Case Study: MLB Advanced Media achieves real-time player tracking and scalable big-data analytics with Amazon Web Services

Major League Baseball Fields Big Data, and Excitement, with AWS

MLB Advanced Media (MLBAM), the digital arm of Major League Baseball, needed a way to capture and analyze every play in real time across 30 ballparks without investing in costly, idle stadium hardware. The challenge was to ingest high-frequency radar and stereoscopic imaging feeds, process massive seasonal volumes (about 17+ petabytes), produce analytics in seconds for broadcasts and apps, and scale down during the off season.

MLBAM built the Player Tracking System (Statcast) on AWS—using services such as EC2, S3, Lambda, DynamoDB, ElastiCache, CloudFront, and Direct Connect—to aggregate stadium data, run millisecond analytics, and deliver metrics and video to broadcasters and apps within about 12 seconds. The result is richer, real-time insights for fans, broadcasters, and teams (illustrated by play-level revelations like the Panik–Hosmer play), with on-demand scalability and the ability to power new engagement and coaching tools.

MLB Advanced Media

Joe Inzerillo

Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer