IBM Creates ‘My Group’ Digital Offering for Personalized Watching of the 2020 Masters Tournament

IBM and the Masters Tournament, of which IBM is an exclusive digital partner, unveiled My Group, a digital feature enabling new levels of fan engagement and viewing for the 2020 Masters Tournament. The new feature allowed patrons, anywhere in the world, to create personalized groups of players, and watch every shot, on every hole, from all of their favorite golfers from the 2020 Masters Tournament. My Group, which runs on IBM Cloud with Red Hat OpenShift, was available globally in the Masters Tournament app and on Masters.com.

My Group with Watson on the IBM Cloud

This marked the first time ever in professional golf that patrons were able to create customized “feature groups” of golfers in the app, and access video of every shot by those players throughout the Tournament. With more than 90 golfers from dozens of countries around the world competing in the 2020 Masters, My Group offered a personalized video feed, giving patrons access to every player’s rounds in near real time. My Group also featured highlights and regular updates from the Tournament leaders, and must-see shots from other golfers, as they happened. As part of My Group’s customized viewing experiences, IBM leveraged Watson’s artificial intelligence (AI) to curate highlights of exciting play. My Group is one of the first applications of Watson to bring customized viewing experiences to millions of people, globally.

The technology being used for the Tournament this year built on IBM’s Watson-powered solutions developed for previous Masters, which have analyzed data including traditional golf statistics, ball tracking data, crowd noise and more. During the 2019 Tournament, nearly 20,000 individual video clips of players’ shots were captured and analyzed by Watson. This year, new AI models were developed using data from last year’s Tournament. The data included the excitement ranking of shots and other data points like player ID, round, hole, score, and tracking stats such as shot length. In total, 16 distinct models were trained to provide personalized and important content of popular players and top performers for My Group users.

For patrons familiar with the Tournament, the “Masters roar” is an iconic indicator of an important shot. Without patrons onsite this year, broadcasters and digital content teams would face a new challenge: quickly and accurately identifying the most important shots. Using IBM Watson Studio and its AutoAI and machine learning capabilities, data from those past shots served as a baseline for Watson to generate a hypothetical patron excitement score to identify this year’s “must-see shots.” These excitement rankings models were used to automatically determine which live shots, of similar situations in past videos, a viewer is presented to watch as highlights in their My Group channel. This information went on to power the new My Group feature as well as editorial content, including “Round in 3 Minutes” video summaries, and more on the Masters app and Masters.com.

For the first time, IBM powered the 2020 Masters using a hybrid cloud approach enabled by Red Hat OpenShift, an enterprise Kubernetes platform, with on-premises data and workloads running on multiple public and private clouds operating seamlessly. In previous years, many workloads were already operating in the cloud, but some, including publishing, scoring and staging for the Tournament remained on-premises for latency reasons. In reaction to the pandemic, which necessitated more data and workloads being housed in the cloud to boost efficiency, IBM worked closely with the Masters Tournament to pivot those workloads to IBM public cloud, and used a hybrid cloud architecture to bring them together. The flexibility and hyper-scalability of Red Hat OpenShift, built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, enables both the larger Tournament technology and features like My Group to exist on a consistent foundation across IT environments.

“The digital experience of sports has never been more important than it is right now,” said Rob Thomas, Senior Vice President, IBM Cloud and Data Platforms. “We’re proud to put the power of IBM’s hybrid cloud and AI technologies on display through the My Group feature on the Masters app and website. And we are honored to enable millions of Masters patrons around the world to enjoy the storied tradition of this magical Tournament.”