MLB Re-Ups Partnership With Google Cloud for Continued Innovation

Google Cloud and Major League Baseball (MLB) have 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.

“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,” says 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.”

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:

• Enhanced Video Experiences: In the streaming era, direct-to consumer digital media experiences continue to grow in popularity as more audiences primarily consume content online. MLB’s decision to expand its partnership with Google Cloud will enable the creation of even more innovative and engaging content for the league’s media products, including MLB.TV. MLB will leverage Google Cloud’s global infrastructure and solutions such as Media CDN and Media APIs to drive this innovation.
• Media Supply Chain Agility: Expected to be powered in large part by Google Cloud, MLB’s media supply chain will enable the flexible creation, management and distribution of content. This will help MLB stream content at faster speeds, with minimal latency and provide seamless packaging of content for consumers. It will alsobe able to securely deliver video experiences to a multitude of end points around the world.
• Personalized Fan Experiences: Leveraging Google Cloud’s extensive expertise in data, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML), MLB will gain real-time insights to continue improving the fan viewing experience. For example, MLB will be able to continue organizing and tagging its vast historical collection of baseball footage in the Major League Baseball Film & Video Archive, which will allow archivists a more seamless process and keep making it easier for fans to search and view highlights from the past on platforms like MLB Film Room. MLB will also be able to provide more personalized viewing experiences and recommendations based on Google Cloud’s AI models.

“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,” says 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 machine learning, analytics, application management, and data/video storage capabilities to increase reliability and manage governance at scale.