Earlier this week, IT services and consulting firm, Tech Mahindra announced plans to establish a sports cloud cloud platform in partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS).
In a chat with CNBC-TV18, Jagdish Mitra, Chief Strategy Officer and Head of Growth at
Tech Mahindra, said the cloud platform would have capabilities ranging from sports analytics to immersive experiences for sports fans via AR/VR experiences and metaverse gamificiation.
The company also said it had inked deals with top-rung sports teams like
Punjab Kings and US-based football team Jacksonville Jaguars, both of whom will use the platform for fan engagement, sports analytics and extending their digital capabilities.
"The collaboration will enable us to offer use cases related to content and community engagement, customer data management and audience segmentation, sports analytics, and deliver immersive stadium-to-home fan experiences by leveraging augmented reality, virtual reality and metaverse gamificiation," said Mitra.
CNBC-TV18 learns that Tech Mahindra's role in creating and delivering these immersive and personalised experiences, could concurrently create new revenue streams by adding services tailor-made to specific audience needs.
A large part of this, of course, rests on fan engagement. "The sports cloud platform will enable sports organisations to remote with fans remotely by offering common digital capabilities like video, data and insights, to accelerate their digital transformation journey," said Mitra, adding that the company would extend its expertise to other sports teams too.
The partnership comes amid a breakthrough era for sports viewing in India. With Jio Cinema's 'hype mode' taking viewers closer to the sporting action, and American streaming service Fubo TV hinting at a foray into India,
the sports-viewing market is slowly but surely seeing a marked shift that goes beyond run-of-the-mill sports broadcast.
Concurrently, the
Indian Premier League is seeing teams heighten their fan engagement experiences and get more interactive with fans even as fantasy leagues have also begun working on immersive experiences, all of which is expected to fuel the growth of the sports-tech sector. "We believe the cloud platform is positioned to disrupt the sports-tech industry and garner greater growth for organizations as well," said Mitra.
