The Evolution and Future of Sports Media

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  Speaker 1:
  Hello, my name is Greg Baker. I’m the Managing Partner of the Alumni Ventures Sports Fund. Alumni Ventures is a network-powered venture firm helping accredited individuals become more successful venture investors. Welcome to today’s webinar. We are pleased you’re able to join us.

  We are speaking today about the Sports Fund—actually more about sports media, tangentially about our fund and our views of the associated landscape. This presentation is for informational purposes only and is not an offer to buy or sell securities, which are only made pursuant to the formal offering documents for the fund. Please review important disclosures in the materials provided for the webinar, which you can access at www.avfundsfs.com/disclosures.

  Before we get started, a few housekeeping reminders. You will be on mute the entire presentation, and this webinar is recorded and will be shared after the event. We encourage you to submit questions throughout the webinar. We will do our best to answer all questions submitted or follow up with you via email. To ask a question, please enter your questions into the question section of the GoToWebinar control panel and click submit. As a heads up, we have 22 submitted already, so we have a lot, but we’ll try and get through as many as we can.

  So with that, let’s get started. We’re going to do a little introduction. I’ll talk briefly about the Sports Fund, and then we’ll get onto the meat of the conversation with Jay.

  Alumni Ventures—we’re America’s largest venture capital firm for individuals. We have a family of investment funds. The Sports Fund is a new venture for us where we’re moving into industry-specific funds. We’ve historically been very diverse investors in our various alumni funds. Started with Green D for Dartmouth. Keaton and I work on the Bascom Ventures fund, which is geared for Wisconsin alumni.

  There are over two dozen funds. We have had over $1.3 billion invested in us by a little over 10,000 people, have 1,300 portfolio companies, and we’re very proud to announce that CB Insights has rated us as one of the top 20 venture investors for 2024. We’re on a list with the brand names you’ve known forever, like Andreessen Horowitz and Accel and Sequoia, and we’re actually even listed ahead of Kleiner Perkins—which, for a firm our age and much smaller than those players, is exciting.

  Those are the people we invest with. We’re never a lead investor—we invest alongside venture capital funds that have a strong track record in an industry. Keaton and I and our other teammate, Matt Jones, will be building a Sports Fund around the same philosophy of investing alongside VCs that have a track record in the sports arena.

  Pretty much covered all this. We’re looking at sports in a very broad framework—athletic performance enhancement (the legal kind), eSports and gaming, potentially some franchises and leagues, and very much sports media, which we’re going to talk a little bit more about today with Jay.

  It’s a $25,000 minimum investment, and you get to participate in our syndication program as well if you’re an investor. And today, we’re honored to be joined by Jay Prasad, who’s CEO of Relo Metrics.

  I’m going to hand it over to Keaton and Jay to introduce themselves because they do a much better job than I would do, and then I can get out of your way and sit back and let you guys have your conversation.

  Speaker 2:
  I’ll give a quick introduction about myself, but I think people are probably here to listen to Jay.

  Briefly about me—University of Wisconsin graduate. My initial career was actually in professional basketball, so I had a short career overseas before coming home and meeting Greg when he was starting the first Bascom Fund. Really enjoyed my first intro into venture capital, pursued it as a full-time gig, did some corporate VC while getting my MBA back at Wisconsin, of course, and then joined the team full-time in 2020.

  I have loved advocating for Badgers—Badger founders—and being part of the Wisconsin network. And I’m very excited to add onto that the sports angle, as our name suggests.

  Actually, I was in touch with Jay because he’s also a Badger, which is fantastic, and he happens to be in the sports world—successful, connected—and so I reached out to him when we were starting the Sports Fund and said, “Hey, would you like to add any perspective to this?” And he was gracious enough to say yes.

  I will let him give an intro, but I think you’ll see this is a very intelligent, well-versed-in-the-subject person. So Jay, please feel free to give an intro, and then we’ll get into some conversation after that.

  Speaker 3:
  Yeah, thanks Greg. Thanks, Keaton.

  It’s always fun to be involved in things that are going to help the next generation of founders and the next generation of people that are interested in technology—and then where that technology intersects is really rapidly changing.

  So thinking about sports and media—and we can talk about AI, we can talk about the business model of sports—but all of those things are really front-and-center topics. I’ve been fortunate to have most of my career in that intersection of technology, media, and marketing.

  I have been a part of big companies like Yahoo—running Yahoo Sports’ media and video strategies back in the 2008 era—to being a part of the transition of traditional television into streaming and more digital TV, and all of the mechanics that go into how that is distributed and monetized.

