For apps that are based on Netball in UK a lot will depend on what sort of data is required, as well as how quickly apps need the data, where the speed of that data delivery will depend on how/when your users are using those apps.

I'll draw some comparison here with Basketball, as Netball shares similarities in terms of court size, squad sizes, being indoor. So for example managing player tracking on a court is easier than on a football pitch because its smaller - but, because its indoor, GPS solutions won't work, so you'd need data derived from either computer vision or ultra wide band trackers (UWB). I'd say Netball's faster, so keeping up with stats input/capture is harder, but because fewer players can shoot and because its' more zonal, tracking challenges, or tracking scorers aren't as complex.

In an ideal world, all of the data would be generated via computer vision at very low levels of latency, but really only NBA is at that level, where the best solutions are very costly and very arena specific. Even then, there's quite a lot of human involvement in terms of reviewing and correcting data from a quality assurance perspective, which has an impact on the speed of delivery of complete and accurate data. What computer vision gives you is accurate positional and tracking data, as well as ball tracking which can help determine passes, shots and interceptions etc.

In reality, player tracking aside, most data capture is human driven.  In basketball, Genius Sports have a solution which is fairly widely used across most pro and college leagues for what's called the 'box scores' for which Netball's equivalent are the core stats you'll see on a page like this. It’s these which are likely to be of most use to apps. These solutions generally use a data entry person per team, and then a third person who does overall quality control and additional data across both teams. So, for example, team A's data person tracks who scored, and that a score was made, but the third person might identify from where, as well as check that the right scorer was credited.

Netball Super League in the UK would I guess be using something similar to the Genius Sports app across all matches. I think it'd be useful to know what that system it is the league uses and whether they use the same in AUNZ. It'd be useful to know how long any currently used solution will be in place for. Given how fast this area is moving, providers are changing all the time. While at a high level the same level of info might be exposed, there's a risk app builders could spend time and money integrating with one provider only to need to do all that work again.

My guess would also be that where established pro-leagues like AUNZ go, others will follow in terms of the tech. As AUNZ have pro-leagues, they may have some level of additional computer vision or UWB tracking in place as well, and this may be easier for them to set up if the same arenas are used over and over.

Looking at my Ladbrokes app, even for the Netball world cup, there isn't much fans can bet on, which makes me think data distribution isn't really something that is particularly well developed within the sport. So, I think any conversation an app builder might have with Netball UK would involve them having to create some kind of bespoke rights arrangement, as I'd be surprised if they have a repeatable distribution/licencing strategy in place. One potential commercial opportunity might be to help put this in place for them, and then use that process to build apps on top of.

It’d be interesting to have a conversation with Sotic. It seems Sotic are responsible for getting key stats from court side onto the Netball Super League site, so they will already likely have solved the key challenge of processing that into data which might be usable by other applications. I could easily see a scenario where builders pay Netball UK for the rights and Sotic for a means of accessing it. In fact Sotic seem to work with quite a lot of niche sports. While they are focussed it seems on just presenting this data for those associations, if I were them I'd be working on how I could act as a distributor and licensor for that data for those associations so that they could be better monetised by other app builders.

What other routes might be open to builders? Use something like Netball Statistics to get the data yourself perhaps? This might tie nicely into a grassroots strategy - The ECB (English and Wales Cricket Board) have a had a lot of success with Play Cricket as an example.