How The Nfl Uses Generative Ai From Aws To Streamline Media Asset

Bonisiwe Shabane

-Nov 2, 2025, 8:16 AM

how the nfl uses generative ai from aws to streamline media asset

Behind every gravity-defying catch and over-the-top tackle, a team of engineers and data scientists work tirelessly to bring National Football League (NLF) fans closer to the on-field action. One of the latest NFL analytics implementations is a sophisticated generative AI system built on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Its creation and deployment is one of the most complex engineering accomplishments in sports media to streamline query and search of media assets to exacting specifications. How does the NFL take more than a century’s worth of football history, millions of video clips, and an ever-growing archive of statistics as inputs to a system that can respond to conversational queries... This is the puzzle that NFL’s technical team, in collaboration with AWS, set out to solve. From developing advanced machine learning models to creating intuitive user interfaces, the journey to build a system to provide this capability was as arduous and demanding as any fourth-quarter drive.

In this blog post, we break down the X’s and O’s of this engineering achievement, demonstrating how the NFL tackles big data challenges head-on. The NFL’s journey into a generative AI-powered content management didn’t start on a whim. It was born of necessity, driven by the sheer volume of data the league accumulated over its storied 100-year history. Imagine navigating a digital labyrinth containing millions of video clips, countless audio snippets, an ocean of statistics, and an ever-growing collection of fan-generated social media content. This is the reality of the NFL’s media asset management (MAM) system—a treasure trove of content that is both a goldmine and a challenge for content creators. The NFL has amassed an unimaginable volume of facts, stats, game day coverage, athlete press interviews, and media assets over the last 100 years, including millions of audio and video clips, as well as...

Any play of substance merits capture from various viewing angles, such that the NFL’s impressive asset library continues to grow rapidly. It even includes social media clips generated by fans. If roughly half of a game’s plays are consequential, that’s around 75 plays per game, and the average NFL season encompasses 272 games. This means the NFL feeds more than 20,000 plays captured from multiple angles into its library each season. Matt Swensson, SVP Product and Technology at the NFL, paints a vivid picture of the challenge: “Until now, our teams needed to perform extensive pre-research to find the media assets they needed. It was like trying to find a specific play in a hundred years’ worth of game footage—which is time-consuming and often challenging.”

At the heart of the NFL’s media facility in Los Angeles, as many as 75 video editors and other visual storytellers toil behind arrays of monitors, crafting narratives that enrich football fans’ enjoyment and... Sifting through millions of game statistics and thousands of hours of footage on tight deadlines, they field thousands of media asset inquiries each season. “Imagine finding a literal needle in a haystack—the perfect clip to tell the story. And it’s not just one clip. It’s as many clips as needed for an entire video edit,” says Eric Peters, director, media administration and postproduction at NFL. Now, thanks to a long-standing partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS), the NFL has moved quickly to leverage its existing data foundation to build a generative AI-powered system called Playbook Pro to automate its...

Instead of having to master complex media asset management (MAM) processes that used to take up to a half-hour per query, the NFL’s content creators now make natural language requests through a chatbot and,... The new system just came online this summer and is already being deployed to transform the NFL’s video storytelling workflow and creative output this season. “Of course, there’s a lot of buzz around generative AI in general,” says Matt Swensson, senior vice president, product and technology, NFL Media. “What’s been awesome is that we’ve implemented it and are using it actively—and the benefits are already showing in the speed and the accuracy of what we’re trying to do.” Before this football season, the NFL’s content creators, such as video producers and editors, had to master an inefficient manual process for retrieving media assets. They used a cumbersome two-step checkbox and filter-based search method to plumb the rich currents of two separate source systems: Next Gen Stats and the MAM system that organizes and stores the NFL’s video...

Next Gen Stats is the NFL's system that captures player-tracking data to analyze and contextualize the game—providing clubs with insights on trends and player performance while enhancing fans' experiences in the stadium, online, and... It captures real-time data on action on the field using sensors embedded in players’ uniforms and equipment that measure such factors as location, speed, distance, and acceleration. It then analyzes this to generate hundreds of advanced statistics that can be applied to anything from safety for players to commentary for fans. NEW YORK – Sept. 10, 2024 – The National Football League and Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), today announced an extension of their long-term partnership.