  And then the last 10 years, I’ve really been focused on measurement. And measurement is something that doesn’t always sound like maybe it’s the sexiest topic in the world, but measurement does make the world go round. If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. The entire world is based on metrics. And going back to the market research class I took back in my sophomore year in Madison, I’ve been interested in the topic for a long time.

  So now, from evolving from TV measurement and how that was going to be changing to now being very much focused on sports marketing measurement—which is something that is actually more global in nature in how it can be done than how TV measurement is done—and there’s just a ton that’s changing.

  So there are a lot of exciting things happening and a lot of really interesting new opportunities as a result in the overall sports and marketing and media world.

  Speaker 2:
  Awesome. Well, I’m excited to talk to you a little bit.

  Maybe the first question I’ll ask—it kind of comes from a selfish perspective—but when I was a player, it was very easy to go, “Well, we’re the product, right? We are the thing on the floor that people are there to see.” And as I progressed in my career and now that I’m on the other side of it, I go, “Well, actually, this is really just a means to an end—to get people to tune into something so that somebody can then advertise, sell, market.”

  But I want to hear your perspective on sports—live sports and sports coverage—as kind of a media asset. Why is it so important to the different media outlets to have access to this particular asset?

  Speaker 3:
  Yeah, if you just look at the consumer behavior overall, as more and more technology gets added into our daily lives—starting with a web browser which had some interesting and useful functionality—email was predominantly being used as a form of business communication. It evolved definitely much more into a marketing channel.

  But because of all the attention fragmentation that exists, there are really only two things that serve the live appointment viewing well—and that’s sports and news.

  And news—while important—isn’t exactly fun. And in today’s world, news is even fragmented beyond that, right? Everyone wants their certain kind of news. Some of the youth want it on their mobile devices in short form. Older people want to sit back and watch it in the evening.

  But the one thing that is still appointment viewing is live sports. And in fact, last year, 97 of the top 100 most-viewed live telecasts and streams in the United States were sports. And the NFL was like 95 of those, and then the others were college football.

  But beyond that, if you looked into the top 100, both professional and college sports are really just what is peppering that.

  Then you also have this transition from linear TV to streaming, and most of streaming is a hybridized business model. There is some free-to-watch streaming—things that are called FAST channels nowadays. If you buy a smart TV and you turn it on, there’s like 150 channels in an LG or Vizio or Samsung. And then it’s basically almost like a mixture of what you might find on YouTube, what you might find on cable television.

  Around the holidays, you’re going to find all these programmed holiday channels. Around the new James Bond movie, you’re going to have a James Bond channel that’s got all these old titles on it.

  But in the form of what is a mass-viewed thing in streaming, again, it’s sports that’s attracting subscribers. So when a streaming platform gets something exclusive—like Thursday Night Football on Amazon—that brings more attention to Amazon Prime as a video platform.

  Apple TV+ is a 10-year now committed and exclusive provider for about 90% of Major League Soccer games. So most of the MLS games now are on Apple TV. There is one or two games a week still on FS1, but a majority of the games have switched to streaming, which helps Apple TV attract and retain subscribers.

  I can keep going—Paramount+ does UEFA, for example. So for all the U.S. footie fans that want to watch the UEFA Cup, those games are exclusively in the United States on Paramount+.

  So now you have both live TV and subscription TV in the form of streaming, which is heavily reliant on sports rights in order for them to attract viewers—attract subscribers. So that has continued sort of this arms race around building a portfolio of live sports, with nothing being more valuable than the NFL.

  Speaker 2:
  Yeah, I mean, I’d be lying if I said I’m not a new customer of both HBO Max and Paramount+ as of last week—because they’re the streaming services for March Madness. Another example of appointment TV. This is my whole weekend—last weekend and my upcoming weekend—and they’ve attracted me by owning…

  Speaker 1:
  That as a former Big Ten basketball player, you don’t have Peacock?

  Speaker 2:
  No, no. I am fascinated by all this stuff again.

  So Jay, you mentioned the business model of sports, and particularly from the point of view of your world. I’m curious about how you break down stakeholders. There are rights holders, broadcasters, sponsors, consumers—how do you break down the stakeholder set, and then maybe what each of them—or the main ones in your view—you mentioned measurement. What are the critical things they’re measuring, and how do they then apply that to their business?

