Amazon to Debut New Technology at PGA TOUR

The PGA TOUR Confirmed Amazon Web Services as its Official Cloud Provider Last Week. With this agreement, AWS becomes the Official Cloud Provider, Artificial Intelligence Cloud Provider, Deep Learning Cloud Provider, and Machine Learning Cloud Provider of the TOUR. AWS and the TOUR say they are partnering to transform the way golf content is created, distributed, and experienced, bringing fans closer to the action on the course whilst also helping the PGA Tour streamline its media operations.

On Thursday, 11 March the Players Championship will tee off with AWS following every shot. This is meant literally, thanks to its over-the-top (OTT) streaming platform named “Every Shot Live”. The platform will give viewers live access to every shot from every player in a tournament. During a tournament like the Players Championship, fans will have access to more than 32,000 shots from a starting field of 144 golfers.

The PGA TOUR captures hundreds of hours of raw footage at each tournament and will leverage AWS to rapidly transform this content into new digital experiences. The fans can choose to follow any player in real-time and experience each shot via streaming content. In addition, AWS will power TOURCast, an evolution of the TOUR leaderboard that will give fans video game-like control of the golf viewing experience, allowing them to change their viewing perspective with alternative camera angles, navigate around the course, view speed rounds, and display player and shot stats on demand.

“This transformational partnership with AWS will give our fans the opportunity to experience the PGA TOUR like never before,” said PGA TOUR Commissioner Jay Monahan. “Growing and diversifying our fan base is a top priority for us, and thanks to the collaboration and innovation from AWS, we are creating more ways to experience the game of golf, while personalizing our content to enable fans to engage with the tournaments and players they support.”

In addition, the TOUR will build a data lake for real-time and historic multimedia content on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). The TOUR will migrate nearly 100 years of media content to AWS – including video, audio, and images dating back to the 1928 Los Angeles Open – and will stream live footage from future tournaments into the data lake. The TOUR will then use Amazon Rekognition (AWS’s deep learning service that makes it easy to add image and video analysis to applications) to automatically tag content with specific metadata like player names and sponsor logos.

The aim is to help the TOUR and its content partners search, review, annotate and package new content, as well as give them instant access to key moments from throughout the TOUR’s history to aid commentary and add depth to event coverage. Fans will also be able to access years of tagged and archived golf footage, with highlights available through the TOUR’s web and mobile apps.

Andy Jassy, CEO of AWS said, ‘“The world’s top sports organizations… continue to turn to AWS to help them innovate for their fans and players at an unprecedented rate”. AWS’s venture into top-tier sports competitions is nothing new, even for a sport as stooped in tradition as golf. In Europe alone, AWS provides services to F1, Bundesliga and most recently, Six Nations Rugby.

You can find more about Amazon Web Services’s partnership with the PGA TOUR here. For more from MVPro, click here.