Friday, July 12, 2019 – A roundup of some of the key sports technology stories you need to know, including SportTechie’s own content and stories from around the web
- Social media platform TikTok has formed a content partnership with Wimbledon. TikTok, the most-downloaded app in Apple’s store last year, allows users to create short video content to the background music track of their choosing. To support Wimbeldon’s wider marketing campaign, TikTok users have been encouraged to create videos using the hashtag #JoinTheStory. The All England Lawn Tennis Club, which hosts the famed Wimbledon championship, established an account on TikTok as part of the partnership.“TikTok provides a brilliant opportunity for sports properties to showcase some of the character, personality, and humour of sport beyond the match action,” said Alexandra Willis, Head of Communications, Content & Digital at the AELTC.
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ESPN and the NBA debuted a new smartphone view of last night’s Summer League game between the Atlanta Hawks and Washington Wizards in Las Vegas. It was the first sports game captured exclusively via smartphone cameras. The alternate broadcast was aired live on ESPN’s app, NBA TV Canada, and internationally on NBA League Pass. A total of six Samsung phones were used to film the game using AT&T 5G video technology. Broadcast elements included courtside views, customized graphics, interviews, and fan interaction. Our Jen Booton was in Vegas this week reporting on the risks that ESPN and the NBA are taking in order to enhance second-screen and fan experiences. Here’s a good take from Las Vegas Sports Biz on the phones.
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- Football analytics organization Pro Football Focus has moved its entire infrastructure to Amazon Web Services. As PFF’s cloud and machine learning partner, AWS will develop new metrics that leverage PFF data and bring new insights to telecasts such as NBC’s Sunday Night Football. PFF supplies troves of data to teams in the NFL, the NCAA, and the Canadian Football League. “We have chosen to use AWS’s unmatched breadth of functionality to innovate at scale,” says Cris Collinsworth, the former NFL wide receiver and current NBC commentator who owns PFF. Collinsworth says services such as Amazon SageMaker will “help us build, train, and deploy machine learning models so that we can generate predictions and deliver insights faster to teams and broadcast partners.”
- New Hampshire governor Chris Sununo is set to sign a bill to allow sports betting in the state, according to the AP. Today’s expected bill will permit mobile gambling and allow for up to 10 retail sports betting locations. New Hampshire’s Lottery Commision will regulate the industry, which is estimated to generate $7.5 million in fiscal year 2021 and $13.5 million two years later. The Granite State will be the 16th state to legalize sports betting, with its first legal wager expected to be placed in early 2020.
- He went deep … into the numbers. A 26-year old baseball fan from Olive Branch, Ill., leveraged Statcast data to win a $250,000 grand prize in MLB’s 2019 T-Mobile Home Run Derby Bracket Challenge. Hunter Mcharry predicted every Derby matchup correctly and also correctly picked that Blue Jays rookie Vladimir Guerrero Jr. would hit the longest home run, and even how far that home run travel— a projected 488 feet, per Statcast. Mcharry told MLB.com that he checks the Statcast leaderboards on Baseball Savant at least once a day. “I went against my gut instinct; I thought Vlad Jr. was going to win, to be honest,” Mcharry told MLB.com. “But I compared the exit velocities and figured [Pete] Alonso would have a little more to gain from it.”
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