XOS Digital’s ThunderCloud Aims at Perfecting the Coach’s Digital Playbook

XOS Digital wants coaches to throw out their shelves of playbooks. The company’s newest sports digital-media-management platform, ThunderCloud, is designed for the collegiate or professional football team and is intended to make game strategy an all-digital operation based on the cloud.

XOS is no stranger to coach and scouting video — its Thunder platform has a strong presence in the NCAA and NFL — but the implementation of the cloud is an enhancement that keeps various arms of the organization up to date.

XOS exhibited ThunderCloud last week at the American Football Coaches Association conference in Nashville.

XOS exhibited ThunderCloud last week at the American Football Coaches Association conference in Nashville.

“Thunder is a product that dominates the market, and it’s an extraordinarily robust editing platform,” says Matt Marolda, EVP of product strategy/marketing at XOS Digital. “Thunder was built as a client/server application. What is revolutionary about the ThunderCloud is that I, now, do not have to be tethered to my server.”

With the release of ThunderCloud comes three products: Playbook, Scout, and Exchange.

XOS ThunderCloud Playbook offers a digital alternative to the traditional playbook in the proverbial three-ring binder. Available through the Internet and its native iPad app, it links play diagrams to embedded video and comes with a variety of annotation features, including notes and highlighting tools. Coaches can be as creative as they want, attaching as many videos with a play and updating formations as often as they like.

“With your old three-ring binder, there was no way you could show someone a play and also say here’s six examples of the play run correctly,” says Marolda. “Now, with ThunderCloud Playbook, coaches are able to associate video with a play diagram. It’s a pretty amazing teaching tool for players, and they can access it anytime anywhere.

Teams using Playbook include the New York Jets, Jacksonville Jaguars, University of Georgia, and University of Washington.

XOS ThunderCloud Scout works off a similar technological cloud infrastructure and is a smart fit for a profession that is constantly on the road. It integrates video, quantitative data, and qualitative information so that organizations can evaluate players more thoroughly through such capabilities as player-profile “snapshots,” player comparisons, a proprietary “plays like” feature, and a player-board ranking for recruiting, drafts, or free agency.

The Buffalo Bills, like several teams from the NFL, NBA, and European Football clubs, are currently using Scout throughout their organization.

XOS ThunderCloud Exchange streamlines and simplifies video trade with a secure file-sharing service managed through the cloud. Exchange supports multiple formats, which can be uploaded and exchanged directly from the XOS Thunder coaching platform.

The Pac-12 deploys XOS ThunderCloud Exchange to share film among the conference’s basketball officials.

“The power of ThunderCloud is that we are taking things that were, for a variety of practical reasons, very disparate products and we’re uniting them into the ThunderCloud platform to get all of the advantages of them together,” says Marolda. “Playbook can integrate with Scout, which can integrate with Exchange. They can all integrate with the core functionality of the cloud itself.”

ThunderCloud debuted last week at the American Football Coaches Association conference in Nashville. XOS Digital expects to launch additional products in the suite throughout the coming year.

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