NBA and Microsoft Partner On AI-Powered Entertainment App

Digital transformation varies by sports league. For Chinese professional baseball, it means robots celebrating home runs in fanless stadiums. For the NBA, it means partnering with Microsoft to launch a direct-to-consumer streaming service.

At this point, the partnership revealed yesterday seems pretty open-ended. But the two companies emphasized the use of AI and machine learning to create a “personalized” fan experience, which could allow fans to toggle between different broadcasts, viewing angles, or post-production features. The app will also presumably let users pull data on players and teams they follow.

As tech analyst Ben Thompson notes, the NBA is effectively a media company. The new partnership gives the league more control of distribution, but that doesn’t mean it’s cutting out the linear TV middleman.

• “I think if we do our jobs right, we’re a complement to whoever our broadcaster is, because they have the same interest we do in increasing engagement,” NBA Commissioner Adam Silver told Thompson.

Zoom out: Microsoft may be the NBA’s official AI and cloud partner on fan engagement, but the NFL is working with AWS.