Since 2017, the NFL and AWS have been at the forefront of innovation, leveraging AWS's artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) services to shape the future of football. The global partnership will be on display during this week’s games with the debut of a new AI-powered Next Gen Stat that changes how we understand and analyze tackles in football. The Tackle Probability ML model predicts, at any given moment of a play, the likelihood that a given defender will make a tackle, helping to quantify which defenders are the most reliable tacklers and... Tackle Probability can be used to calculate various metrics that can be applied to both offensive and defensive analysis, such as missed tackle attempts by a defender and missed tackles forced by a ball... Powered by AWS, the Next Gen Stats platform collects over 500 million data points each season. This wealth of data serves as the foundation for innovation throughout the NFL, from enhancing fan engagement through advanced statistics to transforming the viewing experience by enabling alternate broadcasts and new ways of visualizing...

Additionally, data-driven insights have a direct impact on the game itself by informing rule changes to make the game safer and even more exciting, including the NFL’s new Dynamic Kickoff. A key component of the partnership renewal is the implementation of generative AI to increase operational efficiency and drive additional value for the league and its fans. “Through our collaboration with AWS, we are continuously pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in football,” said Gary Brantley, chief information officer at the NFL. “By harnessing the power of data and advanced technologies like generative AI, together we are accelerating the pace of innovation in important areas such as player safety, fan engagement and content production. This season we’ll see an increase in operational efficiency as we begin to leverage AWS’s generative AI capabilities at NFL Media.” Employees in the league’s media division are using Amazon Q Business and a Bedrock-based research tool to improve workflows and productivity.

The National Football League is expanding its partnership with AWS as the organization pursues generative AI adoption, the two companies said Tuesday. Just before the preseason kicked off last month, the NFL moved two generative AI projects into production within its media division: Amazon Q Business and a Bedrock-based research tool. To get ready to introduce generative AI, the organization updated onboarding processes, data approaches and documentation methods. The goal for both projects is to boost employee productivity and improve operational efficiency. NFL media staff can query internal documentation located in a central database using the Amazon Q Business application. The NFL and Amazon Web Services have extended the length and expanded the scope of their partnership, introducing generative AI functionality among their collaborative projects.

The pair have co-developed two uses of gen AI for internal efficiency at NFL Media. The first uses Amazon Q Business, an automated assistant that facilitates access to business intelligence and production knowledge using natural language prompts. The other relies on Amazon Bedrock for easy retrieval of insights and video footage storied in the Next Gen Stats dataset. “It's not replacing the decision-making process of people, but it's exposing these things much faster, so we can be much more responsive as a business,” said NFL Deputy CIO Aaron Amendolia, explaining that the... Both will be used to help employees produce more and better content across its properties, ranging from NFL Network and NFL Films to digital platforms such as the website, app and social media. Production assistants will be spared countless hours of manual tasks, such as watching video to tag plays, “freeing up that human time to spend it back on the most valuable activities,” Amendolia said.

The gen AI will thus serve fans through a human intermediary, rather than be directly fan-facing -- but those types of projects are in development. Amendolia didn’t put a specific timetable other than to say it could be “soon” but also only “when it’s right for the brand.” Quality control is essential. Behind every gravity-defying catch and over-the-top tackle, a team of engineers and data scientists work tirelessly to bring National Football League (NLF) fans closer to the on-field action. One of the latest NFL analytics implementations is a sophisticated generative AI system built on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Its creation and deployment is one of the most complex engineering accomplishments in sports media to streamline query and search of media assets to exacting specifications. How does the NFL take more than a century’s worth of football history, millions of video clips, and an ever-growing archive of statistics as inputs to a system that can respond to conversational queries...

