La Liga, Microsoft team for digital transformation
May 20, 2021
La Liga, Spain’s top-flight football league, and Microsoft are expanding their partnership focused on digitally transforming the sports experience globally. The companies will also collaborate on developing technology solutions to the media and entertainment industry through La Liga’s technology offering, LaLiga Tech.
As La Liga’s global Tech and Innovation Partner, Microsoft will help develop new and leverage existing solutions that will drive innovation across the sports industry including:
- For sports fans: Azure Event Hubs, Azure Data Lake, Azure Databricks and Azure Machine Learning will provide data-enhanced match coverage, personalised OTT streaming options such as camera angle selection in matches. La Liga will offer new experiences such as augmented reality, virtual reality and 3-D replays.
- For rights holders, broadcasters and commercial partners: Azure, Dynamics 365, Power BI, SQL Database and Azure Cosmos DB, Azure Machine learning will enable an enhanced OTT streaming platform that features personalised recommendations and enhanced experiences with relevant content, games and services.
- For venue managers: Power BI and Azure will streamline stadium operations through innovations in security, and leverage 5G for unified in-stadium experiences.
As part of the collaboration, La Liga will utilise Microsoft Azure, including AI and machine learning for its La LigaSportsTV OTT platform and Mediacoach (match stats and visualisation) platform, to reinvent interactive audiovisual experiences and formats.
“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,” said Javier Tebas, President of La Liga. “We are moving into a new era in which technology will become the centre of the fan experience and data insights will power the next stage of global growth.”
“We are thrilled to expand our partnership with La Liga as it makes further bold moves to deepen engagement with its hundreds of millions of fans, while bringing new business models to market with Microsoft cloud and AI capabilities,” declared Jean-Philippe Courtois, EVP and President Global Sales, Marketing & Operations, Microsoft Corp. “Microsoft is proud to help accelerate La Liga’s digital innovation and empower exciting new business opportunities in the sports and entertainment industries through La Liga’s technology portfolio.”
The collaboration is key to the growth and development of La Liga Tech, through which La Liga will package its full range of existing technologies into a commercial offering for the sports industry, from match-day stats and analytics to the next generation of OTT streaming services, to the most advanced content protection services and venue access management systems. This will help La Liga expand into a new era in sports and beyond and enhance the fan experience by creating new data-driven technology solutions, powered by Microsoft Azure, Power BI, Dynamics 365 and Microsoft 365, and provide customised technology platform, services and solutions to third parties.
The offerings build on La Liga’s rich history of investing and focusing on the development of innovative technology aimed at enhancing the fan experience, including a robust app ecosystem on top of Microsoft Azure services. La Liga’s family of official apps have had more than 113 million downloads globally. LaLigaSportsTV, which provides a free OTT video streaming platform for multiple sports beyond football, has had over 1.5 million registered users.
The solutions leverage a powerful data and AI to deliver personalized content based on fan preferences as well as games and video that engage casual and hardcore fans on match day and beyond.
In addition, La Liga utilises Microsoft Power BI dashboards to provide data visualisation for TV audience, fan360, social media, brand favourability and engagement, web and app performance per country, helping La Liga and its clubs create more engaging and tailored experiences.
With the enhanced partnership, La Liga and Microsoft will focus on co-innovation and cloud acceleration using Microsoft Azure and its AI capabilities. The collaboration will continue providing La Liga, through La Liga Tech assets, with new growth and business opportunities by leveraging the best innovations emerging across the sports market, entertainment companies and other commercial companies around the globe.