Hey Product Hunters co-maker of Swish here and thanks to @allnick for hunting us! @alwaysbcoding and I are Super pumped to share Swish with you - a sports highlights platform for fans. I'll be here all day to answer your questions and get feedback.
The experience of consuming sports content - outside of television - has barely changed in over 100 years despite sports fans using completely different mediums. Most sports apps are not much different than a newspaper article + boxscore from the early 1900’s glued to your phone screen. The content is for the most part unstructured and not searchable.
Imagine if you could interact with sports highlights in the ways you interact with music enabled by platforms like Spotify. With music you can browse the top rated songs by genre and artist, create playlists, easily find a song you are looking for, and share these experiences with other music fans. These interactions don't exist with sports.
@alwaysbcoding had the insight that tying content (highlights) to precise sports stats we could build much more engaging and unique experiences than what currently exists today, and we set out to do just that by building Swish.
Rather than pitch you on all the features, we'd much rather get your feedback on what we could be doing to make Swish better. We're really passionate about making great products and experiences for sports fans so fire away!
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@arilitan hey this looks cool. Curious - why do you have the mixpanel badge at the bottom?
Things that have never been done in a sports app before that we do in Swish:
1) Algorithmically generated highlight feed of the top sports plays at any given moment. The feed can be filtered by sport.
2) All video highlights are tied to the stats backing the play which lets you see the score of the game, and all players and teams involved.
3) Real-time highlight feeds of individual games, the best way to see the highlights of a game while it’s still in progress.
4) Custom highlight feeds of players, and teams, that can be sorted by popularity. i.e. you can finally answer the query “What were John Wall’s top 100 plays this season”
5) Natural language search for any play that can return a playlist of matches (i.e. searching for “Steph Curry behind the back” would return every behind the back pass from Curry this season)
6) A unique permalink for every play that happens in a sports game that is created in real-time and can be shared/referenced online.
7) A join table between users and sports plays which lets users save their favorite plays
More or less Swish is Ari and I trying to show a better data model for sports apps to be built on top of. A lot of UI / UX stuff still needs to be figured out, but I’m positive the way we built our backend is smarter than anything else that’s out there.
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As a European PHer working in sports, I find it continually frustrating that apps like this continually disregard soccer. The different rights packages etc might make it challenging, but US startups in the sports sector that just gloss over billions of users worldwide to focus on US-centric "top four" sports is becoming laughable. There are reasons, sure, (know your niche) and all that, but I'd be interested to hear why this doesn't feature the biggest sport in the world?
@nathenmcvittie The data model for soccer is significantly more complex than it is for the NBA, NHL, and NFL. The key thing that lets Swish work is that every video clip is tied to the statistical information that backs each individual play, which lets us link each video to the players and teams involved. In order to correctly model soccer you essentially need to model every team in the world, because you have tournaments like the FA Cup with hundreds of participants. You also have things like the Champions League where teams from different leagues will compete against eachother in games. You also have to take national teams into account. If I want a highlight feed of Michael Bradley's best plays from the past year I would have to join his highlights from the US national team with his highlights from Toronto F.C. etc...
That's not to say this is impossible to do or anything, if you wanted to tackle soccer, you could start by just modeling specific leagues like the EPL and MLS and ignoring champions league, and national teams and then slowly lacing those in later. However, Ari and I built Swish on our own, with no outside help or funding. So it's more a logistical thing of how much additional work it would be to add soccer than it is a statement about being biased towards US sports.
Note that I'm a huge soccer fan, and agree the app would work incredibly well for soccer.
So I met the founder of this company @arilitan months back at my friend's wedding and he showed me the app then. Since then they've improved a bunch of stuff and I thought it was pretty slick especially for those times when you can't watch the entire game. Yes, you can watch a recap on ESPN but this pretty much provides the best interface for scrolling through those not-to-miss moments.
@allnick thanks again for the post and praise! Thats one of our key use cases. Our users tell us if they missed a game on TV, Swish is the best place for them to find a great recap of it but of course we're always looking for ways to make this better.
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Hey @arilitan looks like a great product! I currently follow a couple of accounts on Instagram that post similar content, so now I'm just waiting for Swish to cover football (this thing you guys call soccer haha) to unfollow them! Good luck going forward
@anthony_abitbol thanks Anthony, we plan on eventually adding the other football. We also post great content to our Instagram account daily, you can follow us there @swishhighlights
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@arilitan "the other football", love it! Can't wait for that... Where are you guys based?
This is great, definitely going to use this. Have you guys run into any copyright issues so far? Do you expect to? Or is it a non-issue since you're just sourcing other people's content?
@dannyfreed thanks Danny, we source all our content from 3rd parties and don't host any video on our servers. If a copyright holder issues a DMCA take down notice they do so to the site it's hosted on and it's no longer available to view in our app/platform. We typically have multiple video sources for the same play so if that happens (and it does with NFL clips, rarely if ever with NBA/NHL) we can swap it in our system for a new one - usually with an official clip from the league, team, or network page.
@alexmoazed right now we are focused on providing users with the experience of watching the best plays of the day and summarizing games they missed. Typically videos from TV broadcasts fulfill this use case where as videos from the stadium are geared more towards "what was it like to be at the game". That being said, anyone can submit a video to swish on Twitter using the hashtag #swishio and we plan to add functionality to see all the different videos of the same plays.
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