With the Stanley Cup Playoffs just weeks away, the National Hockey League (NHL) invited a band of reporters to its Manhattan offices, in the shadow of Madison Square Garden, early this week for a behind the scenes discussion of its technology partnership with solutions provider Presidio.
Centralizing data can be crucial for live broadcasts, fan apps, and other needs. Presidio worked with the NHL to establish the league's Virtual Technical Operations Center (VTOC) to provide a platform for visualizing the performance of live broadcasts of games. The company also helped streamline the complexity of draft night, when teams pick eligible prospects.
It is becoming more and more common for professional sports leagues, from teams in the NFL to Formula One racing teams to the tennis championships at the US Open, to explore technology to enhance fan experience and engagement through broadcasts, apps, and online resources, as well as provide teams and athletes with information to elevate their competitive performance.
David Lehanski, executive vice president of business development and innovation with the NHL, spoke to reporters to lay out some of the transformation ambitions the league has pursued with technology partners that include AWS, Apple, SAP, Verizon, and ServiceNow. "Now Presidio is part of that group," he said. "We're constantly building a pipeline of initiatives and use cases that we know we want to pursue as a league, built around new technology solutions that ultimately are going to help us grow the game from a fan standpoint, from a revenue standpoint, and otherwise."
After vetting potential tech partners, the league typically follows with a pilot, Lehanski said, to see if the vendor is a fit for collaboration.
"We have made a lot of investments in the development of a strategy to obviously, ultimately grow the game, expand our audience, drive more engagement from existing fans," he said. "A big part for how we're going to do that is for the creation of new content experiences that have never existed before across multiple formats."
