Deployment and setup
What running CritShot on your broadcast feed involves.
One workstation at the ground, one camera feed in, one NDI stream back to the truck. This page is the production-side detail: what arrives, what Chrio needs from you, what comes back, how long setup takes, who signs off a call before it goes to air, and what it costs against a conventional crew.
Product status: CritShot is Live and is the product this page describes. CritDRS, decision review, is In development, and CritRate, live player performance ratings, is In development. Neither is part of a CritShot deployment.
For broadcasters
What it takes to run CritShot on your feed.
What hardware comes to the ground?
One workstation with a single Nvidia GPU, two monitors and a capture card. It fits on a folding table in the broadcast box and is set up by the operator who runs it.
Detection, prediction, render and output all run on that one machine, at 30 frames per second. No truck, no uplink.
What feed do you need from us?
A clean SDI or NDI feed of the broadcast camera behind the bowler's arm. Additional angles improve the render but are not required for the shot call.
NDI and SDI are the two standards a production gallery already speaks, so the feed arrives without anything being rebuilt around it. Heavily compressed or upscaled sources degrade detection. The feed manager takes up to four camera feeds, with the active broadcast angle selected for the model.
What comes back to the truck?
An NDI stream carrying the finished overlay: the played shot beside the recommended shot, with the difficulty score. Your director drops it into the replay slot like any other source.
The difficulty score is on a 1 to 10 scale. To keep that output stage standing through a full match, Chrio rewrote a Python NDI library and removed a critical memory leak in it.
How long is setup?
Under an hour from arrival to first overlay, most of it camera calibration against the pitch markings.
Move the camera and the calibration needs redoing, so the angle calibrated at setup is the angle CritShot reads for the rest of the fixture.
Who approves what goes to air?
The operator. Every CritShot call is reviewed on the video manager before release; nothing goes out automatically.
The video manager gives frame-accurate playback of the delivery under review, so the operator can confirm what the model saw before a call goes to air.
What does it cost compared with a DRS crew?
Roughly 0.15x. A traditional analysis or DRS day runs $20,000 to $30,000 before logistics with 15 to 20 people on site; CritShot brings one person and no truck.
The crew is the expense rather than the compute: camera operators, analysts, their travel and their accommodation, and the truck they work from, all moving with the fixture.
The specification
In, out, and what sits on the table.
The same figures as above, arranged so an engineer can scan them before a call. Where a number has not been published with its conditions, the row says so rather than implying more precision than exists.
| Item | What it is |
|---|---|
| Feed in | A clean SDI or NDI feed of the camera behind the bowler's arm, arriving on the machine at the ground. |
| Hardware on site | One workstation, one Nvidia GPU, two monitors, one capture card. |
| People on site | One operator. |
| Sustained throughput | 30 fps on one GPU, continuous. |
| Delivery to on-air overlay | 4.5 s. Ball bowled to overlay available to the gallery. Whether this is a median or a best case, and the conditions, are not yet published. |
| Setup | Under an hour from arrival to first overlay, most of it calibration. |
| Output | An NDI stream, taken into the replay slot like any other source. |
The six stages between that feed arriving and that stream leaving, with the engineering behind each one, are on the pipeline page. How the detection figure is measured is on the accuracy page.
Scope
This page is CritShot on a broadcast feed, and nothing else.
Everything above describes putting the live shot analysis overlay into a production that is already running. CritShot is analysis, not officiating: it reads the delivery and renders the call, and the operator decides whether it airs.
Decision review is a separate product with a separate deployment. CritDRS is In development, needs calibrated cameras rather than one broadcast angle, and begins with a ground survey rather than a folding table in the box. What a first CritDRS deployment would look like is set out on its own page, not here. CritRate is In development as well.
Bring your fixture list.
Tell us the competition, the fixture window and what your gallery already takes, and the answer comes back as a signal path rather than a brochure.