Wimbledon Deploys IBM Watson to increase Viewers & Social Engagement

IBM has unleashed the famed Watson supercomputer on the world of Tennis and it could be the start of a digital revolution in how people experience sport. Watson, which is named after IBM’s first CEO started out as a computer capable of answering questions posed in conversational tone.

The supercomputer was initially aimed at the American TV show Jeopardy to show off and even won in 2011 beating former winners. Now Watson is turning its attention to human interaction at sporting events. At this year’s Wimbledon it will be testing a range of new features.

The first of its trials will be linking a number of cameras facing audiences to the ‘machine learning’ platform. The hope is that it will be able to study the hundreds of different emotions fast. This will be done to work out who the fans are supporting based on their facial expressions and reactions.

This is still pending awaiting approval over obvious privacy issues, but it would be the first sign of Watson computing more than just words. This push for more data in sports is an answer to the growth of the audiences for it. Most of all the consumption of content and consumerism moving on to digital platforms.

Social Media Driven By IBM Watson

Watson will also turn his attention to Social Media. The machine will use its conversational understanding skills to pick up on Tweets and Facebook posts on Tennis.

“During last year’s final we were analysing about 400 tweets a second,” says IBM’s Sam Seddon. “Expand that out into Facebook, Instagram and more long-form content, and that’s a lot of data. We can come up with insights much faster than humans can and inform the media team so they can decide what kind of content they should be offering.”

Social Media is becoming vital for Wimbledon to engage especially with the battle that will have to take place against Euro 2016. Wimbledon enjoyed 71 million visits to their website last year but faces a struggle to get them to stay and view media on their platforms.

Big Data set to offer Better Match Insights

Even more than Social Media, Watson will also be utilised to gather Data on a large scale. 3.2m pieces of data from 19 courts to be exact.

It will look at a variety of attributes of Data such as serving speeds, live scores as well as backhand winners for instance. Watson will be able to convert that into app related content faster than any human could. You can imagine it being used in virtually any sport and competitions.

Imagine the Olympic games where multiple events happen at the same time.  As a result, Tennis fans will still be able to get any information he or she could possibly wish to. Though the only stumbling block on that scale may be cost. This is with the Olympics becoming more and more expensive to host, and Brazil in turmoil this year.

Tennis seems a good place to start this venture though as it already prides itself on being up to date with technology. Players are using sensors in their racquets and wristbands to monitor aspects of a match. Ironically however, despite Wimbledon’s partnership with IBM the tournament venues actually contains no Wi-Fi!

The archaic All English Tennis Club refuses to get the internet access despite most modern sports venues now offering it. Consequently, this is surely shooting themselves in the foot if they hope to get people engaged on apps and websites.

So whilst you enjoy the strawberries and Tennis in an English summer (which will no doubt contain rain); don’t forget that at Wimbledon this year they are forging the future of spectatorship. We can look forward to having all the data we could ever desire, at the touch of a finger. Who wants to watch the Tennis anyway.