The PGA Tour is deepening its embrace of artificial intelligence through collaborations with Microsoft, Narrative Science, and WSC Sports. Those partnerships will help the Tour automate analytics, recaps, and videos.
Microsoft became the Tour’s official analytics partner in 2016. The technology giant will now use its cloud-based Azure computing platform to create the Content Relevancy Engine (CRE) that will sift through 80,000 hours of digital video and 20 years of data collected by the scoring system ShotLink. Each shot produces 22 data points, and the CRE automates the analysis of this wealth of information to recognize patterns and provide helpful context.
Narrative Science’s NLG platform, Quill, generates automatic AP-style recaps for each player on the course. This ensures coverage of every golfer, not just Tiger Woods and the leaders.
WSC Sports, which is gaining traction with leagues like the NBA and MLS, can create custom highlight reels within minutes, sparing hours of human labor. These packages can be personalized for each player or can follow certain themes such as eagle putts.
“The PGA Tour has been passionate about finding patterns and presenting its massive amounts of content in a more structured way for broadcast producers so they can spend more time doing what they do best: telling amazing stories,” said Mike Downey, a principal engineer at Microsoft, in a statement. “Through the Content Relevancy Engine, we’ve helped the Tour make content more accessible. Now instead of requesting manually-created, custom data feeds from the Tour, broadcasters can build their own. This solution will continue to learn patterns and get smarter over time.”
These three applications of artificial intelligence help the PGA Tour harness technology for a broader range of content and give it the ability to cover the unexpected.
“What’s really exciting here is that if you’re in a highlight production business, you decide what’s compelling for fans,” said Steve Evans, the Tour’s senior vice president of information systems, in a release. “The problem with that is being limited by not understanding context. For instance, if we’ve got a young player the general fan hasn’t heard of, and we’ve captured 50 video clips of that player throughout the course of the tournament, none of which would have probably merited a producer making the decision to say, hey, that’s a highlight clip.
“But let’s say that player wins the tournament in some exciting fashion and it gathers a lot of attention and people are now interested in learning more about that player. The fact that we’ve automated all of the video highlights makes us immediately able to share those and make them available to the fans. These nuggets are compelling to provide context to the shot that they’re seeing.”
SportTechie Takeaway
Golf tournaments are a series of discrete, disparate events. Fields of up to 156 golfers each take about 70 strokes; that’s more than 10,000 shots in a single round. Fans are beginning to demand more specific coverage of each golfer and more encompassing context of the overall event. AI is an efficient way to provide that content, especially since every shot can be easily parsed by computer algorithms.