ActivStat will deliver real-time CoD League stats in a matter of seconds, changing the way esports fans experience the action.
Google and Activision Blizzard furthered their partnership Thursday with the announcement of a first-of-its-kind feature that will vastly improve esports broadcasts in 2021.
Google Cloud has introduced ActivStat, a constantly updating suite of statistics that will be rolled out this season for the Call of Duty League. ActivStat will be sourced, analyzed, updated, and delivered in a digestible way across global-scale computing systems with a latency of seconds — and sometimes even more quickly — rather than over the course of hours or days.
The new bells and whistles will be deployed on CoD League’s broadcasts on Google-owned YouTube and integrated into live play-by-play and analysis.
Subscribe for the biggest stories in the business of sports and entertainment, daily.
At the outset of ActivStat’s rollout, Call of Duty fans and broadcasters alike will include player and team standings and winning ratios across multiple aspects of virtual combat, including what these live numbers mean for player and team rankings.
The stats will be available as both raw data and consumer-friendly graphics, giving instant access to the numbers esports fans crave.
Thanks to a sponsorship deal Google signed with the Call of Duty franchise last February, its game engineering team got to work utilizing Google Cloud technology, including its BigQuery data warehousing functionality and its Looker analytic dashboard, to bring ActivStat to life for a global esports audience.
But Google and Activision Blizzard say that this is just the start of what’s really possible.
Google’s broader vision for ActivStat includes mapping gameplay hotspots on the field, driving live metrics directly into the broadcast feed, and predicting where to place cameras over the course of a CoD League match through machine learning, allowing broadcast producers to better predict where the best action will be located.
Quite simply, it’s an innovation that can drastically and permanently change the way we watch esports. (And if traditional sports are any indication, betting on them as well.)
Thirty Five Ventures is a financial stakeholder in Andbox, the operating organization of Call of Duty League’s New York Subliners.
