Peripheral Labs hires former Meta product head Shaun Carrigan to take its 3D replays to broadcasters

Carrigan has done this job before, for larger companies. He spent six years at Intel Sports as director of product and experience ^[12]. There, he says, he headed the first virtual-reality production of a Winter Olympics and collaborated with the NFL on sports' first interactive volumetric experience ^[12]. Intel later wound down the unit, and Meta, which he joined in 2022 to work on mixed reality, has since scaled those plans back to focus on AI ^[14]. He worked on two immersive efforts at large companies, and both were cut back ^[1].

He takes a different lesson from the same history. "I realized there that volumetric video is the future," Carrigan said of Intel. "The question isn't if, the question is when." ^[13] He told BetaKit the three major barriers are quality, cost and speed, and that Peripheral is well on its way to tackling them ^[5].

Whether there is a business depends on cost and speed. Peripheral's approach is a large reconstruction model that turns 2D camera images into navigable 3D video, built on robotics and autonomous-vehicle perception work ^[7]. Carrigan's near-term product is clips that broadcasters use for live and social-media replays ^[16]. BetaKit's account does not include a price, a named customer or a per-game capture cost.

The reported facts fit more than one outcome. Broadcast clips could become the paying product, as Carrigan intends ^[16]. Coaching could become the business instead. The model is pitched at coaching as well as live sports ^[7]. The only facility on record is a biomechanics basketball shooting lab Peripheral opened in May and describes as North America's first outside the NBA ^[8]. Or cost and speed do not fall far enough, and the $8.7 million seed ^[9] runs out before a broadcaster commits.

I think the hire is a sales move, or rather, a bet that Carrigan's broadcast record shortens the time to a first sale. Go-to-market is written into his remit ^[3]. Broadcasters are also the customers his Sportvision years served: over 11 years there he helped develop PITCHf/x, Next Gen Stats and the yellow first-down line, all now standard in sports broadcasting ^[11]. Carrigan tied the move to deployment. "[I] had already done that at Intel and was ready to do that again," he said ^[10].

The counter-case is that a startup's first chief product officer ^[1] is mostly a product hire, and go-to-market stays a line in a job description until a contract appears. Carrigan's own stated reason leans on the technology. "They were so far ahead on the technology that it was time to jump in," he said ^[4]. The sales reading is wrong if the first revenue Peripheral discloses comes from teams or coaching programs. For now, Carrigan said, he is "looking forward to bringing Peripheral's content in front of millions of people." ^[17]