  Speaker 3:
  So I think you start at—each sport has a league. So the league maintains certain rights, and that’s why this part of the ecosystem is often referred to as “rights holders.” The same thing would be considered of a movie studio who owns the rights to movies and all the intellectual property around that. Same thing—I mean, the entire music industry is based upon who has sync licenses and master copyrights of performance-based audio.

  But in sports, you have the leagues that have maintained certain rights, and then you have the teams within that league that have the same rights as the league from a sublicensing perspective. But then they also control more local rights and use of their team, and they may also have local broadcast rights that they can go out and do deals for—the things that aren’t national.

  And then you have the media companies, and they’re the media rights holders. They’re the ones paying the leagues for the right to air and stream different games. So the media rights holders are the ones who are in essence probably spending the most money in order to bring sports to the masses.

  And then you have the buy-side of the equation, which are your sponsors, which are normally brands. You have big mega brands that you see everywhere, like a State Farm. And increasingly in March Madness, which is going on right now, you see AT&T everywhere because they’re the majority sponsor for the Final Four.

  And then you also have the various agencies who support the brands. So you have the media rights agencies—those are the big advertising firms—your Omnicoms and your WPPs and your Publicis Groups. These are the mega agencies that control the media spend for a majority of the large brands in the world. And these are all very global brands. So they buy and plan all the ads for an AT&T, and then they also negotiate and measure the sports sponsorships on behalf of those mega brands.

  Then you have smaller regional agencies that work with regional brands that you might not even know outside of the Midwest, for example. There are certain grocery chains that are really popular in the Midwest and not anywhere else. And so they usually have a regional focus on the teams that they sponsor, and they work with regional agencies.

  And then last, you also have the talent agencies—so your big mega agencies like CAA and UTA, Excel Sports—and they do player representation. They have NIL divisions, and then they also have sponsorship and analytics negotiations. So it is a full spectrum of people that are involved.

  We have to deal with all parts of that ecosystem as a data and a measurement provider to them all.

  Speaker 2:
  Yes, this is a great transition into what you guys do. But I’m fascinated by the data and measurement. I encourage anybody who’s interested in this—go check out Relo’s website. Jay, you could probably give the URL off the top of your head, but just some great pieces on what you guys are looking at, but also just some great visual examples of how you’re parsing these things out and thinking about measuring.

  And I think the one thing I saw really consistently in your website is a reference to ROI. And I guess ROI is different for every stakeholder group, but at the end of the day, everybody’s trying to get something out of this transaction.

  And so when you’re thinking about, okay, we are working with an AT&T or a State Farm, for example—what are you measuring? Eyeballs? Is it time? Is it impact of a visual? How are you thinking about measuring ROI and then justifying what they may have spent to get that placement?

  Speaker 3:
  So I think in sponsorship—which is different than advertising, right? Because the ads are running during the game breaks. The ads are on your phone as you’re flipping through—sometimes annoyingly popping up over the article or the video you want to watch. Or it’s a pre-roll, which is like a little five to 15 second spot, and then the video you start plays.

  That’s what you would call interruptive advertising, and that’s the most traditional form of advertising.

  Sports is a bit different because it’s on camera and it’s on from whistle to whistle. It’s also a piece and a part of the set design for the pre-game show, the post-game show, any press conference where the players that are either happy because they won or not so happy because they lost—behind them is a step-and-repeat board with a bunch of logos on it.

  Those are all things that are not interruptive—they are part of the viewing experience. And so sponsorships are a bit different in that traditionally you were not just looking at it as impressions.

  Like the same way with a TV broadcast. In the past you would have this Nielsen rating. Now there are modern currencies that are measuring the audiences and using big data to do so—and we can get a little bit more into that down the line.

  But in essence, what we do is we record and ingest all of live sports. When I say all of it, I mean we are doing 36 different sports in different parts of the world. But if you talk about March Madness and MLB—which starts this week—and football and hockey and baseball and basketball—all of those things, we have direct ingest. And then we record them.

  And then what we do is we run what’s called computer vision. It’s a form of artificial intelligence. It’s different than the generative AI intelligence that you’re chatting with on ChatGPT, etc., or generating images with. And this is basically analyzing each frame of a broadcast.

  And we do so in three-second by three-second intervals. And within those three seconds, we detect all the visible logos and integrations and signage in that frame.

  And then we have models that classify every sport. So we have a name for everything, right? College basketball stanchion is different, to a degree, than NBA shot clock—which has Tissot as a logo on top of every NBA shot clock.

  So each sport has a different set of placement types—and we call that, in essence, a classification model. Then you have: what’s the logo? And then: who are the rights holders involved?

