Nfl And Amazon Partnership To Drive Ai Enhanced Football Experience

Bonisiwe Shabane

-Nov 18, 2025, 7:43 AM

nfl and amazon partnership to drive ai enhanced football experience

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.” The National Football League (NFL) has further cemented its alliance with Amazon Web Services (AWS), heralding a new era of technological innovation in the sport. Their recently expanded partnership promises to reshape the way football is experienced both on and off the field, leveraging AWS's cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning capabilities. As part of this enhanced collaboration, AWS will significantly bolster its role in supporting the NFL's operations through a range of advanced AI tools and data analytics services. The goal is to enrich the fan experience and provide teams with deeper insights into game strategies and player performance.

This initiative will see the integration of sophisticated predictive models that aim to offer real-time analyses and predictions, thereby transforming the traditional viewing experience. The partnership has led to Amazon introducing a new AI-powered feature for its Thursday Night Football broadcasts. This innovation will enable viewers to predict game plays and outcomes with unprecedented accuracy. By employing AWS's advanced algorithms, fans can now engage more deeply with the game, testing their predictions against real-time data and enhancing their overall enjoyment of the sport. The NFL’s partnership with AWS and the launch of new AI-driven features are set to revolutionise the football viewing , not only by elevating the viewing experience but also by enhancing team strategies and... AI’s impact on fan experience looks set to be further enhanced following the launch of a new startup founded by former NFL agent and Nike executive, Scott Bouska.

Using their proprietary AI prediction model, Field Vision aims to provide betting enthusiasts with cutting-edge tools to gain a competitive edge in their game predictions. ADDING MULTIMEDIA National Football League and Amazon Web Services Expand Partnership to Further Shape the Future of Football NFL Media Implements Generative AI Tools to Boost Operational Efficiency NEW YORK & SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--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... To view a video of Tackle Probability in action, please go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqvAiuC7d7U. 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.” Get the latest updates delivered to your inbox every day, and stay up-to-date for free 🧠📈 Get the latest updates delivered to your inbox every day, and stay up-to-date for free 🧠📈

The NFL and AWS expand their partnership to tackle more AI use cases - SiliconANGLE The NFL and AWS expand their partnership to tackle more AI use cases 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.

In addition to improving player safety, AWS is working with NFL Media to implement Amazon Q Business, an AI assistant that answers business and production-related questions. It acts like an automated helpdesk for common technical or operational inquiries. NFL Media also introduced an Amazon Bedrock-powered research tool that allows production teams to gather insights and footage from specific plays in the NFL's Next Gen Stats database using simple language prompts. The NFL believes these developments will boost productivity by automating routine tasks and speeding up research. Rather than spending time on repetitive activities, teams can focus on creating high-quality content across NFL Media's properties, such as the NFL Network, NFL Films, NFL.com, NFL+, the NFL app and social media channels. Many innovations, including Tackle Probability, are inspired by submissions from the AWS Big Data Bowl, created five years ago to develop new ways of using the NFL's Next Gen Stats.

The program creates an open platform for engineers, data scientists, students, and others without sports experience to get involved in football analytics. The competition has grown fourfold since its inception in 2019, with more than 230 submissions from 400 participants last year and participants from more than 75 countries in the half-decade that it has run. By democratizing access to data, the NFL and AWS can accelerate creativity and innovation. For the participants since the inception of the Big Data Bowl, more than 50 participants have landed jobs in professional sports analytics, with 30+ being hired by NFL teams or player-tracking vendors. Sports leagues have a wealth of data, much of which has gone untapped for decades. One of the challenges is finding experts who understand data and the respective sport to derive value.

Generative AI enables anyone, with or without a data sciences or sports background, to find new ways of leveraging that data to deliver operational value and create new fan experiences. Amazon says its football AI can predict blitzes 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. AI in sports transforms the NFL with over 500 million data points per season.

Learn how AI is revolutionizing America's favorite game and shaping its future. For 20 years, Paul struggled to balance his home life with fast-moving leadership roles at Dell, Amazon, and Microsoft, where he led a team of progressive HR, procurement, and legal trailblazers to launch Microsoft’s... Editor-in-Chief - ex Microsoft, Amazon, Dell In the high-stakes world of professional football, the NFL is leveraging AI in sports to tackle its most pressing challenges. Artificial intelligence is reshaping America's favorite game from player safety to fan engagement. And AI in sports is now revolutionizing everything about football: how the game is played, watched, analyzed, and managed.

Nfl And Amazon Partnership To Drive Ai Enhanced Football Experience

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