Seattle Seahawks Select AWS as Its Cloud, Machine Learning, and Artificial Intelligence Provider

AWS machine learning services will enable the National Football League team to unlock competitive insights and develop winning play strategies

SEATTLE–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced that AWS is now a cloud, machine learning (ML), and artificial intelligence (AI) provider for the Seattle Seahawks. In addition to moving the vast majority of its infrastructure to AWS, the National Football League (NFL) team will use the breadth and depth of AWS’s services, including compute, storage, database, analytics, and ML to drive deep analysis of game footage to inform game strategy, improve operational efficiencies, and accelerate decision-making to advance team performance game-to-game. The Seahawks will combine the weekly NFL Next Gen Stats player tracking data, which tracks the position of the ball and every player 10 times per second, with its own player and club data to develop custom analytics and proprietary statistics.

The Seattle Seahawks are relying on AWS’s unmatched portfolio of services to discover actionable outcomes from its vast amount of player, team, and business data, enabling them to continue to compete at a championship caliber level. The Seahawks are building a data lake on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) that will combine team stats and NFL data, such as Next Gen Stats player tracking, player health and wellness data, and scouting information to provide deeper visibility into player capabilities, as well as give the coaching staff a single, real-time view of player and team performance. By applying AWS analytics services to the data, the Seahawks will be able to quickly uncover insights to better evaluate talent and develop game plans that take advantage of the team’s strengths.

Working with the Amazon ML Solutions Lab (AWS’s Machine Learning Professional Services program), the Seahawks are building new capabilities that will drive deeper analysis and insights into video footage. By applying AWS ML services to practice, regular season, and playoff video footage – including NFL Coaches Film that gives coaches, scouts, and game officials a bird’s-eye view of all 22 players on the field – the Seahawks are creating a cloud-based video analytics platform. The system will use Amazon Rekognition, a deep learning image and video analysis service, to identify and track players, and give the organization a better understanding of their opponents’ defensive and offensive strategies. Using Amazon SageMaker, a fully managed service to build, train, and deploy ML models, the Seahawks can analyze the number of hurries, knockdowns, and sacks, to predict how specific quarterbacks will perform under pressure, as well as which defensive players will exert pressure based on the depth of throws and distance gained by a receiver after catching a pass. These new capabilities will deliver recommendations to the Seahawks coaches in preparation for practice and games to help them make better data-driven decisions.

“As our official cloud provider, AWS will enable the Seahawks to become a data-driven organization that uses the power of technology to fuel future championships. We chose AWS because of their relentless focus on innovation, their broad array of machine learning services, and proven experience in supporting large sports organizations and enterprises around the world at scale,” said Chip Suttles, Vice President, Technology, Seattle Seahawks. “AWS’s breadth and depth of services will help us to extract and pinpoint every possible advantage from the vast amount of data we collect, delivering the actionable insights we need to positively impact our decision-making.”

“We strive to be a consistent championship-caliber team on and off the field, which includes equipping our football operations with the best tools possible to win,” said Chuck Arnold, President, Seattle Seahawks and First & Goal Inc. “We are thrilled to collaborate with AWS and their unmatched analytics services to leverage the power of data and make an instant impact on our team.”

“Data has become a competitive differentiator for sports franchises, but these organizations need the most complete and fully featured set of machine learning and analytics capabilities to analyze and take action upon that data, to impact player performance and drive championship caliber play,” said Mike Clayville, Vice President, Worldwide Commercial Sales at AWS. “The Seattle Seahawks are using AWS’s deep portfolio of ML and AI services to power their cloud-first strategy and take their game play to the next level. We look forward to helping the Seahawks develop greater insights that will continue to propel them forward as a world class sports organization.”

About Amazon Web Services

For 13 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 165 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 69 Availability Zones (AZs) within 22 geographic regions, with announced plans for 13 more Availability Zones and four more AWS Regions in Indonesia, Italy, South Africa, and Spain. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com.

About Amazon

Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.

About The Seattle Seahawks

The Seattle Seahawks joined the National Football League (NFL) in 1976 as an expansion team. The Seahawks have won 10 division titles and three conference championships. They are the only team to have played in both the American Football Conference (AFC) and the National Football Conference (NFC) championship games. They have appeared in three Super Bowls (Super Bowl XL, Super Bowl XLVIII and Super Bowl XLIX). The Seahawks defeated the Denver Broncos, 43-8, in Super Bowl XLVIII to win their first title. The team plays at CenturyLink Field in downtown Seattle.

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