Starlight: The AI Camera System Giving Every Athlete a Fair Shot

When Jacob Webb, BS Financial Analyst Honors Program ‘25, first toured the University at Albany campus, he envisioned playing lacrosse in the spring. He had worked to become a Division I lacrosse player and even earned a lacrosse scholarship. However, during his senior year of high school, Webb learned he had a tumor on his spinal cord. Luckily he made a full recovery, but his days as a competitive collegiate athlete would look a little different. 

To maintain his scholarship and position on the team, Men’s Lacrosse Head Coach Scott Marr offered Webb a spot as the team’s videographer. Though it wasn’t the position he had envisioned, Webb was a natural. This work led him to create Starlight, an artificial intelligence (AI) powered camera system that could revolutionize how athletes record their games. 

A Problem Worth Solving

Thanks to his years of athletics and time spent on the UAlbany team, Webb noticed a common problem for many student athletes. Talented high school players often struggled to gather quality play footage for college recruitment videos. Parents who couldn’t afford to hire a professional video team were forced to film games on shaky phones, often resulting in low-quality videos or crucial plays being missed. 

“There are all these little problems that I experienced firsthand working as a videographer for the lacrosse team and, over a year or two, I realized that wow, a lot of other people are having these problems,” Webb said. 

Finding the Solution

Webb wondered: What if cameras could automatically track players, identify key moments and compile professional-grade highlight reels? What if players and parents didn’t even have to fund the cameras themselves? What if sports facilities had a built-in system so they didn’t have to worry about video operation at all?

He started researching, “Throughout the U.S., there are only two or three production companies that document these sporting events. This requires a lot of manpower, and it's difficult to cover all those events equally. So, these companies have to buy cheaper cameras and find anyone with a pulse to assist with filming. There's no quality control to it.”

Webb has spent the years since fine-tuning his strategy and bringing it to life. Once he landed on creating a camera system that could track players while eliminating human error, it was time to start the work. 

“One of the first steps was building a software that I think would be able to house everything,” Webb explained, “The idea is that there is a play you want to grab a video of, but the camera angle is just too far out. Maybe it's on the opposite side of the field and you would like a different angle, you could press a button and it switches to the other angle at that exact moment.”

Currently, all aspects of taping sporting events are done by people, from the video capture to the editing. To simplify the process,  Webb he came up with the notion of using AI to pull moments automatically, eliminating human error.

“The idea was to build a fixed position camera system with two to three programmable camera lenses hooked up to a board that we design. Each camera lens records a section of the field during the entire game and the video gets stitched together, making a 180-degree panoramic video of the game being played. Then our algorithm can detect the players, objects and the movement of the game”.

Webb knew this was a good idea, but he didn’t want to put the pressure on players and their families to fund these camera systems. “We would have to charge a lot, which means only selling to like the top couple percent of parents, players or teams, and that's not really the people that need this,” he said, “Our goal is to contract with sport facilities and install Starlight directly into the facility. We would install a Starlight camera system on a fixed position at midfield, and then everyone that comes and plays there can purchase that game film like a vending machine.”

Wall Street Crossroads

Heading toward graduation, Jacob faced a choice many would envy: a stable job at a New York City bank or the uncharted path of entrepreneurship.

“I was always entrepreneurial, but more than anything, I wanted to do something that I really loved. I thought, I'm going to just take a stab at Starlight and work on it a little bit every week. I am part of the Financial Analyst Honors Program at Massry, so I was assigned to go out, try to get recruited and get a job. I got a fantastic job at a bank in New York City over the summer,” Webb explained. “It was a great setting and it was a good job, but I felt like my mind was more consumed with Starlight. Once the summer was over, I had a decision to make. It was kind of a no-brainer. It felt like a hard decision because one choice is much more stable and the other is risky, but I made sure that I took the right steps to make sure I'll be fine living while working on Starlight.”

The Village Behind the Visio

Jacob credits his UAlbany peers with helping him as he navigated the waters of early entrepreneurship, including The Blackstone launchpad program and the Financial Honors Analyst program, which provided him with the tools to understand entrepreneurship and the workforce. But he also credits an unsung hero of many start-ups, the internet.

“We live in the information age, so anything that you need is right at your fingertips, especially with ChatGPT. It's unbelievable how much you can learn with the free resources out there. I probably wouldn’t be at the stage I am at without free online resources.” Webb noted. 

Webb shared some words of wisdom for other young entrepreneurs “Everything is right at your fingertips and you should take advantage of it.”

Since its inception, Starlight has won first place in the Software and Services track of NYS Business Plan Competition. Webb graduates in May 2025, and Massry looks forward to watching him succeed. To learn more about Starlight, visit the website.