Google has announced it has a multi-year deal with SoFi Stadium and the Hollywood Park campus to provide its cloud services.
It is believed by Google that these sorts of sports deals will help it quickly gain traction against the likes of Microsoft and Amazon. The company agreed to a partnership with Major League Baseball to operate Statcast, its stat-tracking system, and offer digital infrastructure for everything from online ticket sales to team websites. However, Google still somehow lags behind Microsoft and Amazon with about a 4 percent share of the market according to Gartner.
The cloud services of Google will provide a new personal concierge app that offers real-time metrics on gameday and will help power all of the data passing through the state-of-the-art SoFi stadium. Some of those metrics will appear on the new 360-foot 4K Oculus scoreboard, the largest scoreboard in professional sports.
“The big impact that people are going to see when they go to SoFi Stadium is the Oculus,” said Anil Jain, Google Cloud’s managing director, media and entertainment. Jain further added that Google can provide exclusive video replays to fans and other supplementary experiences. “These are all things that come together in that future reinvention or re-imagination of the fan experience,” he said.
“Our goal is to continue to be an innovator in the space and partner with broadcasters, sports leagues and the broader ecosystem to help drive innovation but put it to the strengths that we’re investing in – cloud computing, data analytics, artificial intelligence, machine learning and more,” Jain said.
“We couldn’t have picked a better partner to manage our technology needs,” Skarpi Hedinsson, chief technology officer, SoFi Stadium and Hollywood Park, said in a statement. “Incorporating Google’s solutions into critical areas of our business ensures we can usher in a new era of innovation in sports and entertainment, raising the bar on what the ultimate fan experience looks like globally.”
