Amazon is expanding its sports media footprint with a new deal to stream New York Yankees baseball games this season. The Seattle tech giant will stream 21 Yankees games on Prime Video later this year. The live MLB content will be free for Prime members, but only available to those in the Yankees “home-team footprint”: New York state, Connecticut, northeast Pennsylvania, and north and central New Jersey. Related: NFL fans can access live Next Gen Stats for first time via Amazon’s Thursday Night Football stream The games will be simulcasts produced by YES Network. Last year, the Yankees, Sinclair Broadcast Group,… Read More
Today’s featured stories MLB partners with Amazon Web Services to predict pitches and analyze live games with robots Agent 007 James Bond’s next ride? Flying cars grab Farnborough Airshow’s spotlight Safety over privacy? RealNetworks to offer free facial recognition technology to K-12 schools Subscribe to GeekWire on YouTube. [Editor’s Note: TLDR is GeekWire’s tech news rundown show, hosted by Starla Sampaco. Watch today’s update above, subscribe to GeekWire on YouTube, check back weekday afternoons for more, and sign up for TLDR email updates below.]
Deeper stats, predicted pitches, and live commentary produced by robots in the voice of iconic announcers — it could all be coming to Major League Baseball broadcasts soon. MLB re-upped its partnership with Amazon Web Services on Tuesday. It will continue using machine learning and artificial intelligence to gather data and provide more information to fans. MLB and AWS, the cloud computing arm of Amazon that posted $5.4 billion in revenue last quarter, have worked together since 2014. Amazon helps power Statcast, the high-tech player tracking system that measures every play during a baseball game and produces stats like pitching velocity,… Read More
The Seattle Mariners went back to the future on Saturday night with a celebration rooted in the past. In honor of the 20th anniversary of “Turn Ahead the Clock Night,” a promotional event from the Ken Griffey Jr. days of 1998, the Mariners put on their backward hats again for some forward-looking perspective. Sleeveless maroon, black and silver uniforms were the most striking feature of the night, with many players choosing to wear them untucked and baring their tattooed arms on a less-than-balmy evening at Safeco Field. Some even spray-painted their cleats silver, to match silver batting helmets. The big… Read More
For any Mariners fans hoping to watch today’s game against Texas, your only option is Facebook. That’s because of a deal Major League Baseball inked in March to stream 25 games on Facebook Watch, the new video platform created by the social media giant last year. It’s part of an experiment that allows MLB to test new ways to air live baseball as more and more sports content is streamed online. It’s also part of Facebook’s push to get more sports video content on its site as it competes with other tech giants — Amazon and its deal with the… Read More
