--- title: "The Coach's Eye replacement playbook (after TechSmith shut it down)" description: "Coach's Eye is gone since Sept 2022. Here's the honest replacement guide: OnForm, Hudl Technique, AceSense for tennis, picked by job, not hype." slug: "coachs-eye-replacement-playbook" date: "2026-01-30" author: "Akshay Sarode" authorBio: "Founder, AceSense. Building AI tennis tools in Europe." category: "Comparison" schema: "BlogPosting" faq: - q: "When did Coach's Eye actually shut down?" a: "TechSmith retired Coach's Eye on September 30, 2022. The app was removed from the App Store and Google Play, and existing installs lost access to cloud features. Local libraries on already-installed devices kept playing back, but no new accounts could be created and the social/sharing layer went offline." - q: "Can I still recover my old Coach's Eye videos?" a: "If you exported them before the cutoff, yes. If they're still inside an installed copy of the app on an old device, sometimes yes, open the app, find the video, and use the share/export option to push it to Files, Photos, or email. Once the device is wiped or the app is uninstalled, the videos are gone, TechSmith's cloud is shut." - q: "Is OnForm the official replacement?" a: "OnForm is the closest direct replacement and was built by people from the same coaching-app world. It runs on iOS, Android, and the web, supports drawing tools and side-by-side comparison, and has a free tier. But it isn't tennis-specific, there's no automatic shot detection." - q: "Why use a tennis-specific app instead of OnForm or Hudl?" a: "Generic video annotation tools force you to do all the labelling yourself: scrub to the shot, mark the frame, draw the line. A tennis-specific tool like AceSense detects shots automatically and pre-labels the timeline. For a one-hour match that's the difference between a 30-minute review and a 4-minute one." - q: "Is there a free Coach's Eye replacement?" a: "OnForm has a free tier. Hudl Technique has a free tier. AceSense has a free tier on Android and iOS for tennis matches. None of them charge to install. The paid tiers unlock storage, sharing, or AI features depending on the app." --- If you're here because Coach's Eye stopped working, the short answer is: pick the replacement by what you were *using* Coach's Eye for, not by which one looks closest. For generic frame-by-frame video annotation across any sport, **OnForm** is the closest like-for-like, same drawing tools, same side-by-side view, same coach-focused workflow. For team sports with a coaching ecosystem, **Hudl Technique** (the rebrand of Ubersense) covers it. For tennis specifically, neither of those does what you actually want most often, automatic shot detection and stroke quality, so a tennis-specific tool like **AceSense** is the right pick. This post breaks down the three options, what each is genuinely good at, and how to migrate your workflow without losing the muscle memory you built around Coach's Eye. ## TL;DR - TechSmith retired Coach's Eye on **September 30, 2022**. The app and its cloud are dead. - **OnForm** is the closest direct replacement, drawing tools, slow-mo, side-by-side, free tier, multi-sport. - **Hudl Technique** (formerly Ubersense) is the team-sport equivalent. - For tennis: a tennis-specific AI tool like **AceSense** auto-detects shots and replaces 80% of the manual labeling Coach's Eye made you do. - Pick by job: generic annotation = OnForm; team workflow = Hudl; tennis stroke + match analysis = AceSense. ## What Coach's Eye actually was (so we replace the right thing) Coach's Eye was a video coaching app from TechSmith, the Camtasia people. You imported a video, scrubbed frame-by-frame, drew lines and angles on top, recorded a voice-over, and shared the annotated clip with a player. It didn't analyze anything automatically. It was a *manual* analysis tool that respected coaches' eyes, hence the name. That's the workflow you're trying to keep. Three modern apps cover different slices of it. ## Option 1: OnForm, the like-for-like replacement OnForm is the most-cited Coach's Eye successor in the post-shutdown community, including a [direct comparison published by OnForm itself](https://onform.com/blog/onform-vs-coachs-eye/) and a recommendation from [SeamsUp's review of Coach's Eye alternatives](https://seamsup.com/blog/the-best-coach-s-eye-alternative-for-video-analysis-seams-up). **What's the same:** - Frame-by-frame scrubbing - Telestration (lines, angles, shapes, freehand) - Side-by-side and overlay comparison - Voice-over and recorded audio commentary - Cross-platform: iOS, Android, web **What's different:** - Cloud-first by default, videos sync between coach and player accounts - Subscription-based with a free tier - Built for asynchronous coaching, with a roster and assignment model **Tennis caveat.