Sports Business Report: Championship Point

The gates to the All England Club are set to open next week to host the oldest tennis tournament in the world. Although Wimbledon holds strong to tradition on the court, such as wearing all white clothing and playing on grass, they are starting to serve up the technology off the court.

While IBM sponsorship's are limited to the Masters, the U.S. Open golf tournament and the four tennis grand slam events, they have long since used these relationships as a platform to demonstrate its technology expertise. In fact, the grand slam championship websites are branded as being "powered by IBM" and are quite impressive with respect to fan engagement.

This year they will be testing a machine learning-based highlight system, or commonly known as artificial intelligence, that automatically cuts and edits video clips based on crowd noise, player gestures, lead changes, broadcaster inflections and other cues. The company experimented with this technology earlier this year at the Masters.

Based on IBM's Watson technology, a voice-activated digital assistant called "Fred" will also help those attending Wimbledon find their way around. Visitors can ask Fred for directions to the nearest strawberry stand, how to buy a Wimbledon towel or who is playing right now on Centre Court.

IBM technology will also help fans find matches that are likely to be the most exciting to watch by analyzing player statistics. Using cognitive data analytics, IBM and AELTC have jointly developed a new metric called competitive margin , which is the differential between the opposing players' ratios of forced to unforced errors. If there is little margin between them, the match is likely to be a close-fought contest.

Seems like IBM is serving up a championship point.

Sources:

http://www.wimbledon.com/index.html

http://www.sportsbusinessdaily.com/Journal/Issues/2017/06/26/In-Depth/Main.aspx

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/tennis/2017/06/27/wimbledon-using-artificial-intelligence-enrich-fan-experience/

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-27/wimbledon-to-use-ibm-s-watson-ai-for-highlights-analytics-helping-fans