  And all of that—we’re running through this kind of algorithmic detection. And then we run a quality model on top of it, meaning: how many seconds was that logo exposed in that frame? And then that’s summed up to have a number for the end of the game.

  But also: the prominence of it. Was that logo prominent or was it more in the background? Clarity—was it super visible and vibrant, or was it blurry? And share of voice—was it one logo? Because sometimes in baseball, for example, there’s a lot of stuff in center field, but there’s only one thing behind home plate, which is why the home plate one is more valuable. So share of voice also matters.

  And then we basically calculate that into an MVP score. And that’s looking at all those different variables. Then we take that MVP score, and we look at what is the actual cost to advertise a 15- or 30-second spot in that game. And then we apply a sponsored media value to that based on the spot cost rate.

  Now recently, we also integrated all the data from VideoAmp—which is another company that I was a part of on the founding team—and that now gives us how many actual households watched that game. And that sample set is based on 40 million households and 80 million devices—meaning smart TVs, set-top boxes, plug-in devices, etc.

  And so now we actually have how many households were watching that game. So we can now equivocate into impressions, just like people do on digital when they’re buying on Facebook or YouTube. Those are basically impression-based models of measurement. We can now apply impressions to sponsorship measurement—which has never really been possible before.

  So that gives you a cost per 1,000 impressions view of that valuation.

  Now we repeat and rinse that whole process with different inputs across all of social media. So we’re also measuring on Facebook and Instagram and TikTok and X and YouTube. Because sports highlights and sports posts that contain clips from the game or with athletes appear everywhere.

  So we’ve also built out ecosystems across all of social media by sport. And then when we work with a team or a rights holder, they actually authenticate us into their social accounts. And so we’re now pulling engagement of posts, views of posts and duration—same things: quality, all those things still apply into social media.

  And then at the end of the day, we put an exposure value to what that sponsorship is getting and how long the exposure was across all forms of broadcast, streaming, and social.

  That’s the valuation part. So that’s the first base. Now, marketers on this call all know that it goes deeper in terms of what people are actually wanting to get out of marketing. But we can kind of pause there for a minute.

  Speaker 2:
  Yeah. Greg, do you have any questions?

  No, I’ll talk. What you just said kind of makes me curious about the inventory side. As the ability to value placements and assets becomes better, have you seen behavior change on the inventory side?

  So now they’re starting to, I don’t know—unlock new placements, or ways to shoot the game, or how they use their banner ads at the scorer’s table of an NBA game. Have you seen behavior change on the inventory side where they say, “Well, actually there’s more value to be unlocked here”?

  Speaker 3:
  Yeah, there’s a lot, right? So there are examples where the leagues and teams are creating new types of virtual assets, and then also some that are coming from the broadcasters and the media rights holders.

  The best example right now in the U.S. is the NHL. So when you’re watching an NHL game right now, you’ll all of a sudden see that the rink board looks like it’s got something much more animated and colorful—because the rink board itself has logos in it. And those are a little bit more behind the scenes, if you will, because that’s a physical sign covered with a bunch of stuff that gets hit by players skating at like 50 miles an hour all throughout the game. And those are still visible during the broadcast and also obviously to everyone who’s in the arena.

  But for those watching the broadcast now—in hockey, just like in baseball and basketball—about 85% of the games are on regional sports networks. So your BSNs, your Comcast SportsNets—wherever you live, you’ve got a different regional sports network that’s carrying those games.

  There’s now both a home and away feed, right? So the away team has their RSN broadcasting in their market, and the home team has it broadcasting in theirs. The NHL also now has national assets. So now you have the home team, the away team, and the league putting virtual logos on that rink board. Some of them are sold nationally, some of them are sold locally by the home team and the away team.

  Now that is all new inventory that is being flowed throughout the broadcast. And those things all have to be measured three different ways. And you can now have things that are animated—things that you wouldn’t be able to do in a physical, print-oriented rink board.

  So that’s called the Digital Dasher Boards—DDBs for short—and that is something that hockey has pioneered as this new form of, in essence, virtual signage on top of the rink board.

  Speaker 2:
  I mean, that’s fascinating. And I think seeing some other sports do their version of it—as a viewer, you take these things for granted. But then all of a sudden I watch a game and my eye is now drawn to, “Well, that’s an interesting thing going on over there in the corner of the field that may not have been going on before.” It is just really fun to see.

  Speaker 3:
  And we’ve done some consumer and fan research in order to understand that, right? And definitely the larger and the more animated executions have more recall with customers, with fans.

