New Zealand Rugby Selects AWS-Powered Analytics for Deeper Game Insights
Kiwi startup Intela AI and data science company DOT loves data join forces to develop “Play in the Grey” analytics
platform on AWS to improve team performance
WELLINGTON, New Zealand – 4 December 2019 – Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company, today announced that
New Zealand Rugby (NZR) has selected the Play in the Grey analytics platform running on AWS to gain deeper insights into
game play in order to improve team performance. Amazon Partner Network Partner Intela AI and data science company DOT
loves data partnered to develop the Play in the Grey interactive platform on AWS.
Created with NZR in September 2019, Play in the Grey helps coaches gain insights from game footage to inform their
strategies and scout for new talent. By automating the delivery of near real-time analytics from gameplay video, the
platform provides coaches with accurate game analysis which is free of subjective interpretation. Powered by Amazon
Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Play in the Grey applies machine
vision and machine learning algorithms to generate over one million data points about players and event patterns for
every minute of video footage. Intela created the machine vision algorithms to capture location data from the video
footage, and DOT loves data used statistical modelling to turn the raw data into scalable and repeatable insights for
NZR to explore. By analysing this data, which includes details such as player locations, speeds, proximity, and running
paths, coaches gain new insights that help teams gain competitive advantages. For example, if a team liked to shift the
ball to the edges from set piece, push it infield, then kick to the corners, the coaches could devise strategies to
counter this.
Jason Healy, Performance Analysis Manager High Performance for NZR, said, “Play in the Grey’s capabilities are unlike
anything our teams in black have used before. With precise location data for all players throughout an entire game, our
coaching team can devise attacking and defensive strategies based on data driven insights.”
Paul Migliorini, Managing Director for AWS in Australia and New Zealand, said, “The cloud is changing the pace at which
organisations can access, and then use insights to innovate. New Zealand Rugby is benefitting from Intela AI and DOT
loves data using AWS technology to deliver meaningful insights to help athletes and teams perform better.”
Asa Cox, CEO at Intela AI, said, “We benefit from Play in the Grey running on AWS because the platform can easily scale
up and down to meet demand at any given time, helping us to minimize our operational costs and meet the timelines teams
need for the data to have impact. As we look to take our platform global and into other sports like football (known as
soccer in the U.S.), we plan to adopt more AWS services to support our effort to accelerate innovation through the use
of big data, streaming data, and the Internet of Things.”
About Amazon Web Services
About Amazon Web Services For 13 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted
cloud platform. AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics,
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and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 69 Availability
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enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower
costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com.
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