January 14 – Amazon is developing in the football space as more than just a rights buyer for big league football. Germany’s Bundesliga has announced Amazon Web Services (AWS), as its official technology provider.
The deal with AWS will see Amazon’s technology division focus on delivering enhanced stats and graphics as well as new and personalised fan experiences.
The Bundesliga described the AWS deal as taking “football to the next level” with provision of advanced real-time stats and “utilising AWS cloud infrastructure, advanced machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence technologies to deliver the right information to all fans anytime, anywhere, on any device.”
The AWS technology will cover every Bundesliga and Bundesliga 2 match across mobile, television and web platforms. It starts with the second half of the German season kicking off this weekend.
At the heart of the ML technology is Amazon SageMaker, described as “a fully managed service to build, train, and deploy ML models, the Bundesliga will soon be able to offer fans real-time predictions on when a goal is likely to be scored (Expected Goals), identify potential goal-scoring opportunities and highlight how teams are positioning and controlling play, based on live data streams and historical data from over 10,000 Bundesliga games.”
The Bundesliga will also use Amazon Personalize – an ML service – to get closer to fans and create real-time and individualised recommendations, and offer fans personalised game footage, marketing promotions and search results based on their favourite teams, players or fixtures.
Bundesliga CEO Christian Seifert said: “Innovation means challenging the status quo. Working closely with AWS as one of the most innovative technology companies in the world significantly enhances the investment we’ve made in innovation over the past two decades, all of which contributes to us being able to deliver a world-class football experience for our fans.”
Andy Isherwood, Vice President and Managing Director EMEA, Amazon Web Services, hinted that the opportunity to use the technology to develop enhanced services is at an early stage and that AWS has a roster of applications that will game changing in terms of fan experience.
“We are thrilled to work with the Bundesliga and help them use cloud technology to give football fans around the world a more engaging match day experience and look forward to helping them leverage our deep portfolio of ML and AI services so they can deliver even greater insight into the world’s favourite game,” he said.
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