Major League Baseball Will Use Live AI-Generated Statistics

Source: REUTERS/Abhishek N. Chinnappa

Amazon and United States Major League Baseball (MLB) have expanded their partnership to include Amazon Web Services' machine learning and artificial capabilities. Amazon will begin to provide AI-generated live graphics and statistics during baseball games this season that are broadcast on both TV and digital channels. The deal follows one made in November of 2017 with the National Football League (NFL), and will also bring with it a new brand and logo as Amazon's machine learning technology begins to reach a wider audience. The cloud infrastructure market is expected to be worth close to $82 billion in 2018. Amazon Web Services currently holds 32% of the market (according to 1Q 2018 figures from Canalys).

Amazon Web Services competes with Microsoft and Alaphbet's Google in the cloud infrastructure market, and its recent partnerships with MLB and NFL make for fantastic reference customers. According to Blair Hanley Frank, principal analyst at ISG, "They're large high profile enterprises with complex needs and interests in developing new digital experiences for consumers that translate well to cloud usage." 

An example of the kind of statistics that will be generated live for fans is a live pitcher heat map that will be able to change according to the hitter, stadium, whether the team is in the playoff hunt, and time of day to display where the next pitch may go. These kinds of multi-variable statistics will be crunched by AWS's machine learning systems and beamed live to give fans insights as they watch their favorite teams. 

According to research firm Canalys, in the first quarter of 2018, Microsoft Azure came in second in the cloud infrastructure market with 16 % of the market, and Google's Cloud Platform held 7%. 

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