** OnForm's [own pricing page](https://onform.com/pricing/) and [marketing site](https://onform.com/) showcase golf, swimming, gymnastics, baseball, and dance, *tennis is not listed as a supported sport*. The drawing tools work for tennis the same way they worked in Coach's Eye: by hand. There's no tennis-specific analysis. If your Coach's Eye workflow was 90% manual annotation, this is a clean migration. If it was "I wish this thing could just find the shots for me," keep reading. ## Option 2: Hudl Technique, the team-sport answer Hudl bought Ubersense and folded it into Hudl Technique. It still does free side-by-side video analysis on phone, but the gravity of the platform has moved toward team sports, football, basketball, volleyball, where Hudl owns the coaching/scouting workflow end-to-end. For an individual coach reviewing a single tennis player, Hudl Technique is functional but heavy. The free tier is real, but you'll be ignoring 70% of the surrounding ecosystem. Most tennis coaches we talk to who tried Hudl post-Coach's-Eye drifted to OnForm within a season. ## Option 3: AceSense, when "Coach's Eye for tennis" is actually what you wanted This is the post where I have to be honest about the angle: I built [AceSense](/) because Coach's Eye-style manual annotation didn't scale. I'd record an hour of tennis, sit down to review it, and the first 20 minutes were just *finding the shots*, scrubbing back and forth to mark forehand vs backhand vs serve. The actual coaching insight took five minutes. The labeling was the bottleneck. AceSense's pipeline does that labeling for you: - **TrackNet** detects the ball every frame. - **Court keypoint detection** registers the camera once per match. - **MediaPipe pose** locates the player's body. - **CatBoost classification** labels each shot (forehand, backhand, serve, volley) and scores stroke quality. You upload, the [report](/features/coaching-report) comes back with shots pre-labeled and timestamped, and you spend your time on the part Coach's Eye couldn't help with: deciding what to *do* with the data. When AceSense isn't the right replacement: if you coach across multiple sports, or if your videos aren't tennis. AceSense is tennis-only. For everything else, OnForm is the better Coach's Eye equivalent. ## Migration playbook: leaving Coach's Eye in 2026 If you're just now making the move (and many coaches still are, Coach's Eye libraries linger on old iPads), here's the practical order: **1. Recover what you can.** Open the old app. Export every video that matters. Push them to Files, iCloud Drive, Google Drive, or Dropbox. Once you uninstall, you cannot get them back, TechSmith's cloud is shut. **2. Pick the destination.** Generic video annotation across sports → OnForm. Tennis specifically → AceSense + OnForm together (AceSense for the analysis, OnForm for hand-drawn telestration on top of clips you save). **3. Rebuild your folder structure.** Most coaches had a Player → Date → Session hierarchy in Coach's Eye. OnForm's roster model maps onto this. AceSense uses a session-per-match model with stable IDs (the Firestore `jobs` collection, yes, I'm a developer; that detail leaks into the product). **4. Re-record your benchmark.** The most common Coach's Eye workflow loss isn't the videos, it's the *baseline*. The original "this is what your serve looked like in March" comparison clip. Record a new baseline now. Pick a date and stick to it. ## Source quotes From [OnForm's own comparison](https://onform.com/blog/onform-vs-coachs-eye/): > "OnForm was designed by the same team that originally built Coach's Eye, and it incorporates everything we learned about what coaches actually need." From [SeamsUp's review](https://seamsup.com/blog/the-best-coach-s-eye-alternative-for-video-analysis-seams-up): > "Coach's Eye was retired by TechSmith in September 2022, leaving thousands of coaches and athletes scrambling for an alternative." That "scrambling" is real. Three years later, the migration is mostly done, but the people who haven't moved yet are usually the ones who never needed cloud sync to begin with. They were using Coach's Eye for one thing, repeatedly, and the question is which modern tool does *that one thing* best for their sport. ## Where this leaves tennis coaches If you coached tennis through Coach's Eye, the honest truth is: you spent more time labeling than coaching. That was the price of using a generic tool for a specific sport. The sport-specific AI tools that replaced manual labeling didn't exist when Coach's Eye launched, and now they do. Worth a try on your next match. ## Related reading - Compare [AceSense vs SwingVision side-by-side](/compare/swingvision) for tennis-specific analysis. - See [how AceSense's shot detection actually works](/how-it-works), the pipeline behind the auto-labeling. - For the broader landscape: [What is similar to SwingVision for Android?](/blog/similar-to-swingvision-android)