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Automated and integrated video & competition tech launches for wave pools

AI automated video capture platform Flowstate and competition management platform Liveheats have today announced a strategic partnership with the goal of bringing automated video capture to the world of live events, introducing new data points to the Flowstate AI technology and enhancing the competitor experience throughout the action sports industry.

Liveheats is a competition and scoring platform used by an array of community, state and national competitive sporting bodies to manage their competitions and athlete leaderboards across surf, snow, skate, surf life saving and the broader action and adrenaline sports industries.

Under the partnership, event organizers would be able to utilize the Flowstate platform for AI-powered video capture, as well as automation in tagging and sorting of video clips according to the relevant round, heat, athlete, or score – driven by Liveheats’ event data.

The result is that organizers, competitors and fans will have faster access to the event clips they are most interested in, with the ability to replay all the action post event and amplifying the event experience for all. 

Luke Wallace and Chris Friend
Luke Wallace and Chris Friend at the recent X-Games event in California.

Flowstate CEO Luke Wallace and Live Heats CEO Chris Friend were in Ventura, California, for the 2024 X-Games, the pinnacle of action sports, to announce the partnership. 

“Enabling the sporting organizations we work with to automate video content capture and remove many of the manual tasks required to produce event video will transform these organizations and enable them to become their own media channels, expand their community reach and help drive athlete performance.” said Chris Friend, CEO of Liveheats.

Fresh off a big win at the 2023 Surfing Australia Awards where they took out the Innovation Award for their AI computer vision technology, Flowstate are taking their ground breaking technology from the world of wavepools pools and into the ocean and broader action and adventure sports industries.

Flowstate CEO Luke Wallace using his company’s automated video capture system at URBNSURF Melbourne.

“Sports fans are accustomed to replaying all the action from their favourite sports in the comfort of their own home,” said Luke Wallace, CEO of Flowstate. “This kind service has generally been reserved for the professional leagues given the high cost of production, until now. The Flowstate automated video capture and editing solution combined with the backbone event structures of Liveheats allows us to bring an automated content solution to wavepool competitions around the world. Kids and big kids alike will be the new found heroes as they watch themselves compete, stoke some friendly rivalry between mates, learn from their mistakes and get ready to go for gold at the next comp!”

Luke is a founding member of the Melbourne Boardriders Club, the first inland boardriders club where competitions are exclusively run in wave pools and has had the opportunity to experience and be involved with the competition format, operations, customer experience of the unique format that is a wavepool competition.

“It’s very different to the ocean, it’s challenging, and a whole lot of fun,” added Luke. “I look forward to seeing what we can do with the technology and evolving the format for competitions from official sanctioned events, local boardriders clubs, inter-pool surf offs and friendly gamification formats for the every day surfer.”

Register your interest: Flowstate & Liveheats are calling for all interested parties in the broader surfing and action sports community to register for early access and to receive the latest news on this program. 


Endless Surf 2023A