Saturday, February 1, 2020

How AWS is making the Six Nations 2020 the most immersive yet

As the Six Nations 2020 gears up to kick off in Paris this weekend, millions of fans across the world will be tuning in to cheer on their country.

But this year's tournament will also feature a more in-depth way for fans to interact with the game than ever before thanks to the Six Nations' partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS).

The computing giant is set to expand the statistics and insights it provides to viewers everywhere, but also to broadcasters and even coaches as they push to get that extra edge over their rivals.

“The Six Nations is another one of those kind of customers that want to use the technology that we offer to provide better insights," Steve Ryan, AWS Senior Technical Evangelist told TechRadar Pro at the official Six Nations 2020 launch in London recently.

This is the second year of the partnership between AWS and the Six Nations, with the initial seven insights being expanded to twelve for the 2020 tournament.

The new statistics include the likes of heat maps to show where on the pitch the action is taking place, metrics on rucking efficiency, numbers concerning balls won, impactful tackles, and crucial line breaks.

"The great thing about this is that it puts more stats and insight into the hands of a broad spectrum of fans," Ryan says, “I think we should see a significant improvement through technology for the fan experience."

AWS has gained plaudits for its work with Formula 1 and the NFL, giving viewers extra insight into what can be some of the trickest parts of the sport to understand, even for long-standing fans.

The data itself is gathering by a seperate company, StatsPerform, which gathers the information in real-time through a custom platform built on AWS EC2, with the data then put into a data lake hosted on Amazon S3.

AWS tools including Elastic MapReduce and SageMaker are then used to harness machine learning and analytics to get detailed insight into that data, creating analytics that can then be shared in real time for live broadcast to viewers in over 170 countries to enjoy.

For example, to power the new Kick Predictor statistics tool, the AWS Machine Learning Solutions Lab team worked with StatsPerform to analyse a wealth of historic data to train a machine learning using AWS SageMaker to predict if a conversion or penalty kick will be successful.



from TechRadar - All the latest technology news https://ift.tt/2ubE6Tv

No comments:

Post a Comment