  But at the same time, if the execution distracts too much from the game, it can sort of make them have maybe not as favorable a view—but it depends on the execution.

  So another example of a media rights holder: we work with TelevisaUnivision, and they have the rights for Liga MX and the Mexico national team—which has a huge following in the U.S., and they’re a really good team.

  And Liga MX and Univision—they actually have these executions that have specifically been done with the movie studios. During the gameplay, around the release of Across the Spider-Verse, you got Spider-Man digging a hole in the middle of the pitch during the game and coming out and doing something crazy on screen.

  Now that’s a great takeover—and it’s during the game. And you’ve got to remember, during soccer, there are no commercial breaks. It’s only at the half. So that’s the only real way to do things—is to get more creative with the virtual things going on in the broadcast or the stream.

  And as more and more shifts to streaming—streaming is digital, it’s just like your phone or on the web—and you’re going to be able to do even more executions in a stream than in a traditional linear broadcast, just by the nature of it being digital.

  So now it’s IP-based. It gets all technical—into packets back and forth—but you can just do more in a stream than you can in linear, which means even more virtual stuff is coming.

  Speaker 2:
  Yeah. I think one of the things that I’ve found really intriguing about sports as I’ve focused more on the business side is—they’re infinitely monetizable. And it’s really: creativity will be the limit.

  And I guess there’ll be a threshold—you don’t want Spider-Man popping up every fourth down—but there is an infinite opportunity for creativity and testing. And honestly, if you do it one game and it’s poorly received, you’ve got another game next week that you can try. There’s just a number of ways to test it.

  Speaker 3:
  Just on Thursday Night Football on Amazon—you can have multiple versions of the game on Amazon Prime. And you can have the one that’s got all the live analytics brought to you from AWS—which happens to be another Amazon brand.

  But if you want to know the angle of every pass, how fast the receiver was running, what was the force of the impact—all this data is happening live on your screen now when you watch that game.

  So if you want to watch a version where you’re paying less attention to the commentary and more to the data—well, there you go.

  So let’s say you’re a sports bettor and you want to watch that, because it’s giving you much better insight into which team is playing harder or how things are actually happening on the field—maybe that’s a better example.

  You’re also going to have in-game betting soon. And there’s going to be ways to create bets. There’s going to be interaction on the screen.

  There’s a bunch of new technology companies coming out that are in that space—from here in the U.S. but also from international. And so that’s going to be the next frontier of monetization.

  Outside of all the sponsorship—it’s going to be live betting. And that probably has something to do with the increase in viewership, which drives up the media rights, which drives up the cost for sponsors, and makes athletes want to demand more money.

  So you’ve got this boat that keeps rising—and betting is going to come on top of it. Which means that sports as a value creator is not—it’s not peaking yet.

  Team values might be reaching a point of “How many billions can one NFL team be worth?” but the monetization on top of it keeps coming.

  And ultimately, the media companies—they need that, because they are paying so much for these rights. And the whole thing is funded upon that. Ticket sales, jersey sales and whatnot generate certain amounts of money, for sure. But you can only sell X amount of jerseys as one team. But when you’re getting a cut of a $10 billion media contract—that’s different.

  Speaker 2:
  Yeah. Yeah. Amazing.

  One last question on this side—I’ll let Greg chime in too—but you mentioned social media. So I think a lot about new distribution channels, and even maybe generational shifts in viewing.

  But I know Relo just announced—maybe within the last week—a Facebook analytics tool for Facebook Reels, if I’m not mistaken. But is there anything different about that technology fundamentally? Or is it applying the existing technology to just a new medium?

  And then what goes beyond Facebook Reels? Instagram or these new avenues of viewing are very important. How do you continue to help people?

  Speaker 3:
  Each platform is a bit different, just based on the fact of who the audience is on these different social platforms and what they’re good at.

  Instagram is very good at photo-based posts traditionally that have a lot of engagement in the photos. There’s a lot of reactions to photos—not necessarily maybe as much in terms of meaningful dialogue in the comments.

  But Facebook Reels—which is a video-based platform, similar now to TikTok—has a different type of content that gets people going. That’s the kind of stuff where you get video and then people start adding their own flavor to that video. It gets remixed perhaps, or the rights holder or the brand decides to do something on top of that—and now that gets a whole kind of video-based engagement.

  And that’s what has to be accounted for differently than something that’s more just photo and text.

