The NHL brought its third annual Technology Showcase event to Seattle this week, a stone’s throw from the global headquarters of Amazon. It was fitting, given the growing connections between the tech giant and pro hockey. The league took over a private lounge Thursday evening at Climate Pledge Arena for the event, which featured a bevy of technology partners helping the NHL develop new statistics, increase fan engagement, and much more. I checked out the action at Climate Pledge — named after Amazon’s carbon neutral initiative — and ran into Amazon Web Services chief Adam Selipsky. “AWS has a great partnership with the… Read More
Second-guessing an NFL coach on whether he should have gone for it or kicked on fourth down is one of the great pastimes of watching the sport. Now the league is turning to Amazon Web Services and Next Gen Stats to better inform the armchair quarterbacking by fans and broadcasters. AWS and the NFL announced a new stat called NGS Decision Guide on Wednesday that will be used during the 2021-22 season. Using a series of machine learning models, the equation focuses on win probability — how much the game will change in the hypothetical event of each outcome —… Read More
Amazon’s interest in sports has taken the tech giant from NFL stadiums to NHL hockey arenas and now onto the racetracks of Formula 1 as Amazon Web Services has played a key role in the design of new F1 race cars. The racing league revealed the next-generation car in a YouTube presentation on Thursday, and Amazon said in a blog post that the intent is to create more intense racing and excitement on the track through more aerodynamic vehicle design. AWS figured in the process by using Computational Fluid Dynamics and thousands of compute cores to run simulations of over… Read More
It might seem like a no-brainer to pit the Super Bowl champion Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Tom Brady against “America’s team,” the Dallas Cowboys, in the opening game of the 2021 NFL season. But figuring out the matchups, locations and timing of the other 271 games takes a bit of computing power. The NFL leverages its partnership with Amazon Web Services to sort through some of the endless scenarios that come into play when figuring out how to match 32 teams across 17 games during an 18-week period, all while optimizing for fairness, travel, and availability of particular venues. The… Read More
Amazon Web Services continues to expand its reach into the sports world. The latest deal, announced Tuesday, is with the PGA Tour, which will make AWS its official cloud provider. The pro golf organization will use AWS to process and distribute video footage to various platforms and services such as Every Shot Live, which debuts next week at The Players Championship, and TOURcast, an interactive way to track shots throughout a tournament. The PGA Tour will also migrate nearly a century of content to AWS. “Our collaboration with the TOUR will change the way that fans will be able to connect… Read More
