Hudl’s most recent product, the Focus Outdoor, was announced in early March 2021 and provides teams with a fully-automated and weatherproof camera system to allow for the recording and live-streaming of games. With these new products, we would expect to see new patents being filed to protect these innovations, but Hudl is surprisingly absent in the Sports Analytics Patent Forecast®. 

While the company might not be mentioned by name, that’s because Hudl is actually just a product owned by the company Agile Sports Technologies Inc. Further analysis shows three patents assigned to Agile are geared towards Hudl. Even so, Agile has also been dormant since mid-2018, with no patents covering the recently released hardware. This becomes especially interesting when considering how crowded the space of automated sports cameras is with companies like Thuuz Inc. and Pixellot constantly filing applications. 

That being said, Hudl has shown an interesting strategy in the past by constantly acquiring competitors in the spaces they enter. As of March 2020, Hudl has acquired many of its competitors since its inception, including a 2019 acquisition of Krossover. With this track record, it becomes easier to see a strategy. Could Hudl just be waiting to be challenged by one of these other companies before acquiring them and their patents? Of course, the previously mentioned companies would make great targets with their fairly broad patent portfolios, but Hudl seems to also prioritize market position when deciding targets. While it’s not clear what Hudl is planning to do here, it’s definitely something worth keeping in mind as we watch the space unfold.

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