Wimbledon Aces Digital Experience for Fans Around the World

Share this post:

For two weeks every year, the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club transforms from a private tennis club in a leafy London suburb to the host of one of the most prestigious sporting events in the world: the Wimbledon Tennis Championships.

Since 1990, IBM has been the Official Supplier of Information Technology and consultant to the All England Lawn Tennis Club. We are proud that it is our technology and expertise that helps Wimbledon in its pursuit of greatness.

We work with Wimbledon to design and power digital platforms that deliver millions of data points captured and analyzed to provide real-time insights to fans, players, coaches and broadcast commentators.

We’re also applying cognitive solutions to understand, reason and learn across multiple social channels. Data and design come together to deliver engaging experiences, all hosted on the IBM Cloud.

Almost half a million tennis fans will attend matches in the grounds of Wimbledon over the next fortnight beginning today through July 10. Another 71 million visits follow the action on www.wimbledon.com.

A new app for Apple TV will enable fans to follow The Championships at home. They can browse scores, watch the Live @ Wimbledon studio show, listen to three live radio channels, and check out the web site’s video and photo content.

Mobile fans can rely on new Wimbledon smartphone apps for iOS and Android, responsive to all screen sizes, to provide personalized feeds that will help them stay engaged at home and on the move. The new apps also provide an enhanced experience for visitors on-site at Wimbledon. Apps are available for downloading from the Apple Store.

A new Cognitive Command Center uses IBM Watson and hybrid cloud technologies to ingest feeds across multiple social media channels to automatically understand, reason and learn the most relevant and emerging topics of conversation related to Wimbledon, as well as other major sporting events, providing those insights to the digital editorial team.

By identifying common topics of interest, IBM can help the All England Lawn Tennis Club identify opportunities to better serve relevant articles, posts and images to fans.

For example, the Cognitive Command Center could identify emerging conversations about a soccer game at the same time as a tennis player from that country is playing. Using these insights, Wimbledon will be able to make rapid content decisions to engage and inform sports fans during a summer filled with several major sporting events.

During The Championships, IBM typically captures 3.2 million data points from 19 courts over 13 days with an accuracy target of 100 percent and a sub-second response time. It does this by using highly trained tennis analysts and transforms that data in near real time to provide insights to commentators and media helping to bring The Championships to life for TV fans globally.

In a matter of seconds this information is available on TV, social channels and millions of digital devices around the world to deliver a fan experience that supports the club’s digital vision of cementing digital as the gateway to its brand.

SlamTracker, which has been extended to the mobile web, allows Wimbledon fans to go beyond scores to analyze real time and historical player, match and tournament data based upon more than 41 million data points. SlamTracker also enables fans to share insights on their social media accounts with the push of a button.

Best of all, the solutions that IBM uses to improve the fan, player and media experience at Wimbledon aren’t limited to the action on the courts. They are the same technologies and solutions that IBM uses to transform industries and professions all over the world.