  Whereas on the Twitter/X platform, there’s a lot of conversation happening. And so that’s a different kind of engagement—where, let’s say, an athlete is quoted saying something, and now there’s a whole more conversation-oriented thing. And it’s not as video-oriented—it’s more engagement based on the dialogue or the conversation.

  And then YouTube is the ultimate—people are watching highlights there. And that’s different.

  Then—it’s also different by sport. In the U.S., Formula One is much bigger on social media than it is on broadcast.

  Now, when you have Miami, Austin, and now Vegas races—viewership goes up. But on average per F1 race in the U.S., you might be getting 1.2 million viewers, which is small compared to other big games or other sports in the U.S.

  However, the engagement of F1 as a lifestyle is massive on Instagram. And so it’s also helping reach a younger audience. And that younger audience was brought to F1 because of a Netflix show—Drive to Survive.

  So you have this new ecosystem that started with long-form content, ends up attracting an audience who would rather engage socially than wake up early on Saturdays to watch an F1 race in Bahrain. One week it’s in Singapore—it’s all over the place. The timing changes, and it’s just a totally different thing that young people in the U.S. aren’t as used to.

  Now in Europe, there’s massive viewing every week for F1—it’s just different.

  I just got back from Brussels, Belgium yesterday night, and this weekend is a huge road race—bike cycling—and it’s like Mardi Gras and St. Patrick’s Day. They all have off on Monday. People are in each of the streets, in the villages—it goes through the whole country. There are block parties, there are viewing parties—and this cycling thing is the biggest sporting event unless it’s a Belgium World Cup game in the country.

  So we don’t have anything equivalent to that in the U.S. The most cycling-viewed thing here is going to be the Tour de France. But each country has a race like this in Europe—and that’s a huge deal.

  Speaker 2:
  Fascinating. Greg, you have any questions or—I’m going to…

  Speaker 1:
  Well Jay, you brought up hockey and what they’re doing on the boards, and it reminded me of—I’ll butcher Gretzky—“Where’s the puck going?”

  What do you see in the future? You’re probably more tied into this than we are.

  Speaker 3:
  More fragmented viewing—so more stream- and digital-based. There’s going to be more creativity in how brands get integrated in. There’s going to be more opportunities for sports betting happening in these experiences. And you’re just going to have these… there’s a lot of partnerships that have to be done in order to execute these things, and a lot of integrations.

  And everything still has to be done from the lens of the consumer first. If it gets to a point where it’s unattractive, then you’ve gone too far.

  But yeah, there’s still a ton that is going to get unlocked. And things are just becoming more global.

  We don’t always understand—and we work with, for example, La Liga in Spain, which is one of the world’s most prominent football leagues with big, massive brands like FC Barcelona and Real Madrid. And so many of the best players in the world all play in La Liga at some point.

  Speaker 3:
  They’re not now as big as the English Premier League, but they’re still hugely global. Same thing with the Prem. Each weekend those soccer feeds—those global feeds—are sent to 90 countries. So every week, 90 countries are watching Premier League, 90 countries are watching La Liga. That is far more than the amount of countries that are receiving NFL feeds.

  So think of the world where each of those global feeds ends up being a stream and then has local marketing and sponsorships integrated—and maybe local sports betting integrated—into those feeds, into particular parts of the world where Real Madrid has as many fans in India as they do in Spain. Not a lot of people know that, but it’s like—that’s the kind of next frontier. As this stuff goes global and more streaming happens, there’s still a lot of new things to unlock.

  Speaker 1:
  Where do you see VR coming in?

  Speaker 3:
  Yeah, I mean, look—the opportunity to watch in a headset and have an extremely immersive experience…

  So, NBA wants to sell lots of League Pass, right? I mean, let’s also talk about something else, which is that RSNs and local sports are having a big financial problem because of the decline in subscription cable. So when people cut the cord, they’re cutting the cord on the RSNs. So now the league has to take up more local sports rights, and they’re going to want to put those local sports rights in their apps.

  So whether it’s a streaming app or it’s a VR app—how do you make that a really exceptional and cool experience?

  If you’re NBA League Pass, and it’s in essence like you’re sitting on the bench with the Lakers every game—it might be really cool to pay for that. And then there’s going to be other brand experiences and other team experiences that are going to be able to be done in a VR environment that you wouldn’t get—but would want to—in a lean-back and watch environment.

  And that’s going to probably start happening sport by sport, as the technology for the headsets gets better. They get lighter, they get cheaper. Already the Meta Quest—the new one—I mean, it’s an amazing device for four or five hundred bucks. But when that thing becomes $150 to $200, now it’s going to get a bunch more outside of the core gamers or hardcore sports fans.

