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StatsInsight develops a home-grown baseball Hawk-Eye system with AWS hybrid cloud architecture

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StatsInsight develops an integrated baseball platform to build Taiwan's home-grown STACAST. Credit: StatsInsight

In modern competitive sports, the margin between victory and defeat often depends on who can capture and analyze data more effectively. Taiwan's triumph at the 2024 WBSC Premier 12 was not only the result of exceptional player performance and precise coaching but also the scouting team's ability to provide rapid, on-site opponent analysis. As a key member of the scouting team, StatsInsight played a pivotal role. Leveraging its stadium optical tracking system and StatsInsight analytics platform - both built on Amazon Web Services (AWS) - the company provided real-time data insights to players and coaches, making it one of the unsung heroes behind Taiwan's championship win.

StatsInsight co-founder Leh Shyu noted, "As sports technology evolves rapidly, baseball has long moved beyond the era of paper scorecards. Professional leagues in both the U.S. and Taiwan have adopted electronic and camera-based systems to record every detail of practices and games. StatsInsight is the only company in Taiwan focused exclusively on baseball analytics and sports technology integration. Our goal is to build a solid foundation for the next generation of baseball data development in Taiwan by delivering comprehensive solutions and customized services that bring technology into every ballpark."

Products validated through real-world performance: adopted by pro and national teams

Baseball is a sport defined by subtle details and strategy that are difficult to capture with the naked eye. Founded in 2020, StatsInsight has long specialized in baseball data collection and analysis. Its "Electronic Strike Zone" system has become a familiar presence to Taiwanese baseball fans, offering advanced statistics derived from ball flight trajectories and player motion reconstruction.

StatsInsight's scouting data systems and analytics services have been widely adopted and highly recognized by both professional baseball teams and the national team.

A former baseball player himself, Shyu entered the Chinese Professional Baseball League (CPBL) draft in 2019. Although not selected, his deep knowledge and experience earned him a place on the national team's scouting staff. That opportunity inspired him to co-found StatsInsight with like-minded partners to develop Taiwan's own baseball scouting system.

Shyu explained that while the U.S. has a more mature sports technology ecosystem, its systems are often expensive and come with language and support barriers for Taiwanese teams. StatsInsight, though a later entrant, built its system in-house and proved its reliability through multiple competitions. With its ability to deliver customized solutions and localized support, the company successfully partnered with the national team to build an international scouting platform and has since collaborated with professional clubs.

Leveraging AWS services to realize a hybrid cloud architecture

StatsInsight has deployed its full system and website on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and uses Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for managed database operations. Video data is securely stored in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), while Amazon CloudFront Content Delivery Network (CDN) ensures smooth and fast content delivery for optimal user experience. The company is also developing an optical computer vision system and, through resources provided by the Startup Terrace Kaohsiung AWS Joint Innovation Center (JIC), received direct technical guidance from AWS experts to implement and validate its hybrid cloud architecture.

Shyu shared, "U.S.-made Hawk-Eye systems are highly advanced and purpose-built for baseball stadiums, but renting one costs around NT$7 million per year, with a minimum four-year lease. Including technical support, total expenses can exceed NT$30 million. Our vision system is designed to match the performance of those systems, combining similar-grade cameras with small on-premises servers and AWS cloud services to deliver a more cost-effective hybrid solution. Taiwan's next baseball era will require comprehensive data and biomechanical analysis. By developing our own system, we aim to provide an affordable and effective option to drive Taiwan's baseball technology transformation."

Currently, StatsInsight is collaborating with the National Sports Science Institute in Kaohsiung to deploy its system in baseball stadiums and create a next-generation smart baseball field. This collaboration will also serve as a testbed for validating the company's self-developed optical vision system and as a model for future smart stadiums in Taiwan.