[Love sports and technology? Sign up for our sports tech newsletter to receive this rundown from GeekWire’s Taylor Soper via email every week.] TAYLOR’S TAKE ON THE WEEK IN SPORTS TECH: As NBA commissioner Adam Silver said in September, the way we watch pro sports on TV has barely changed over the past 30 years. Don’t expect the same regularity over the next decade — or even the next few years. I got a behind-the-scenes peek this week at the cloud technology Amazon used to stream Thursday Night Football games this season to 200 countries and on 600 different devices. This seems like… Read More
Signal acquisition, content ingestion, transcoding, ad insertion, playback optimization, and end-to-end monitoring probably weren’t top of mind for NFL fans who watched Thursday Night Football this season on Amazon. But developing and implementing the technology required to stream live sports over the internet to millions of viewers in more than 200 countries at the same time is no easy task — and Amazon, for the most part, scored a touchdown with its first attempt at live football. The Seattle tech giant last week streamed its 10th Thursday Night Football game as part of a deal worth a reported $50 million… Read More
Ever wondered who was the best basketball player in the Pac-10 in 1982? If that trivia item has been bugging you since the Reagan administration, Google Cloud Platform and the National Collegiate Athletic Association have some good news for you. The NCAA has named Google as its “Official Cloud of the NCAA,” which mostly means you’ll see a gazillion ads for Google Cloud during the basketball tournament in March. But sports junkies could learn some interesting historical data from this partnership, as the NCAA also plans to upload more than 80 years of sports data across a number of different… Read More
A few uninjured defenders, a running game, some more offensive line help — all of that may be on your Christmas wish list for the Seattle Seahawks at this point in the season, but how about just settling for a new piece of team gear? In a fun promotion the week before a Christmas Eve matchup against the Dallas Cowboys, the Seahawks are partnering with Uber and Fanatics to make last-minute holiday shopping a little easier for dedicated 12s. Fanatics, the online retailer that is enjoying big success with its sale of licensed sports merchandise, is the official e-commerce partner… Read More
Unikrn is getting into brick-and-mortar on the Las Vegas Strip. The Seattle esports betting startup today announced a new deal with MGM Resorts International to host live video game tournaments on Friday and Saturday evenings next year inside the MGM Grand Hotel & Casino on the Las Vegas Strip. The events will take place at Level Up, a new entertainment complex inside MGM that opened one year ago. Unikrn will create a “branded esports experience,” said CEO Rahul Sood, and host competitions for a variety of games like Street Fighter, Madden, NBA 2K, and more. Competitors will have a chance… Read More