  Speaker 1:
  That Meta Quest right now—that’s the worst one we’ll ever have.

  Speaker 3:
  Right. The Vision Pro—the Apple one—is obviously the most sophisticated, but it’s also $3,700. So that’s a V1 Apple product. It’ll keep getting cheaper and better as you go along.

  Speaker 1:
  It’s an Apple product—it probably won’t get cheaper.

  Speaker 3:
  Cheaper than this! So it’ll never become mass market, but yeah—it will be a premium product in the market. Quest is going to be like Android, and it’s going to be priced to move in the masses—and more internationally.

  Speaker 1:
  Steve taught Tim well—to keep the price very high. They don’t seem to move cash.

  Speaker 3:
  Printing machine—without doing a lot of advertising—and that’s how they do it, right?

  Speaker 2:
  Yeah. You mentioned enabling technologies—but kind of in our world, we refer to that as “picks and shovels.” But you talk about something like streaming a La Liga game globally, or dynamic ad placement based on an IP address or something like that.

  Are there any enabling technologies that are either nascent at the time or need to be developed to unlock a lot of this stuff? And I’m asking kind of from the perspective—as venture capitalists, we go out into the world and look for what’s five, ten years down the road. Are there roadblocks in just fundamental technology?

  Speaker 3:
  Infrastructure is all there to do this, right? Ecosystems are all there to do this. You just need the right application layers now that have use cases that are specific for each part of that value chain.

  And then you also have now what generative AI is going to bring to this, which is going to be the ability to anticipate what content, experiences, or questions that you’re going to have while watching a game—and how does that get surfaced to you in different environments?

  From our customers—who are the teams, the leagues, the brands, the media companies—and as they use our technology, how do we anticipate what measurement they’re going to want to see?

  How are we going to anticipate that you are a sales director at the Yankees (one of our customers), and you want to get a new airline partner? Well—we have all the data. You could go and navigate, and we can teach you how to use our filters and everything.

  Or—can I just surface to you: here are the five best airlines, and here’s the reasons why, and click here to generate a proposal for you to send to Delta?

  That’s where generative AI in our world comes in. But in a VR headset—when generative AI meets VR—I mean, again, much more complex experience.

  Speaker 2:
  Yeah. I’ll ask one more question before we turn to Q&A from guests. But thinking about the future of the industry—and you’ve probably alluded to a lot of this throughout the conversation—but the future of the industry, and maybe even specifically for your company: what are you excited about in the next year to three years?

  Speaker 3:
  Yeah, we are very focused on building more standards around the data for sports marketing.

  Sports marketing and sponsorship has been the Wild Wild West for decades. I mean, a lot of these deals are done in a handshake at a steak restaurant in Kansas City—and the main access is the hospitality and the tickets, and that’s what they’re looking for.

  And so you don’t have the same roots as you do even in TV advertising—which was always a medium that was built based on a little bit more accountability and proof.

  So now that sponsorship and sports and marketing and sports has gotten so big and so global, you still have this transition happening.

  So for us, if we keep focusing on building a wide-ranging set of data on the biggest sports that is transparent for all parts of the market to use—meaning what the brand sees is not different than what the rights holder sees—what happens now is you’ve got people with different numbers, and they’re trying to figure out what something’s worth. That makes the market less liquid.

  So we hope that there could be more liquidity by creating more standard—what we would call census-level data—for the sports industry. And building that census-level data into global markets is absolutely a big investment area for us.

  And then creating these generative AI experiences on top of that data, so that the application layers keep changing depending on what market and what type of customer we’re dealing with—that’s going to be, again, it’s like a multi-year development.

  But just the marketing and sports is supposed to be a $151 billion market here in the next three years—and that might even be conservative. That might only be talking about certain European and North American markets. This stuff is huge in Malaysia. It’s huge in Japan.

  So—sports is the one true thing that’s global, that still unites people in competition in a friendly way. When the World Cup comes and the Olympics come, there’s nothing bigger in the world right now than that. And so that’s going to continue to build more data opportunities and more things for companies like us to go after.

  Speaker 2:
  Yeah. Fantastic. Greg, I’ll let you do any kind of audience Q&A if you have something. Of course, funnel anything to Jay.

  Speaker 1:
  Relevant? We have a lot, so I’ll get started.

  Jay, Jeffrey asks: is there a notion that the sports leagues will risk overwhelming their customers with distractions and begin to slow the returns of each new media innovation?

