La Liga – Microsoft Partnership: LaLiga, Spain’s premier football association, and Microsoft Corp. on Wednesday announced an expansion of their partnership focused on digitally transforming the sports experience globally. Under the new agreement, Microsoft, which first became a LaLiga partner in 2016, steps up to become a Global Partner. The focus of the new deal will be building innovative technology solutions for the sports industry to enhance the fan engagement experience with data-enhanced match coverage, next-generation over the top (OTT) streaming services, advanced content protection services and venue management systems.
The collaboration is seen by the league as key to the growth and development of LaLiga Tech, through which LaLiga will package its full range of existing technologies into a commercial offering for the sports industry. Technologies included will range from match-day stats and analytics to the next generation of OTT streaming services, to content protection services and venue access management systems.
La Liga – Microsoft Partnership – What will it do? As LaLiga’s global Tech and Innovation Partner, Microsoft will help develop new and leverage existing solutions that will drive innovation across the sports industry including:
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For sports fans: Azure Event Hubs, Azure Data Lake, Azure Databricks and Azure Machine Learning will provide data-enhanced match coverage, personalized OTT streaming options such as camera angle selection in matches. LaLiga will offer new experiences such as augmented reality, virtual reality and 3-D replays.
For rights holders, broadcasters and commercial partners: Azure, Dynamics 365, Power BI, SQL Database and Azure Cosmos DB, Azure Machine learning will enable an enhanced OTT streaming platform that features personalized recommendations and enhanced experiences with relevant content, games and services.
For venue managers: Power BI and Azure will streamline stadium operations through innovations in security, and leverage 5G for unified in-stadium experiences.
The new agreement with the US-based technology giant comes less than a week after the league announced an 8 year US broadcast rights deal with Disney ESPN reported to be worth $175m per season
Javier Tebas, president of LaLiga, commented: “We are moving into a new era in which technology will become the centre of the fan experience and data insights will power the next stage of global growth.”
LaLiga first announced an association with Microsoft in November 2016, when the company became Official Technology Partner of LaLiga.
“We are thrilled to expand our partnership with LaLiga as it makes further bold moves to deepen engagement with its hundreds of millions of fans, while bringing new business models to market with Microsoft cloud and AI capabilities,” said Jean-Phillipe Courtois, executive vice president and president global sales, marketing and operations at Microsoft Corp.
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In becoming a Global Partner, Microsoft joins bank Santander, sportwear firm Puma, beer brand Budweiser, Livescore and BKT in the top tier of LaLiga’s portfolio
La Liga – Microsoft Partnership: With the enhanced partnership, LaLiga and Microsoft will focus on co-innovation and cloud acceleration using Microsoft Azure and its AI capabilities. The collaboration will continue providing LaLiga, through LaLiga Tech assets, with new growth and business opportunities by leveraging the best innovations emerging across the sports market, entertainment companies and other commercial companies around the globe.
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