PGA Tour moves to cloud with AWS, to build data lake for 100 years of game content

PGA Tour, a premier membership organisation for touring professional golfers, has picked Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its official cloud provider. 

The cloud giant is expected to help PGA with storage, compute, analytics, database and media services to process and distribute video footage from the tournaments. Additionally, AWS said it will provide new ways for users to engage with the tour’s content, according to a statement. AWS will also be the official artificial intelligence cloud provider, deep learning cloud provider and machine learning cloud provider for the organisation. 

“Unlike other sports, there’s more than one ball in play on a golf course, which makes it harder for fans to follow how every player is performing,” Andy Jassy, CEO of AWS, said. 

“Our collaboration with the TOUR will change the way that fans will be able to connect with the sport,” he added.

While raw footage will be captured by the organisers, AWS will utilise this content to provide digital experiences. An example of this is the OTT streaming platform Every Shot Live, which will give users access to every shot by every player in the tournament.

PGA Tour will build a data lake for real-time and historic multimedia content on Amazon simple storage services called the Amazon S3. Under this, 100 years of media content will be migrated to Amazon’s storage. The media content will include video, audio and images dating back to the 1928 Los Angeles Open. Content from future games will also be added to this lake. 

“Growing and diversifying our fan base is a top priority for us. We are creating more ways to experience golf by personalizing our content,” PGA TOUR Commissioner Jay Monahan, said.

PGA Tour will use Amazon Rekognition -- a deep learning service used to add image and video analysis to applications -- to automatically tag content with specific metadata such as logos or names. The application will help the organiser as well as content providers to search, review, annotate and package new content. 

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For THE PLAYERS Championship, an annual golf tournament under the PGA Tour, AWS said it will provide viewers with access to more than 32,000 shots from 144 golfers. The fans will be able to choose any player and view their shots and details in real time.

In a gamification move, AWS also said that it will give fans video game-like control of golf viewing through the power TOURCast application. Some of the features will be changing viewing perspectives, navigating around the course, and display player statistics.

PGA Tour will also utilise AWS to process and distribute OTT content making the videos suitable for viewing on a variety of platforms.

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