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By mounting their iPhones above the court, tennis players of all levels can use the SwingVision app to collect a trove of data and video from their matches. Add an Apple Watch and competitors can press a button and challenge a line call, receiving an animation on the wrist showing whether the ball landed in or out.

More recently, SwingVision has added a beta feature that yells “Out!” if a shot lands beyond the court boundaries. That audible line call takes a split second for the iPhone to process the image and make its determination, a rapid reaction only possible by the computing power of the chips Apple puts in its smartphones, bypassing the need to transmit to the cloud.

“That’s really only possible on device,” said SwingVision CEO Swupnil Sahai . “Because we’re processing 1080p at 60 frames per second, that’s a lot to process. And if you were to send that to the cloud and then have it process it and then run it back, you definitely can’t do that in half a second. And you certainly can’t do that on any court in the world.”

The proliferation of cloud providers and their processing have transformed sports tech for the better, democratizing access to storage and AI models, but there remain key use cases when the cloud isn’t the answer — when requiring speed, managing costs and operating with limited connectivity.

“This is a bit of a trend in my view, is that you see something that really works well in the cloud, but you need it speedier,” said Mike Davies , Fox Sports EVP of technical and field operations.

Davies shared that observation in the context of his network’s IndyCar coverage . Fox and Indy Motor Sports Productions contracted with Lumen Technologies recently to install 10-gig fiber-optic cables at every track to support on-location servers. That enables faster rendering of data overlays on the driver’s eye camera and the use of a product called XtraMotion, which uses generative AI to turn regular footage into high-frame-rate video.