Lyle Shearer, Hudl | O'Reilly Fluent Conference 2013
Channel: SiliconANGLE theCUBE
Date: 2013-05-31

Lyle Shearer, Hudll, at O'Reilly Fluent Conference 2013, with John Furrier and Jeff Frick

In our quest to extract the signal from the noise at the recently concluded O'Reilly Fluent conference, we came across Lyle Shearer, front-end developer at Hudl. theCUBE host Jeff Frick was particularly delighted about having Shearer on our program because he is a Hudl user, frequenting the app that helps teams study themselves and scout their opponents.

Hudl has been very well-received by sports enthusiasts, particularly those football coaches who are least likely to be tech savvy. Apart from that, you have to give this young gang of developers at Hudl some credit for getting into the tough world of video competition, noting their amazing progression to the mobile world.

The company started working only with one football team, the Huskers. At the time, it was just a thick client application. It wasn't until 2008 when they started to move towards the web and even the high school market, allowing high school football coaches to scale and support more lower-cost solutions that are just as applicable to them as the thicker client was to professional and college teams. This has become Hudl's springboard to success; garnering a whole lot of customer and growth and speed.

Aside from having a worthy product, Hudl also managed to increase their world-class support team which is pivotal to their success because, as previously mentioned, sports coaches aren't always the most technically savvy people in the world.

At first, Hudl was only aiming to create basic web application. However, as the consumption landscape of data has changed, it was inevitable for them to get into mobile. They held back for a while and didn't do anything related to mobile but when they did get into it, they just jumped right into being native in iOS and iPad because the platform is great for video. Hudl eventually expanded to iOS and Windows 8.