Rezzil — key legal considerations for scaling sports tech businesses

Over the past several years, Rezzil has grown from a ‘simple’ VR fan experience to a multifaceted business that operates in the elite performance, medical and in-home gaming arenas.

Our sports technology expert Simon Cothliff recently caught up with Rezzil’s Co-Founder Andy Etches to discuss the legal challenges he faced while setting up and scaling the business.

Initial legal challenges

Since we were quite cautious in our approach, we managed to avoid any major challenges. Coming from a sports background, I understand what’s appropriate and how to build trust with clients and athletes. There were definitely issues that we needed to be aware of — for instance, around copyright, licensing arrangements and the use of athlete imagery. 

We also made sure that our people were aware of privacy and social media guidelines. Since we work in such an exciting field that people want to talk and post about, the biggest challenge for us wasn’t necessarily a legal one — it was more about staying within the legal boundaries that other people had set and keeping secrets.

Growth and IP considerations

However, when we grew to a point where we were bringing in investors, we knew that we needed to protect our intellectual property. We undertook a few exercises to ensure that, where appropriate, we had registered all our IP in the correct ways. More recently, we’ve applied for two patents in different fields, which has given us a new level of protection. Now that we’re creating a lot of novel technologies and features, we’re certain that we’ll need more protection in future.

Data protection

We’re lucky to be in partnership with the Premier League, which manifests itself in a number of different ways — from working more closely with teams on the game that’s soon to be released or working with broadcasters. The underlying theme among all this work is data. Our system ingests multiple data sources from events that happen during a game. The optical tracking data from Premier League partners like Second Spectrum and Hawkeye is brought into our system and before being made available through tools that allow coaches and players to relive moments of action as though they’re back on the pitch. This helps them to review their actions, explore new scenarios and look at things from different perspectives. Sometimes, it might inspire a bit of manager empathy when things look different from the sideline to how they did on the pitch. This helps to build relationships between players and coaches when they can truly review things from each other’s perspectives.

There are definitely some challenges in terms of ensuring that we’re controlling our content. We have an incredibly powerful tool that allows anybody to watch a live game in a 3D environment. Obviously, rightsholders don’t want us to do that, so we must ensure that we’re protected from a legal standpoint and lock things down from a data protection standpoint.

We’re also careful to stay within the rules around issues like marginal decisions. We can effectively turn those off by ensuring that they’re only viewable from the appropriate angles.

Talk to us

The use of sports technology is seeing significant growth. The challenge for those sports looking to take advantage is to understand which technologies will create new revenue streams, improve governance and regulation and protect sporting integrity.

Our sports technology experts work side-by-side with elite sports clubs, national governing bodies, international federations and large sports intermediaries, as well as major sports tech businesses like Rezzil, to deliver effective digital transformation — providing the legal peace of mind to support bold initiatives and lasting change.

Talk to us by giving us a call, sending us an email or completing our contact form below.