🔊 How AWS Is Shaping The Future Of The NFL

📰 TOP STORY
Here’s The Rundown On The AWS & NFL Partnership

• This week, the NFL and Amazon Web Services, an Amazon.com company, extended their long-term partnership. Since 2017, AWS has been powering and pioneering technology in the NFL to enhance the overall fan experience and bring innovative methods to teams across the league. One of the newest offerings is called Tackle Probability, a new AI-powered model that changes how we understand and analyze tackles in football. The partnership extension will also build upon several previous innovations including:

• Next Gen Stats: Next Gen Stats are used by the league, broadcasters, partners, teams, coaches, scouts, and players. The NFL leverages AWS to help manage the scale, speed, and complexity of the enormous data set. The NFL also uses AWS’s machine learning capabilities to turn the tracking data into advanced statistics that help contextualize the action on the field.

• Digital Athlete: This cutting-edge injury recognition and analytics tool provides a complete view of an NFL player’s experience, using video and data from training, practice, and in-game action. AWS technology runs millions of simulations of specific in-game and practice scenarios to identify which players are at risk of injury, enabling coaches and training staff to develop individualized injury prevention, training, and recovery regimens.

• NFL Big Data Bowl: The NFL annually hosts the Big Data Bowl powered by AWS, a crowd-sourced competition that challenges applicants to use data and technology to create new insights and make the game more exciting for fans.

• Unified View of the Fan: The NFL has developed a platform on AWS that combines data from multiple sources to create a comprehensive view of fans. The league can get deeper insights into fan behavior, preferences, and engagement levels, enabling more personalized and tailored experiences.

• NFL Schedule: The NFL uses AWS to power its schedule-making process, running high-performance computing workloads to find the best possible schedule each year from a quadrillion possible combinations.

• NFL Films and NFL Media: The NFL uses AWS for NFL Films’ digital archive, ensuring that the league’s invaluable content is preserved and accessible for generations to come. AWS also provides the cloud infrastructure for NFL+, enabling the NFL to strengthen its direct relationship with fans and provide greater access to football content.

💰 MONEY MOVES 
Fastbreak.AI Makes A Major Acquisition

• Fastbreak.ai Acquires Optimal Planning Solutions. Fastbreak.ai, a sports technology company specializing in AI-driven scheduling and sports logistics announced the acquisition of Optimal Planning Solutions, a global leader in optimization-based scheduling solutions for the sports industry. This acquisition will enhance Fastbreak.ai's platform capabilities and help solidify its position as the world leader and premier provider of advanced scheduling technology to sports leagues (more here).

• Oura Acquires Metabolic Health Startup Veri. OURA, the maker of Oura Ring, the smart ring that delivers personalized health data, insights, and daily guidance, announced its agreement to acquire Veri, a personalized metabolic health company that guides users to the right foods and habits for their bodies through an app-enabled by continuous glucose monitors. Most of Veri’s team, including its three founders, will join ŌURA as employees (more here).

• LeagueSpot Acquires Mission Control. LeagueSpot, the premier platform for managing competitive gaming competitions announced the acquisition of Mission Control, a leader in recreational youth and community esports league management. Through this acquisition, LeagueSpot now expands beyond competitive gaming into traditional sports, positioning the company to capitalize on the rapidly growing $15.3B youth sports market in the US (more here).

• Players 1st Raises €1.3M. Golf platform company Players 1st has raised €1.3M in funding from Scale Capital. The Danish software company has developed a digital platform used by 2,000 golf clubs globally. Their core product is a questionnaire that helps the clubs learn about their members' experiences and where the members think the clubs can improve (more here).

• Nazara Technologies Acquires 15.86% Stake In Esports Firm Stan for $2.2M. Nazara Technologies, an Indian-based gaming and media company, announced its acquisition of a 15.86% stake in esports community platform Stan for Rs 18.4 crore ($2.2M) in cash. Stan, co-founded by Parth Chadha, Nauman Mulla, and Rahul Singh, is an esports fan engagement platform that allows gamers to connect with and support content creators through various tools. As of July 2024, the platform has amassed more than 12M users, with over 80% of them acquired through organic and referral-based channels. The platform currently boasts more than 500,000 paying users (more here).

 🤝 PARTNERSHIPS
Kendrick Perkins’ NIL Platform NILLY Partners With Harlan Capital Partners

• NILLY Announces Strategic Partnership with Harlan Capital Partners. NILLY, a financial technology platform co-founded by NBA champion Kendrick Perkins to enable, empower, and enrich student-athletes in the NIL era announced a strategic partnership with Harlan Capital Partners, a leader in specialized private credit investments. The collaboration earmarks up to $200M to be advanced to current college athletes and will allow NILLY to develop further and enhance the first-of-its-kind platform (more here).

