An innovative Bristol business that allows sportspeople to capture replays of their exploits at the press of a button, has been acquired by the world’s largest digital platform for cricket.
My Action Replay, based in Bristol’s SETsquared incubator, has developed a system that provides clubs, players, coaches, and fans instant footage that they can then share on social media channels or used for video review and analysis, and for broadcasting on screen.
More than 700,000 replays – made by recording the previous few seconds of action – have been created across football, cricket and a number of other sports in venues in the UK and globally.
Buyer New Zealand-based CricHQ is the world’s largest digital platform for cricket and the online home for all levels of cricket around the world. It provides mobile-enabled cricket data and content management tools and CRM capability for cricket organisations. Financial details of the deal have not been disclosed.
CricHQ’s customers include 53 out of 105 national governing bodies, 350 associations, thousands of leagues, tournaments, clubs, schools, teams and millions of players, coaches, parents, administrators and of course the fans.
The company, which says it wants to revolutionise cricket through technology, acquired My Action Replay following a pre-existing technical partnership between the two companies.
The My Action Replay team plans to remain in Bristol and has just taken an office in the Engine Shed innovation hub, which also houses SETsquared.
My Action Replay co-founder Emily Kent: “Since creating our replay system we’ve enabled sportspeople to capture and share so much great sporting footage and it was a natural progression to try and add real-time data to that footage.
“We met CricHQ just at the point they were looking to add video to their product, so it’s been a brilliant fit. Now that the footage is automatically combined with live-score and stats, via the scoring app, every game, at every level, can be a global broadcast.”
CricHQ founder and CEO Simon Baker added: “This is exactly the sort of future we envisioned when we created CricHQ. The convergence of data, video and digital at all levels of cricket is what we have been pushing forward with for the last few years. By acquiring My Action Replay, our planned focus on video within the CricHQ platform becomes a reality immediately.”
My Action Replay is the third SETsquared member company to be acquired in the past six months and follows deals for Screen Time Labs and Pelipod.
Bristol’s SETsquared Centre director Monika Radclyffe said: “I would like to congratulate the team on the successful acquisition. It just shows we live in a small world when a Bristol-based company is spotted for a business opportunity by one in New Zealand! I am really pleased that My Action Replay has got the global vision, yet do want to remain local and grow the talent based in Bristol. It is a great success story and hope it will inspire other up and coming technology startups.”
Pictured: The My Action Replay team
