In November last year, DP World Tour and Amazon Web Services, AWS announced a partnership positioning AWS as the Official Cloud Provider of the global golf tour. AWS has also been working with PGA TOUR in golf and for other sporting events with NFL, F1, NBA and Bundesliga.
Through this partnership, AWS is looking at collaborating with DP World Tour to drive innovation into the golf spectator experience till 2030. Another reason for partnering with DP World Tour is the global nature of the golf event that is held across 42 different tournaments and in 26 different countries.
“We do not do branding for the sake of it. For us, it is about what is the long-term opportunities of the partnership and what are the new innovations that we can help to uncover together,” says Nina Walsh, Global Leader for Industry Business Development, Media, Entertainment, Games, Sports, Amazon Web Service.
Walsh continues, “We too are a global organisation. So how can we really help DP World Tour reach those audiences in parts of the world that maybe they have not previously.”
The media coverage of golf is not as simple as a football stadium or a cricket stadium, where there is one field of play. From a coverage point of view, golf is a particularly difficult sport to cover, since there are 18 fields of play and around 150 players. The actions are also different at each of the different holes based on the game itself.
“Golf really presents a fun technological challenge, which is how do we capture everything that is happening at one time and then be able to provide that data to audiences, to commentators, to fans watching along.
“Being able to track all of that, is not that simple,” says Walsh.
AWS solutions
AWS has been working with DP World’s European Tour Group for the past few years. The recently announced partnership is a formalisation of some of the experimentation that AWS has already been doing with it and to define what it can continue to do so in the next five years and beyond.
With DP World Tour, AWS is co-innovating on various initiatives like the Green Drive Live, Tournament as a Service, and to streamline operations by using Agentic AI solutions like AWS Quick Suite.
AWS is providing Agentic AI tools and Quick Suite is an example to help streamline operations. Customers will use AWS Quick Suite to present all the insights in a single screen and to help with decision making. Quick Suite is one of AWS’ native services.
AWS Elemental services are used in the production of that content. AWS Elemental Live is video encoding solution that runs on hardware or on virtual machines in a customer’s premises. It encodes and transcodes real-time-live video for broadcast and streaming delivery.
AWS Elemental Live is used to transform live video content from one format and package into other formats and packages. Typically, media enterprises need to transform content in order to provide a format and package that a playback device can handle. Playback devices include smartphones and set-top boxes attached to televisions. All of AWS’ Elemental services are used in the production of content.
All the insights that are provided to commentators and provided to audiences, feeds through all the digital assets, during any live broadcast. AWS technology solutions are underpinning production and capturing all the data, which enables the storytelling aspect.
“We are the underlying infrastructure for it,” says Walsh.
AWS provides the cloud infrastructure for its customers like DP World Tour. However, DP World Tour will have its own account with AWS and will decide how to manage this account and how to deploy the cloud platform and cloud solutions from AWS.
“It is up to them. We are about choice. That is fundamentally how we operate – to provide our customers with choice,” says Walsh.
Specialised partners
For sport enterprise customers who opt for Tournament as a Service from AWS, it is about providing them a single pane of glass for the tournament. The tournament director can see everything that is happening at the tournament. They can see all the insights that are being captured, and all the analytics, to help with decision making.
“It is about streamlining all the information into one pane of glass to make it simpler to make those decisions,” says Walsh.
The Tournament-As-A-Service is a visionary concept based on the SaaS principle. TaaS represents the ability to deliver tournament technology services and applications via the cloud to any tournament in the world, regardless of country, region or continent.
The vision is driven by having the ability to stage global tournaments efficiency and consistently. Services that are critical to staging tournaments include Shot-by-Shot Data Collection, On-Venue Scoring Services, Volunteer Management, Spectator Ticketing, and Player Portal.
However, while AWS can provide the infrastructure for its deep relationships with customers like DP World Tour, specialised partners are also required for localised and last mile services.
“We have a very rich partner ecosystem. We have 600+ media, entertainment, games, sports partners, that specialise in that space. It is a deep ecosystem and as I said, one of the things we pride ourselves on is providing our customers with choice.”
“There are a lot of services from our side that go into helping develop the various offerings that DP World Tour will put out there to their audiences and customers. We take all of the knowledge and the learnings that we have with all of our customers globally to co-innovate on various offerings,” elaborates Walsh.
Since the DP World Tour is played across 26 different countries and 42 different tournaments, being able to access AWS infrastructure at low latency in all of those locations is important. The benefit for DP World working with AWS is the scalability and the reliability of the infrastructure that AWS provides.
DP World Tour is a global tournament and must be able to consistently manage its fan experiences around the world, through its mobile app, broadcasts and website.
Builders and buyers
How enterprise customers deal with AWS and its channel partners depends on whether they are intrinsically builders and buyers from the ground up. Builders look at the various solutions from AWS channel partners as part of their Lego building blocks that need to be assembled and integrated to build their own particular solution.
“We want to take all the Lego pieces and we want to put them all together to create a solution,” is how builder customers would engage with AWS according to Walsh.
The buyer customer on the other hand is looking for channel partners who have already figured out how to put the Lego pieces together. They will simply want to buy the Lego pieces off the shelf. It all depends on what are the technology capabilities of the enterprise; what is their budget and what is their timeline.
“We are finding more and more because of the timelines; enterprises are wanting to use a partner solution because it is quicker. From idea to implementation is quicker, but it also depends on the skills that they have in-house,” says Walsh.
Five-year partnership
DP World Tour has over fifty years of archival footage and content. An early priority with AWS is to organise, archive and tag all of that data. It is a task that involves both digitising and adding meta descriptions as well. To reduce the time taken for adding meta descriptions and tags to images, DP World Tour is using machine learning and facial recognition.
More importantly by understanding that content, DP World Tour can potentially monetise that content by offering it to fellow broadcasters and partners for their audiences to consume.
DP World Tour is also using Generative AI to capture the data and then to be able to tell new stories to fans. Some of the new fan experiences include highlight reels, personalised feeds, real time speech to text, real time language translations. These are some of the new upcoming initiatives.
“Right now, when it is just sitting on tape, you cannot consume it or use it in the way that you want to,” says Walsh.
Another part of the partnership with DP World Tour is Green Drive Live. DP World Tour is measuring and tracking its use of logistics, transport, and consumption of food and beverage, among other related variables, for local tournaments. Staging a local in-country tournament is almost like building a smart village and globally that is like building 42 smart villages.
AWS’ Green Drive Live is measuring the impact of the local tournaments on the local environment and how to improve efficiencies.
By moving the production of media content to the AWS cloud platform, DP World Tour does not have to move its production teams around the world and they can operate remotely. This is a saving of 87 tonnes of carbon footprint.
“If you think about each tournament, each local team or director, can track their impact on the environment and then we can help them figure out ways in which to improve that,” says Walsh.
While efficiencies gained through AWS’ Green Drive Live also helps AWS indirectly, “We prefer to show what are the customer outcomes as a result of using our services. Of course it helps us, but more so it is about what are the outcomes for the customer,” reflects Walsh.
