NASCAR Selects AWS as Its Preferred Cloud Computing, Cloud Machine Learning, and Cloud Artificial Intelligence Provider

Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ:
AMZN), announced that National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing
(NASCAR) has chosen AWS as its standard for cloud-based machine learning
and artificial intelligence workloads. NASCAR will use the breadth and
depth of AWS technologies to build cloud-based services and automate
processes, including a new video series on NASCAR.com called This
Moment in NASCAR History powered by AWS. The video series will debut
heading into the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series™ race at Michigan
International Speedway, sharing the greatest historical moments in
NASCAR racing with viewers. NASCAR is migrating its 18-petabyte video
archive to AWS, and will leverage Amazon Rekognition—an AWS service that
adds intelligent image and video analysis to applications—to
automatically tag specific video frames with metadata, such as driver,
car, race, lap, time, and sponsors so they can easily search those tags
to surface the most iconic moments from past races. By using AWS’s
services, NASCAR expects to save thousands of hours of manual search
time each year, and will be able to easily surface flashbacks like Dale
Earnhardt Sr.’s 1987 “Pass in the Grass” or Denny Hamlin’s 2016 Daytona
500 photo finish, and quickly deliver these to fans via video clips on
NASCAR.com and social media channels.

NASCAR will leverage AWS services to enhance its full range of media
assets including websites, mobile applications, and social properties
for its 80 million fans worldwide. NASCAR plans to use Amazon SageMaker
to train deep learning models against 70 years of historical footage to
enhance metadata and video analytics. With Amazon Transcribe, an
automatic speech recognition (ASR) service, NASCAR will be able to
caption and time stamp every word of speech within archived videos so
that NASCAR video producers can easily locate source footage via text
searches. In addition, NASCAR will use AWS Media Services, including AWS
Elemental MediaLive and AWS Elemental MediaStore, to support NASCAR
Drive, which puts fans in the driver’s seat using in-car cameras, live
audio, and live leaderboards. These AWS Media Services enable NASCAR to
process, package, and store broadcast video content, including live
races, for delivery to broadcast and industry partners.

“Speed and efficiency are key in racing and business which is why we
chose AWS—the cloud with unmatched performance, the most comprehensive
set of services, and the fastest pace of innovation—to accelerate our
migration to the cloud,” said Craig Neeb, Executive Vice President of
Innovation and Development, NASCAR. “Leveraging AWS to power our new
video series gives our highly engaged fans a historical look at our
sport while providing a sneak peek at the initial results of this
exciting collaboration.”

“Amazon’s 20 years of machine learning experience, along with our broad
analytics and machine learning capabilities, make us the best choice for
organizations who want to use machine learning to gain insights into
their data and establish new levels of engagement with their customers,”
said Mike Clayville, Vice President, Worldwide Commercial Sales at AWS.
“NASCAR is utilizing cloud technology to enhance the way people
experience the sport and deliver even more impactful content to fans.
AWS’s unmatched portfolio of cloud services gives NASCAR the most
flexible and powerful tools to bring new elements of the sport to live
broadcasts of races.”

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 165
fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking,
analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence
(AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and
augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development,
deployment, and management from 66 Availability Zones (AZs) within 21
geographic regions, spanning the U.S., Australia, Brazil, Canada, China,
France, Germany, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, India,
Ireland, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Sweden, and the UK. Millions of
customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest 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.

About Amazon

Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than
competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational
excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping,
personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle
Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa
are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more
information, visit amazon.com/about
and follow @AmazonNews.

About NASCAR

The National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing, Inc. (NASCAR) is the
sanctioning body for the No. 1 form of motorsports in the United States.
NASCAR consists of three national series (Monster Energy NASCAR Cup
Series™, NASCAR Xfinity Series™, and NASCAR Gander Outdoors Truck
Series™), three regional series, one local grassroots series, three
international series and the Automobile Racing Club of America (ARCA).
The International Motor Sports Association™ (IMSA®) governs the IMSA
WeatherTech SportsCar Championship™, the premier U.S. sports car series.
Based in Daytona Beach, Fla., with offices in eight cities across North
America, NASCAR sanctions more than 1,200 races in more than 30 U.S.
states, Canada, Mexico and Europe. For more information visit www.NASCAR.com
and www.IMSA.com,
and follow NASCAR on Facebook,
Twitter, Instagram, and
Snapchat (‘NASCAR’).

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