NBA uses Microsoft Azure to power new content that elevates fan engagement

A new era of basketball fandom

National Basketball Association (NBA) fans vary across different demographics and engage with the league on different levels. Some fans follow casually—perhaps just tracking a favorite team’s progress—while others immerse themselves in all things NBA-related, watching games daily, participating in fantasy leagues, and digging deep into the wide range of information available about the sport and its players. For the NBA, each of these fans is important, and the league strives to give all of them the fun, up-to-the-minute content that they seek.

And those fans consume a lot of content. Every day, up to 10 billion interactions take place between fans and the NBA across all its divisions and content delivery channels. Increasingly, the connection between the league and its fans is a digital one, and the NBA has been exploring ways that technology can provide an even richer experience for basketball aficionados through a comprehensive direct-to-consumer platform.

“We’re trying to recognize the changes in the way fans engage with the game,” says Ken DeGennaro, Senior Vice President, Media Operations & Technology at the National Basketball Association. “For many years, basketball games were very much a one-way presentation focused on television broadcasts. With digital media, it’s more of a bidirectional relationship where fans can engage directly with us and provide feedback simply by using the platform.”

That interaction now continues 24 hours a day, even when games aren’t on, through on-demand streaming, social media, and the web. The NBA wants to better understand that interaction, use the knowledge to customize content for fans based on explicit and implicit preferences, then serve up that content within a much different experience than what the league has offered traditionally.

A valuable partnership and a new mindset

The NBA knew that it needed the right technology partner to realize its direct-to-consumer vision. It chose Microsoft to fill that role. 

“Microsoft is a best-in-class company, not only for Azure and its many services, but also for the Microsoft ecosystem of vendors and partners,” says DeGennaro. “The NBA and Microsoft have a shared vision for an exciting direct-to-consumer experience—we bring the basketball knowledge and data, and Microsoft brings the technology products and deep technical expertise.”

The direct-to-consumer platform represents a subtle shift in mindset and strategy for the NBA. The NBA hopes that its new plans will strengthen the direct relationship with fans and increase levels of engagement across the board. One way to do this is through increased personalization of both content delivery and marketing efforts. 

“If a customer buys four shirts—an adult large, an adult medium, and two youth smalls—our marketing offer to them shouldn’t be two tickets to a Tuesday night game,” says DeGennaro. “Four tickets to a Saturday afternoon game would be more appropriate, given what we can infer about that customer having a family. We’ve talked about the Internet of Things for years, but now it’s all about the internet of behaviors.”

That same level of applied knowledge of fans’ activities and behaviors extends to personalizing content. For example, fans in different time zones around the world may not always be able to watch live games. By understanding a fan’s typical usage patterns, the NBA will be able to package up customized highlight reels of appropriate length and position them on the fan’s phone for consumption when they are able to watch. If a fan has shown a preference for just seeing the most exciting plays, the highlights can be filled with dunks and steals and the game’s most action-filled moments. Or the feed can be customized to show a particular set of broadcasters, different sets of graphics, or whatever is going to maximize that fan’s enjoyment and engagement.

It’s all about the optics

To help enhance the fan experience, the NBA has created NBA CourtOptix, an AI-driven data analysis system that uses spatial position information about players and the ball to derive meaningful insights into the action during a game. Regular NBA fans may already have seen it in use on the official NBA Twitter feed and in game broadcasts.

The NBA works with a partner that provides player tracking for every NBA game, where cameras track the movements of the players and the ball 25 times a second throughout the game, resulting in about 1.5 million spatial coordinates per game. The total player tracking equates to nearly 2 billion data points over the course of an NBA season.

The NBA relies on Microsoft Azure to make sense of that sea of numbers. “It takes cutting-edge, industry-leading cloud and AI tools to crunch that amount of data and turn it into actionable insights that a fan can understand, engage with, and enjoy,” says Charlie Rohlf, Associate Vice President, Stats Technology Product Development at the National Basketball Association. “We’ve always been sitting on a lot of data, but we needed Azure and AI to unlock its potential and find the interesting nuggets in those billions of data points.”

The NBA uses Azure Data Lake Storage, Azure Machine Learning, Azure Databricks, and open-source products Apache Airflow, MLflow, and Delta Lake as the building blocks of CourtOptix, along with Azure Functions, Azure Cosmos DB, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), and Azure Event Hubs. All the tracking data and data from a variety of other sources is consolidated in the cloud, while some historical records remain in an on-premises system running Microsoft SQL Server. The NBA development team has found Azure Databricks to be a particularly useful tool for employees with different skill sets.

“We do a lot of things right within Azure Databricks notebooks,” says Rohlf. “That’s one of the reasons we chose it. Notebooks provide us with a flexible way for SQL query experts, or Python and Scala developers, to all work in the same place. That’s a huge win from a workflow perspective.”

To make NBA CourtOptix an effective tool, the system needs to gain knowledge of the game of basketball through machine learning and modeling. Coaches and fans may know what a post-up, ball screen, or back cut is, but CourtOptix must be taught first. As it learns these concepts, the insights that it can deliver about the game become more sophisticated.

“Our process starts with finding a particular set of events during the game—like drives and dribbles and shots—then we time stamp them and combine them with the traditional box score and play-by-play information,” explains Rohlf. “Once we have that event list, we can build a warehouse of data as wide as we want, which a fan can filter to see only events of interest.”

All this sophisticated data manipulation came together surprisingly quickly. “I was really impressed with how fast we got up and running in Azure, especially because no one on our team had done any work with Azure before,” says Rohlf.

The NBA plans to narrow down its data based on individual fan preferences and serve those fans the content that matters most to them, furthering its ultimate goal of heightened fan engagement. “Down the road, we want to personalize these statistical insights so that fans can more easily get what they want,” says Rohlf. “If we know you like a particular team, we can recommend insights about that team more readily, without you needing to search for them. We’re also excited about what we can do with Azure in terms of visualizations. We hope to do more in that area to bring our player and game insights to a broader audience through the web and social media.”

Tailored experiences for every fan

With CourtOptix, the NBA hopes to better understand how fans consume its products, what interests them from a content standpoint, what devices they use, and other key metrics that will help the NBA properly tailor content for each fan.

Having its direct-to-consumer platform built on Azure opens up tremendous possibilities for the NBA to expand its offerings in the future. “With Azure, we can do all this data analysis and personalization at scale,” explains DeGennaro. “Our on-premises systems are physically capped—there’s a limit to what we can do without buying more hardware, and that’s not the business we want to be in. We now have the computing power to do more innovative things in real time, unencumbered by past technology hurdles. It’s like a data revolution.”

Being in Azure also provides a wide range of additional services that the NBA hopes to take advantage of, including Personalizer, an AI-driven cloud service that’s part of Azure Cognitive Services. “Using Personalizer, we will provide fans with the right story based on their behaviors and other information we know about them,” says DeGennaro. “We can change the layout of the application or of our websites to better cater to a fan’s particular preferences.”

Overall, the NBA has been pleased with the move to Azure, finding it very easy to bring together all the necessary pieces in an innovative way. Progress has been rapid, with the league completing development in weeks, furthering the NBA’s commitment to providing the most personalized and best fan experience.  

“There’s a lot of competition out there today for sports and entertainment,” says DeGennaro. “It’s important that we provide fans with experiences that keep them coming back and demonstrate that we really value the time they give us. If you’re going to spend time with the NBA, we’re going to make sure it’s the most frictionless, fun experience it can be. We want to make it very easy to be an NBA fan, and Microsoft is helping us do that.”

Find out more about the National Basketball Association on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Learn more about NBA CourtOptix.