Google Cloud and Major League Baseball (MLB) today announced an expanded, multi-year, strategic partnership to scale, modernize, and amplify MLB’s media products and properties, such as MLB.TV and other media platforms. MLB has chosen Google Cloud as its strategic cloud provider to accelerate its worldwide delivery efforts that will help yield even more real-time and personalized experiences for baseball fans around the globe.
With this partnership, MLB will utilize a full suite of Google Cloud products including Anthos, BigQuery, Cloud Armor, Looker and Google Cloud Media APIs, which are critical components for producing live and on-demand video workflows. Additionally, MLB will pilot Google Cloud’s Media CDN, a modern, extensible platform for delivering immersive experiences that leverages the same infrastructure that YouTube uses. Optimized for streaming video and large file download workloads, Media CDN will enable MLB.TV to deliver live action, commentary and archival content with scale, security, and performance at the forefront.
The expanded partnership will enable MLB to continue reaching baseball fans in new and more dynamic ways by focusing on the following areas:
“Google Cloud has been an outstanding partner to baseball, helping us innovate platforms that provide our fans with exceptional real-time experiences, from Statcast to Film Room,” said Commissioner of Baseball Robert D. Manfred, Jr. “With their leading expertise in everything from data analytics to machine learning, this partnership provides us with an unmatched extension of technological resources. Now we can continue collaborating with Google Cloud as a means of further delivering unparalleled digital experiences for our fans.”
“Major League Baseball has been a clear leader in digital media for decades, bringing unforgettable moments to homes, offices and fans across the world for the last 20 years,” said Thomas Kurian, CEO, Google Cloud. “We look forward to starting the next chapter of our partnership with the league to further advance its media offerings for years to come by using our data-driven capabilities, AI and ML, and secure global infrastructure.”
As the first professional sports league to live stream a complete regular season, MLB has since continued to invest over the last two decades in technology partnerships to improve fan experiences over the last two decades. Today’s announcement builds on MLB and Google Cloud’s 2020 partnership to upgrade its business processes and support next-level fan experiences with Google Cloud’s extensive data and analytics solutions. In the last three years, MLB has migrated its cloud and on-premise systems to Google Cloud and has leveraged Google’s industry-leading machine learning, analytics, application management, and data/video storage capabilities to increase reliability and manage governance at scale.
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