IBM Watson Media is being launched at the 2017 U.S. Open Tennis Championships, enabling the U.S. Tennis Association (USTA) to quickly generate shareable highlights from matches occurring across 7 of the tournament’s courts.

IBM Watson Media is a suite of artificial intelligence powered solutions which use the IBM Cloud to analyze images, video, language, sentiment and tone. The USTA will use a module called Cognitive Insights which finds a match’s critical moments based on statistical tennis data, audience reactions and facial expression recognition. Cognitive Insights ranks these moments, enabling more rapid curation of highlight packages.

The USTA intends to use the highlights packages to post a daily Highlight of the Day on its Facebook page, drive push notifications of highlights of fans’ favorite players, populate players’ bio pages with highlights and display highlights in the players’ lounge and in the IBM Watson Experience section on the grounds.

Cognitive Highlights was previously tested in April at the Masters golf tournament and as part of the production process at Wimbledon. Golf and tennis tournaments, with their many players and frequent fan-friendly shots are ideal for Watson Media’s ability to analyze lots of structured and unstructured data.

Of course, these kinds of short-form highlight clips from sports events frequently go viral on various social media platforms as well. This drives highly valuable inventory in both ad-supported and sponsorship-driven models. Equally important, they enable fans and non-fans alike to immerse themselves in the action in ways that were previously unattainable.

(Note: IBM Cloud is a VideoNuze sponsor)