The NHL takes another step forward in data, analysis and tracking of records and players.
The league has reached an agreement with Amazon Web Services to put all of its videos and data in the cloud. The hope is to provide everyone, from coaches, executives and players to fans, with an integrated look at the game with the help of new camera angles, artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Being able to search and sort the speed, shooting speed and more of all the players is not here yet, but this is a starting point.
“Before we start building, let’s say, as a new augmented reality app that fans can use in the arena to get real-time stats and make comments tracking records and players while sitting and watching the game, there there’s a lot of infrastructure that needs to be established, ”said Dave Lehanski, executive vice president of business development and innovation for the NHL. “There will be a huge amount we can do.”
NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman and Amazon Web Services CEO Andy Jassy announced the deal to NBC Sports Network on Wednesday afternoon. Bettman said that “the most advanced technology and services will provide us with capabilities to provide analysis and statistics that highlight the speed and skill of our game.”
The NFL, Formula 1, Bundesliga football and Six Nations rugby already use Amazon Web Services, along with individual teams. Beyond the NFL’s “NextGen Stats,” the Seattle Seahawks have used it to study practice habits.
“Potentially, there’s a lot of capacity for technical teams to help their teams improve better just by learning where players can be efficient, where there are some opportunities to better coordinate,” said Matt Garman, vice president of sales and marketing. ‘AWS.
Later this season, fans looking for stats on the NHL website will get the corresponding video clips and vice versa. The league hopes to have new 4K cameras mounted on the center marker of each field for at least the playoffs to add different angles.
All that data and player tracking can provide, this video will allow Amazon’s AI to compose even more things about acceleration, confrontations, stick positioning, and possibly pave the way for new stats and analysis.
“It’s just the beginning where this is going,” Lehanski said. “It melts a little bit with the amount of opportunities we have in front of us.”
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