A likely parade of new and expanded customers coming in the next week or so for Amazon Web Services Inc.’s cloud offerings kicked off today with the Pac-12 Conference.

The western athletic conference said today it’s going “all-in” on Amazon.com Inc.’s cloud — AWS’ favorite term for customers that use an increasing number of its services.

AWS this year has announced a steady stream of new customers and others that are expanding their use of its storage, computing and artificial intelligence services. But AWS likes to trot out customers at its annual re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, so more are likely coming when it opens Monday.

Pac-12 Networks, the content arm of the conference, said it has extended its “strategic relationship” with AWS by making the cloud unit its standard for machine learning and media workloads.

Pac-12 already uses AWS to power its website, mobile apps and live television networks. In particular, it runs its media infrastructure on AWS’ S3 storage service, the Elemental MediaLive video processing service and the Elemental MediaPackage video streaming delivery service.

Now the organization is moving critical business databases to the cloud database Aurora. Moreover, it’s setting up new production workflows for live video on demand and over-the-top streaming for more personalized viewing. It also will use the Amazon SageMaker machine learning services to automate those workflows, which including models for capturing gameplay and highlight clips and for closed-captioning.

“Putting this content in front of fans is really important to us,” Mark Kramer, vice president of engineering and technology at Pac-12 Networks, said in an interview. “Now can take all of the video content we produce and make it available in various ways. It opens up the ability for us to do cool things with our content.”

For instance, now that the hundreds of terabytes of content it creates, including every game in the last six and a half years, has all been moved to S3 and an AWS archival storage service called Glacier, Kramer’s team can experiment with new services, such as catch-up TV, more live content and video on demand, all at higher video quality. Pac-12 also is planning a full launch of an international service that has been in the pilot stage.

Moreover, it can offer analytics back to schools as a service, helping them analyze data on fans and improve engagement.

Not everything is in the cloud yet. “There’s always going to be some things we do on-prem, at least today,” he said, such as some video editing.

Asked if Pac-12 is joining the multicloud movement that many companies say they prefer, at least in theory, he indicated that wasn’t in the cards anytime soon because his relatively small team can collaborate more easily on a single cloud and get things done faster. The unit started deployment in June and all seven networks it operates were live by August, he said.

Photo: Pac-12