As the new kid on the block we often get asked how we're different from other video analysis apps already on the market like Coach's Eye. Well, I'm glad you asked! Let's take a minute to see how OnForm is designed from the ground up to be easier and more useful than its predecessors.
The first difference is the people behind the app and their vision for empowering coaches. Gear Fisher and Krishna Ramachandran, the co-founders of OnForm have both come from experienced business backgrounds working with coaches and athletes for decades. Krishna was the co-founder of Ubersense, which was purchased by Hudl and re-branded as Hudl Technique in 2015. Coach's Eye and Hudl Technique are what we refer to as "first generation" video analysis apps. They pioneered and democratized previously expensive and hard-to-use video technology and made it available for coaches to improve and develop athletes.
Gear Fisher is the co-founder of TrainingPeaks, a very popular training and coaching platform used by endurance athletes. Gear and Krishna joined forces to leverage each of their strengths to create OnForm, a combination of video analysis tools and a coaching platform all in one. So the first big difference is the vision and team around which the company was formed. We have spent our careers helping coaches coach smarter and be more efficient. We're thrilled to have a chance to take that to an even bigger audience through OnForm.
The overarching goal of OnForm was to be a true coaching platform, not just a video analysis tool. We aimed to improve the loop between practice and feedback with video. In addition, we included chat messaging to foster conversations between coach and athlete, and our design allows for others like parents, assistant coaches etc. to be included in that conversation as well. It can be private or shared among a group to get multiple inputs.
This is partly why we designed the core architecture of the app to be 'people-first'. Sure, the main utility is around capturing and analyzing video, but it's always a video of a person, and that means we wanted to make it easy to organize, find and share video among people. Our menu structure and app layout is based on existing team and individual coaching relationships which feels familiar and obvious as you navigate the app.
Because the whole point of capturing and analyzing video is to show your students/clients/athletes how they can improve, we made sharing video seamless and intuitive. The people-first layout means that you simply chat with your students/clients/athletes and sharing video is as easy and natural as a text-message conversation. The benefit of this is that by default, all your video is organized by person, chronologically and automatically just by using the app.
With all that video sharing and recording, we knew storage is a chief concern. We didn't want to have our customers managing 'lockers' or deciding what to keep in the cloud or on the device, we just wanted to take care of it all for you. So, you'll find that we sync all your videos magically to the cloud and we manage the space on your device so you don't have to. In this day and age people expect apps to 'just work' and not be a burden. We take care of it so you don't have to worry about video, archiving, storing, sharing etc.
It's pretty easy to see when you try other apps like Coach's Eye, you'll see that they just don't have sharing, storage and organization figured out quite like we do. Our modern approach to these challenges is what sets us apart both in functionality and with our easy-to-use interface.
The future of video analysis is beyond exciting, we've laid the groundwork with our interface and infrastructure so that we're in prime position to add computer vision and enhanced machine learning/artificial intelligence to empower coaches and athletes around the world with never before seen insights and improvement tools. I can't wait to show you what's coming, but that will be in a future post.
Give the app a try today, for free! You only pay if you need to store more than 10 videos.
Thanks for reading,
-Gear