Games/Interactive

IBM today announced it is launching IBM Watson Media, a new suite of AI-powered solutions on the IBM Cloud that analyze images, video, language, sentiment and tone, at the US Open. By combining IBM Watson with IBM’s video capabilities, the United States Tennis Association (USTA) will be able to rapidly share highlight videos of more matches while engaging and informing fans more than ever before.

The US Open will use one of the first solutions available through IBM Watson Media called Cognitive Highlights. Developed at IBM Research with IBM iX, Cognitive Highlights can identify the match’s most important moments by analyzing the statistical tennis data, sounds from the crowd and the reactions of a player using both action and facial expression recognition. The system then ranks the shots from seven US Open courts and auto-curates the highlights, which simplifies the video production process and ultimately positions the USTA team to scale and accelerate the creation of cognitive highlight packages.

The finished highlight videos will be available in four ways:

-Each day, the USTA will post a Highlight of the Day, as ranked by Watson, on its Facebook page.
-Fans that “favorite” players on the US Open apps will receive real-time push notification alerts about those players’ highlights. Fans on iOS 10 can play the highlights within the lock screen.
-On the player bio page, video highlights will be available across all of the USTA’s digital platforms.
-Onsite in the player’s lounge and in the fan-facing IBM Watson Experience on the plaza near Court 9.

“The US Open is packed with so much action across so many courts that even the fastest video team is challenged to keep pace with what’s happening,” said Noah Syken, IBM VP of Sports & Entertainment Partnerships. “To meet that challenge, Watson is now watching the matches alongside the USTA to help bring fans closer to the best moments across the courts shortly after they happen. We’re seeing this technology come to life through tennis, but the entire IBM Watson Media portfolio has the potential to impact many industries.”

Leading up to the US Open, IBM’s cognitive highlights technology was tested as a proof of concept at this year’s Masters Tournament, and also was served as part of the content production system at Wimbledon. The successful results and positive reception at both events led to the technology being integrated into the new soon to be commercially available solutions from IBM Watson Media.