Over the past few months, Microsoft has formed or expanded upon Azure-centric partnerships with various firms including Cruise, GM, Standard Chartered, PepsiCo, and more. Today, the tech giant has announced an expansion of its partnership with Spain"s premier football association LaLiga.
As part of this team-up, LaLiga will be leveraging Microsoft"s cloud platform, including Azure AI and ML for its LaLigaSportsTV OTT platform, as well as for its match statistics and visualization Mediacoach platform. The aim through this would be to offer viewers highly modernized interactive audiovisual experiences.
Javier Tebas, President of LaLiga, commented on this partnership, noting:
"We value Microsoft as our technology and innovation partner and appreciate how they collaborate deeply to build innovative solutions aimed at solving business challenges specific to our industry. We are moving into a new era in which technology will become the center of the fan experience and data insights will power the next stage of global growth."
Another major feature of this collaboration would be the utilization of LaLiga Tech - the federation"s technology offering - through the development of new tech solutions focused on innovating the media and entertainment industry. When it comes to fans of football, services like Azure Event Hubs, Azure Data Lake, Azure Databricks, and Azure Machine Learning will be advancing the match experience for them through personalized streaming options, as well as through new visual experiences in the form of AR, VR, and 3-D replays.
As far as the rights holders, broadcasters, and commercial partners are concerned, Dynamics 365, Power BI, SQL Database and Azure Cosmos DB, and Azure Machine learning will allow for an improved streaming platform with personalized recommendations. And finally, venue managers will be able to leverage Power BI and Azure to streamline stadium operations.
Notably, LaLiga"s app ecosystem already largely relies upon Microsoft"s Azure services, and the expansion of this partnership may be considered as just another major step on the road to digitizing the football experience for fans of the sport across the globe.