Google and Major League Baseball (MLB) announced a powerful multi-year collaboration to upgrade MLB’s business processes and support next-level experiences that inspire fans around the world.
Google Cloud will become MLB’s Official Cloud and Cloud Data and Analytics partner, with MLB’s business operations, including Statcast—the automated tool for analyzing player movements and abilities—now running on Google Cloud. Additionally, for a third season in a row, MLB will use Google Ad Manager and its Dynamic Ad Insertion feature to power its ads business.
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“Every season we work to apply emerging technology to engage and support our fans, clubs and broadcasters in new and exciting ways,” said Jason Gaedtke, MLB’s Chief Technology Officer. “MLB has enjoyed a strong partnership with Google based on Google Ad Manager’s live ad delivery with MLB.tv as well as YouTube’s strong fan engagement during exclusive live games. We are excited to strengthen this partnership by consolidating MLB infrastructure on Google Cloud and incorporating Google’s world-class machine learning technology to provide personalized and immersive fan experiences. We couldn’t have picked a better technology partner across ad delivery, streaming, cloud computing and machine learning.”
MLB will migrate its cloud and on-premise systems to Google Cloud and leverage Google’s industry-leading machine learning, analytics, application management, and data/video storage capabilities to increase reliability and manage governance at scale. Google will also become the underlying data analytics technology of Statcast, MLB’s state-of-the-art tracking technology that has become indispensable for players, coaches, umpires, broadcasters and fans alike. Google will collaborate closely with MLB to bring the next evolution of Statcast, as well as a number of new technological innovations, to life.
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“MLB, which has led the sporting world in the use of data since the early 1990s, has shown the sports industry and sporting fans globally what’s possible when you combine data with human performance,” said Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud. “We’re looking forward to working with MLB to usher in a new era of innovation in sport, and together we can have a substantial impact on the game, giving the next generation of fans a different way to experience America’s favorite pastime.”
MLB’s migration to Google Cloud has already resulted in an exponential improvement in analytics and decision making, enabling MLB to provide teams with a unified data plane to enable accelerated decision making. MLB and the teams will maximize the value of Google Cloud capabilities in machine learning, network, and analytics for the development of the fan experience today and beyond.
The Google Ad Manager platform also continues to help MLB grow its media business by delivering ads seamlessly across screens wherever viewers are watching, whether that’s on mobile, desktop, or connected TV devices. Additionally Ad Manager’s integration with Google Cloud BigQuery enables the organization to better analyze its advertising data.
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