New Zealand Rugby uses AWS to transform fan engagement and content delivery

Unlike many sports teams whose fan base is concentrated in their home markets, most of NZR's fans live outside New Zealand. The organization wanted to better understand who these fans were, how they engaged, and which content interested them. NZR sought to create a unified view of fans by bringing together data from ticketing systems, broadcast partners, social platforms, and event databases.

With a better understanding of its fans, the organization could effectively target engagement with international audiences. NZR also needed a scalable way to deliver personalized content and build direct relationships with audiences in key markets. At the same time, the growing appetite for rugby content on digital and social platforms presented an opportunity. NZR turned to Amazon Bedrock, a fully managed service for building generative AI applications, to help produce content quickly and reach fans at relevant moments.

Working with AWS Professional Services, NZR designed and built a scalable fan data platform over multiple iterations. The engagement spanned several years, with each phase expanding the platform's capabilities and data sources. The organization has since unified over one billion data points onto over two million fan records into a single platform.

At its core, the platform uses Apache Iceberg open-source tables on Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), an object storage service, as a centralized data layer. This layer unifies fan records from ticketing, membership, events, digital properties, and streaming platforms. AWS Glue, a serverless data integration service, extracts, cleans, and loads data from disparate sources into a consistent schema for analysis at scale.

This unified view helps NZR understand its local and global fans in greater depth. The platform supports segmentation, behavioral analysis, and personalized engagement strategies. NZR can also use the platform to engage its international audience through a direct-to-consumer (D2C) offering.  The platform gives fans access to exclusive content, such as documentaries and archival footage, connect them to the history of the All Blacks and Black Ferns. The organization can also offer live match streaming on a market-by-market basis.

NZR holds decades of archival content, far more than any one person could watch, catalog, or recall on demand. To make this archive more accessible and complement its data capabilities, the organization worked with an AWS Partner to build a modern video content pipeline powered by AI and machine learning.

The pipeline ingests documentaries, ancillary content, and match footage. It uses TwelveLabs video foundation models through Amazon Bedrock to automatically extract metadata from video content. The metadata identifies individual players, key moments, highlights, and contextual information. With this information, NZR can turn raw footage into a searchable, AI-enhanced content library.

What previously required manual effort across multiple tools whilst also knowing what to look for now takes around 15-30 minutes, down from 1-2 hours, reducing selected content turnaround time by 75 percent. The organization can now respond to relevant cultural moments while audience interest is high.

NZR has used the video archive solution to create short form content across Meta, Tiktok & YouTube shorts for Rugby's Greatest Rivalry Tour between South Africa and New Zealand driving over two million views, and it will be used for the upcoming Bledisloe Cup matches to build anticipation among fans globally.

With fan data unified into a single platform, NZR can continue to identify audience segments, personalize communications, and gain actionable insights into engagement across channels. The organization can deepen fan relationships across its digital fan platform, website, social channels, and email marketing. NZR can also reach fans with tailored content that reflects their interests and engagement history.

The organization can use its AI-powered content pipeline to publish video content more quickly. Automated metadata tagging, transcoding, and editing can help the content team produce social-ready clips at the pace of digital conversation. Around major events, NZR can utilize timely, relevant content to build momentum and support ticket sales and viewership.

"AWS has given us the tools to better understand our fans and reach them with the right content at the right moment. Whether it’s understanding who's engaging with our D2C platform or producing a promo clip for Rugby's Greatest Rivalry Tour within minutes of an idea, we're operating differently. We're working at a pace and scale that simply wasn't possible before," said Jonathan Southee, Chief Information and Technology Officer, NZR.