• Arsenal & NTT DATA Announce Official Partnership. NTT DATA, a global digital business, and IT services leader, announced a multi-year partnership with Arsenal to become the club’s official digital transformation partner. The two organizations will work together over the coming years to strengthen the club’s connection with supporters worldwide, and NTT DATA will bring new technologies to improve the Arsenal experience (more here).

• Orlando Magic & LEAD Announce Partnership. The NBA’s Orlando Magic is extending its foray into the venture capital world. The team owned by the DeVos family is joining the LEAD fund as a venture partner, the second major US team to join the sports and health-tech-focused investment firm (more here).

• Infinite Reality & Google Cloud Ink 5-Year Partnership. Infinite Reality, a company driving the next generation of digital media and e-commerce through AI, spatial computing, and extended reality, announced a five-year partnership with Google Cloud to provide brands solutions to harness 3D and AI to enhance engagement across various sectors, including e-commerce, sports and entertainment, education and customer care (more here).

• Monumental Sports & Entertainment Announces Partnership With TikTok. The partnership includes the Capitals’ road jersey, the entitlement of the Capitals’ 50th Anniversary Celebration, in-arena branding, and unique programming elements specific to the Capitals, NBA’s Washington Wizards, WNBA’s Washington Mystics, NBA G-League’s Capital City Go-Go and NBA2K’s Wizards District Gaming. It will also extend season-long across MSE’s NHL, NBA, WNBA, G-League, and NBA2K properties and media entities, inclusive of Monumental Sports Network, through the conclusion of the 2026-27 season (more here).

🔊 ATHLETES & OTHER SPORTS NEWS
Former NBA Player Is Buying Into The Team He Once Played For

• Junior Bridgeman Is Buying A Stake In Milwaukee Bucks In A Deal That Values Team At $4B. Former NBA player Junior Bridgeman is set to buy a 10% stake in the Milwaukee Bucks, three sources familiar with the deal said. Bridgeman, long-time fast-food franchiser and current owner of Ebony and Jet Magazines, is getting a preferred limited partner discount to buy a portion of the team that he played for from 1975 to 1984 (more here).

• Tennis Channel Launches Real-Time, AI-Generated, English-to-Spanish Dubbing in Spain. For the first time in tennis, Tennis Channel’s viewers in Spain can watch live matches with the original English commentary dubbed into Spanish in real time through a new AI-driven feature (more here).

• Chase Griffin’s New NIL Venture. According to US Dept. of Education figures, UCLA topped all Big Ten schools by receiving $692M in donations from 2022-23. But that zeal for lavishing cash did not carry over to the school’s athletic department, which ranked fourth from the bottom of the conference with just $16M in donations over the same period. Like a quarterback calling an audible, Chase Griffin wants to change those financial fortunes for his Bruins teammates with his newly launched 1919 Players Fund (more here).

• Introducing 2024 Companies For The Techstars Sports Accelerator Powered By Indy. This year’s class comes to us from six countries including the US, Canada, England, Scotland, Israel & Norway. The class consists of an even balance of B2B (5) & B2C (5) companies. The founders from these 10 startups will participate in a 13-week mentorship-driven accelerator program, culminating with a Demo Day/One Zero Sports Summit from December 12-14th in Indianapolis, where they will showcase their progress in front of hundreds of strategic operators and investors in the sports tech space from around the world (more here).

• NBA Launchpad Opens For New Submissions. NBA Launchpad, the league’s initiative to source, evaluate, and pilot emerging technologies that advance the NBA’s top basketball and business priorities, is seeking submissions for its fourth cohort. The program, which matches startups with relevant NBA departments for incubation and pilots, is split between the needs of basketball performance and the business side. The three related priorities to on-court performance are the Future of Officiating, Youth Basketball, and Player Health & Wellbeing. The three business-related categories are the Future of Media, Fan Connection, and NBA Impact, the latter of which is its emphasis on sustainability (more here).

💬 INTERVIEWS
Meet The Founders & Innovators Building The Future Of Sports

• How Vestible Is Building A Revolutionary Athlete Investment Platform. Fandom looks different for every fan. Some fans buy merchandise. Other fans buy season tickets. But every fan would more than likely want to buy shares in their favorite players. Vestible is making this possible. Founded by Parker Graham and Yves Batoba, two former student-athletes, and teammates at Oklahoma State University, they’re paving the way for an innovative form of fandom that lets fans make money when athletes do well. In this interview, we talk about the challenges of launching and growing Vestible, how the platform works from a high level, and why they feel they can pull this off long-term (more here).

• How Tenni Is Becoming The Ultimate Tennis Companion App. Sports is all about community. But how can you build community within a solo sport? That's what Tenni aims to solve within tennis. Founder Mark Pesahovich struggled to find quality tennis partners after relocating several times. After realizing how many other people had the same problem, he started to build a solution. Tenni is now the only tennis companion app designed with a diverse community truly at the core. They've been building in stealth for months and now they're ready to bring it to tennis players across the world. In this interview we discuss some of the struggles of launching a product, why community is important when building a company, and when you should bootstrap versus raising capital (more here).