Seattle Seahawks Extend Partnership with AWS, Leveraging Generative AI for Enhanced Fan Engagement

Amazon com : Seattle Seahawks Announce Multi-Year Partnership Extension with Amazon Web Services

RENTON, Wash. - The Seattle Seahawks announced today a multi-year extension to their strategic partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to remain the team's Official Cloud Provider, as well as machine learning, artificial intelligence, and generative AI provider. Under the partnership, the Seahawks will continue to use the depth of AWS's unmatched cloud technologies to provide data-driven insights that help inform decisions across the club's football and business operations. A new element of the extended partnership will include the implementation of AWS's generative AI services as part of the team's business operations, starting with a focus on improving the team's internal digital media processes. The Seahawks will use a generative AI-powered system based on Amazon Bedrockto automate content distribution, transcribing, summarizing, and distributing press conferences to millions of fans across online, social, and mobile channels in English, German, and Spanish. For a look at how the Seahawks are using this technology to streamline their coverage and increase fan engagement, click here. "Leveraging innovative technology has become vital to optimizing our daily business operations and reducing manual processes," said Kenton Olson, Seattle Seahawks Vice President of Digital & Emerging Media. "By integrating AWS's services, including Amazon Bedrock, into our digital video distribution workflows, we've been able to streamline numerous daily activities including video translation, closed captioning, encoding, and summarizing. This has resulted in a significant time savings for our team and gets content to our fans faster. We see this as just the beginning of how AWS can make our internal operations more efficient in the future." "The Seahawks and AWS have a record of driving advancements on and off the field and we are excited to continue our collaboration," said Julie Souza, AWS Global Head of Sports. "By leveraging AWS's comprehensive cloud capabilities, including our cutting-edge generative AI solutions, the Seahawks gain powerful insights to enhance player health and performance, better prepare for upcoming opponents, engage their fans, and boost operational efficiency. This partnership underscores our commitment to empowering sports organizations with the best tools possible to excel." The Seahawks first partnered with AWS in 2019. In addition to utilizing AWS for insights on player health, performance and scouting, AWS will continue to provide the team's football operations with methods for acquiring, storing and streamlining data, as well as assist with new ways to leverage NFL Next Gen Stats., Lumen Field, home of the Seahawks, features 15 of Amazon's Just Walk Out technology locations, the most of any venue in the world, with total sales per game increasing 112% last season in Lumen's first store. AWS will also continue to partner with the Seahawks on community engagement efforts in the Pacific Northwest. About Seattle Seahawks The Seattle Seahawks joined the National Football League (NFL) in 1976 as an expansion team and have since won one Super Bowl (Super Bowl XLVIII), 11 division titles, and three conference championships. The club is headquartered at the Virginia Mason Athletic Center in Renton, Wash. and plays at Lumen Field in downtown Seattle. The Seahawks organization continues to be one of the strongest in the league, consistently ranking in the NFL's top 10 in numerous categories, including local and national fanbase, fan experience, retail, and digital engagement. Off the field, the club supports nearly 2,500 charities around the Pacific Northwest and beyond and uses its unique and powerful platform to support community programs in areas including youth empowerment, the future of football, social justice, community response, and the military community. The team's corporate partnerships include club deals with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Coca-Cola, Delta Air Lines, Lumen, Starbucks, T-Mobile and Toyota. Follow the team online at seahawks.com or @seahawks on social media. About Amazon Web Services Since 2006, Amazon Web Services has been the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud. AWS has been continually expanding its services to support virtually any workload, and it now has more than 240 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, media, and application development, deployment, and management from 105 Availability Zones within 33 geographic regions, with announced plans for 21 more Availability Zones and seven more AWS Regions in Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, Thailand, and the AWS European Sovereign Cloud. 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. Amazon strives to be Earth's Most Customer-Centric Company, Earth's Best Employer, and Earth's Safest Place to Work. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Career Choice, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, Alexa, Just Walk Out technology, Amazon Studios, and The Climate Pledge are some of the things pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/aboutand follow @AmazonNews.

Seattle Seahawks tap Amazon Web Services for digital media processing - SiliconANGLE

Since 2019, AWS has been the team's official cloud provider and key technology partner for football and business operations. As part of the renewed agreement, the Seahawks will use AWS generative AI services, specifically Amazon Bedrock, to improve their digital media processes. Amazon Bedrock will help the team automate tasks like creating, translating and sharing press conference content in multiple languages across its website, social media and mobile apps. The Seahawks will be able to distribute content faster while reaching more fans across multiple platforms. I recently talked about the partnership with Kenton Olson, vice president of digital and emerging media with the Seattle Seahawks. "AWS has become our toolbox to get things done -- everything from how we stream a live video to transcribing to using generative AI to provide summaries," he explained. "The latest initiative helps us get content out to our fans much faster than we could by processing things without AI." In the past, the Seahawks' digital media team had to transcribe, summarize and share press conferences manually across different platforms, a time-consuming process that delayed content delivery. The Seahawks produce more than 1,000 videos annually, including more than 300 press conferences. Each video used to take about 30 minutes to complete, which caused delays, especially on busy game days. "The process involved multiple groups, as editors had to hand things off to content teams to distribute," Olson said. "Then, the videos had to go through quality assurance to ensure the right boxes were checked. It was a very repetitive, monotonous process. Heading into this season, let's improve the efficiency so our creative team can spend more time creating and less time on the mundane. With AWS, we can automate almost the entire process." Bedrock has reduced the old 60-step manual process to just a few automated tasks, allowing the Seahawks to get content out to fans faster. Generative AI also creates detailed summaries of press conferences and adds time codes so fans can jump to specific parts of a video. As a result, the team can now distribute updates almost immediately after a press conference, improving both speed and accessibility. I asked Kenton about the benefits, and he described many: "One of the biggest is that it can process the video faster than people. It also provides a richer and more detailed description. In the past, these were a sentence or two, but now they can be more colorful with time stamps so fans can jump to the parts they want to see. Our team can focus on more exciting things and be impactful for our fans." The Seahawks faced some challenges when implementing generative AI, which required training to recognize specific player and coach names. This required building a custom vocabulary that updates with the team's roster. Another issue was hallucinations, where the AI would sometimes generate incorrect information, especially during long press conferences. To fix this, the team provided the AI with up-to-date lists of players, their roles and other details. Overall, integrating the AI with various AWS tools created a smooth process for handling and distributing content. The Seahawks use a combination of AWS tools, including MediaConvert for processing videos, S3 for storing data, SMS for sending notifications, and Bedrock for AI tasks. Although the current focus is on press conferences, the Seahawks plan to include other types of content so it's more engaging for fans. The team hopes to unlock the entire media library by making old content available. With the team's 50th season coming up, it's a way to showcase historical footage that was previously difficult to access. Looking ahead, I inquired what fans can expect to see over time concerning AI and how it changes the fan experience. Olson focused on two areas. "The first is the ability to get more information faster," he said. "If you think of what AWS Next Gen Stats has done, it wasn't long ago when no one knew how fast the players were and how our social team could quickly post that a certain player broke 20 miles an hour, giving the fan more context. The second area is uncovering the game's history to bubble up more content and tell unique and compelling stories. But ultimately, we want to continue getting fans more information faster than ever." It's fair to say that AI promises to change the world in more ways than we can imagine. In the highly competitive world of sports and entertainment, AI is being used to redefine the lens that fans watch through. As a fan of the game, I'm looking forward to seeing what's next.