This is the puzzle that NFL’s technical team, in collaboration with AWS, set out to solve. From developing advanced machine learning models to creating intuitive user interfaces, the journey to build a system to provide this capability was as arduous and demanding as any fourth-quarter drive. In this blog post, we break down the X’s and O’s of this engineering achievement, demonstrating how the NFL tackles big data challenges head-on. The NFL’s journey into a generative AI-powered content management didn’t start on a whim. It was born of necessity, driven by the sheer volume of data the league accumulated over its storied 100-year history. Imagine navigating a digital labyrinth containing millions of video clips, countless audio snippets, an ocean of statistics, and an ever-growing collection of fan-generated social media content.

This is the reality of the NFL’s media asset management (MAM) system—a treasure trove of content that is both a goldmine and a challenge for content creators. The NFL has amassed an unimaginable volume of facts, stats, game day coverage, athlete press interviews, and media assets over the last 100 years, including millions of audio and video clips, as well as... Any play of substance merits capture from various viewing angles, such that the NFL’s impressive asset library continues to grow rapidly. It even includes social media clips generated by fans. If roughly half of a game’s plays are consequential, that’s around 75 plays per game, and the average NFL season encompasses 272 games. This means the NFL feeds more than 20,000 plays captured from multiple angles into its library each season.

Matt Swensson, SVP Product and Technology at the NFL, paints a vivid picture of the challenge: “Until now, our teams needed to perform extensive pre-research to find the media assets they needed. It was like trying to find a specific play in a hundred years’ worth of game footage—which is time-consuming and often challenging.” Just in time for the 2024 season, the National Football League and Amazon Web Services Inc. continue to push the boundaries of artificial intelligence and machine learning in football. Through a partnership that began in 2017, the NFL has used AWS technology to improve player performance analysis, game strategies and fan experiences. Upcoming NFL games will showcase a new AI-powered tool, Tackle Probability, that analyzes and predicts the likelihood of a defender making a tackle in real time.

The tool identifies the most dependable defenders and the hardest-to-catch ball carriers. It also provides data on key performance metrics, such as missed tackles and successful attempts, offering teams valuable insights for offensive and defensive strategies. More specifically, Tackle Probability looks at 20 different factors, including the position and speed of each defender, every 10th of a second. Using these data points, an AI model, trained on five years of past game data, calculates the likelihood of a tackle happening at any given moment in a play. From this data, the model creates new stats like how often defenders attempt tackles without missing or how frequently running backs force missed tackles. This helps coaches see which players are the most reliable at tackling or avoiding tackles.

Tackle Probability is a feature within Next Gen Stats, the NFL’s player and ball tracking platform, which relies heavily on AWS to process an enormous amount of data collected from games. The platform gathers over 500 million data points each season, providing the NFL with advanced statistics that improve the viewing experience and aid gameplay decisions. This includes rule changes such as the new Dynamic Kickoff to minimize high-speed collisions and injuries during kickoffs by adjusting player positioning and movement. Digital Athlete is another tool developed using AWS to improve player safety. The tool simulates game and practice scenarios to help coaches and medical staff assess injury risks so they can develop prevention and recovery plans for each player. One could think of this as building a digital twin of players and then running them through various scenarios to better understand when and how injuries occur.

Teams can use that data to avoid those situations and keep the players on the field longer. Discover how the NFL leverages AWS to drive innovative fan, player, and employee experiences powered by cutting-edge generative AI services like Amazon SageMaker and Amazon Bedrock. Developed by the Next Gen Stats (NGS) team and Amazon Web Services (AWS), Tackle Probability paints a more complete picture of the art of the tackle than previously possible, from both an offensive and... A new tackle probability model aims to capture the entire process of tackling, from pursuit angles to missed attempts, providing a wealth of deeper and more granular insights for teams, broadcasters, and fans alike. Explore how the NFL is using AWS to develop a unified view of its 77 million active fans, enabling personalized experiences and real-time insights. Discover the composable, cloud-based ecosystem that empowers the league to rapidly operationalize fan intelligence across consumer touchpoints.

How The Nfl Uses Generative Ai From Aws To Streamline Media Asset

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