21st Century Fox Inc., Major League Baseball and Epic Games Inc., the maker of Fortnite, the Battle Royale game that is currently the most popular game online, said today they’re deepening their use of Amazon Web Services Inc. in a boost for Amazon.com Inc.’s cloud services arm.

Fox, soon to be a division of the The Walt Disney Co., has extended a strategic relationship with AWS in a deal that will see the vast majority of Fox’s platforms and workloads hosted on the AWS cloud along with leveraging AWS’ machine learning and data analytics services to create a consistent set of digital media capabilities across its brands.

According to AWS, 21st Century Fox has already reduced its data center needs by 50 percent and moved more than 30 million assets — approximately 10 petabytes of content — to Amazon Glacier and Amazon Simple Storage Service, known as S3. With the expansion of the strategic partnership, AWS will be the primary platform to deliver more than 90,000 titles on demand for key brands such as FOX, FX, National Geographic, 20th Century Fox Television, 20th Century Fox Film and FOX Sports.

For Epic Games, a company that is in the spotlight as Fortnite continues to break growth records, the newly expanded partnership will see the company shift its entire business to the Amazon cloud. Notably, Fortnite itself has been powered by AWS from day one.

“AWS’ fault-tolerant, highly performant infrastructure enables Epic Games to reliably support more than 125 million players worldwide who flock to Fortnite to win a Victory Royale,” AWS said in a statement. “By using AWS, Epic Games is able to scale up to meet the demands of these players and expand its services globally with minimal effort.”

For example, Epic Games is said to have recently run an event on AWS where the company invited all Fortnite’s players to join the game and watch a onetime global event that lasted for only a few minutes. Given the near-mania around the game, there was a massive surge of traffic, but AWS was able to handle the traffic through its Cloudfront content delivery network and related services.

Nor least, Major League Baseball, which has long used AWS’ machine learning services for its Statcast player tracking technology, said AWS will be its official machine learning provider.

MLB will develop new technologies using Amazon’s SageMaker, a managed platform for creating, training and using machine learning models, to develop new technologies for “innovative fan experiences.” MLB also will work with Amazon’s ML Solutions Lab to provide more game statistical data during broadcasts and more personalized viewer experiences tailored to markets and geographic regions.

The organization is already using SageMaker to “test how well they can accurately predict pitches by evaluating the pitcher, batter, catcher and situation to predict the type and location of the next pitch.” Perhaps a little spookily, it plans to use Amazon SageMaker and the natural language processing service Amazon Comprehend to “build a language model that would create scripts for live games in the tone and style of iconic announcers to capture that distinct broadcast essence baseball fans know and revere.”

Entertainment has become a key marketplace for cloud service providers as both old-school media and game makers switch from legacy systems to a cloud-first approach. Amazon is not alone in chasing the market. Google LLC is targeting Hollywood directly with a Los Angeles region and storage services announced June 28.

Photo: sergesegal/Flickr