NASCAR picks Amazon Web Services to store race car videos on the cloud

On Tuesday, NASCAR announced it picked Amazon Web Services as its preferred cloud for its largest cloud endeavor.

NASCAR plans to use AWS to store its 500,000 hours of archived race car footage and use AWS's artificial intelligence capabilities to automatically tag the footage and make it searchable.

NASCAR looked at other cloud providers on the marketplace, but it picked AWS because it said AWS was the “best in breed” when it came to innovation and a business relationship.

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NASCAR has 500,000 hours of archived race car footage that goes back 57 years. But the computers storing this treasure trove of footage are as old and outdated as some of the cars in the races.

On Tuesday, NASCAR announced that it's moving the 18-petabyte video archive the cloud, and it picked Amazon Web Services as its go-to system.

Craig Neeb, executive vice president of innovation and development at NASCAR, says that the data centers that the company had been storing its footage archives on were “getting antiquated.”

“We can invest in all new technology or look at who was the best in breed and most advanced to go in cloud technology,” Neeb told Business Insider. “We decided cloud was a better choice for us.”

Neeb says NASCAR looked into the other cloud players on the marketplace, but they decided to narrow it down to AWS. Part of it, Neeb says, was Amazon's “track record of innovation.” It also sets the stage for future partnerships with Amazon.

“We felt that Amazon's interest in our business, the technology that came with it, and their continued growth and innovation made a lot of sense,” Neeb said. “We're certainly very excited to have that relationship with Amazon.”

It's not the first time that NASCAR is using cloud technology, but this is NASCAR's largest cloud endeavor, Neeb says.

How NASCAR will use Amazon's cloud

With AWS, NASCAR plans to store these archives on the cloud and use AWS's artificial intelligence tools to sort through and categorize the footage.

For example, NASCAR plans to start a video series on its site called This Moment in NASCAR History, which displays historical moments in NASCAR racing. This series will debut heading into the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series race at Michigan International Speedway on June 9.

Before, NASCAR needed employees to manually watch and tag videos. Now AWS can automatically analyze videos and tag information such as the driver, car, race, lap, time, and sponsors and make it easily searchable. It can also automatically add captioning and time stamps. NASCAR expects to save thousands of hours of manual search time a year.

When NASCAR wants to show its videos to broadcast stations or promoters, or post it to NASCAR's social media channels, Neeb says AWS will make it faster and easier for the company to search for and dig deeper into its video clips.

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“We like being associated with best in breed,” Neeb said. “Amazon is high on that list. It came down to business relationship, the value they were bringing to the business relationship. It felt best to work with Amazon.”

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