  Speaker 3:
  Yeah, there is. And that’s why you have to test and have measurement—and why we do those kinds of fan insights.

  If you cross the line and you’re pissing off fans—they’ll tell you, right? And then you have to figure out how to dial it back, change it, et cetera.

  There’s also decluttering. Sometimes we do something called white space analysis—on the screen and in the stadium. And it doesn’t mean you have to fill every piece of white space. Sometimes the proper use of white space makes certain things do better—and that’s who you maybe sold the most expensive thing to.

  So—less is more, right? But again, the data informs that.

  Speaker 1:
  But maybe with the NHL, they could have a glowing area around the puck and—nevermind…

  Speaker 3:
  To follow it a little bit, yeah—because nothing is quick.

  Speaker 1:
  Jeffrey also asked: when does the NFL decide forced paid streaming for playoff games actually diminishes their own returns by reducing an audience that does not want to pay for another streaming service?

  Speaker 3:
  Well, I mean the NFL didn’t determine that, right? It was Peacock, and it’s a part of NBC’s multi-year, multi-billion-dollar media rights commitment, which gives them the flexibility to try things. So yeah, I mean, look—Comcast, which owns NBC, is going to be measured in part by the growth of subscriptions in Peacock, and if Chiefs and Dolphins is going to drive that, then they’re going to try it.

  Speaker 1:
  Yeah, there was a question submitted early on about how can the marketing rights continue to go up—and it’s going to be all this testing, right?

  Speaker 3:
  Yeah. Look, I mean—we go beyond the valuation. Now we’re doing these brand metrics to let you know how consumers are feeling, but we’re also now tying things to search lift. Did the search activity go up because of the sponsorship in that game?

  Some brands are going to be able to help actually understand sales lift. There’s location lift. If you’re Dunkin’ and foot traffic increases after games at Dunkin’ because of some promotion you did, you can measure that stuff.

  And so now you’re going to just get to a much more rational number where they’re going to be like, “My ROI is about here. This is what I’m willing to pay.” And then that’s going to sort of naturally work out how much sponsorships go for.

  Media rights are a bit different, and I think we’re kind of hitting what media companies are able to pay, because media companies are in a period of transition—the transition to streaming from pay TV—and that’s painful. This has been a very painful phase for media companies. So the only thing they’re going to really put a lot of money into—the most money into—is sports, but there’s only so much that they can do.

  Speaker 1:
  Sienna asks: how can a student start getting involved now without putting themselves all over social media? What job opportunities are available that don’t require someone to sit behind a screen all day? Besides from broadcasters, what on-field positions are there, and what kind of education is required to work with camera crews?

  Speaker 3:
  Sounds like it’s a bit more of a production kind of question. So I think there’s opportunities both with individual teams, with regional sports networks, with the mega brands. And I would start to just read and learn about how—in this case—the business of sports production works.

  Publications like the Sports Business Journal, which has been sort of like a bible of sports-related things, is always a good source. There’s a new one that’s aimed younger called Front Office Sports. There are also events that are happening all the time that usually have free tickets for students. There are trade shows that are focused on production—there’s one actually coming up in Vegas called NAB, the National Association of Broadcasters, and there’s an entire section of all cool new green screen, yard-line marker—like all of these vendors are at these places.

  And you’re going to have to get out there. These are not thousands of jobs on LinkedIn, for example. There might be some—but yeah, I think you have to learn the market, who the players are, how things work, and then approach that market with that level of insight that you’ve taught yourself. And then that’s going to help a lot with those companies and hiring managers taking a look at you.

  Speaker 1:
  Next question we have here: how does NIL litigation look to be trending among state and federal courts this year and next?

  Speaker 3:
  I mean, that’s an entire podcast or webcast for us.

  Speaker 1:
  That’s a different webinar. I believe there are a lot of NIL questions.

  Speaker 3:
  There’s NIL with how it operates now—with the collectives and the fact that there’s not a lot of regulation about how those deals can work. That’s kind of problematic. It makes it very difficult for coaches and teams to hold on to players.

  You also have this court case about: are college athletes employees? Which is going to get litigated, and that’s a separate issue. That’s not about NIL, but about whether they’re employees and can they unionize—and what does that do to college sports overall? That’s a different court case.

  Then you also have: will college football kind of just break from the NCAA and do its own thing? And football ends up getting financially securitized in a way where outside capital is coming in to grow it even more. And now it’s more like a La Liga than it is an NCAA sport.

  So think about all those different things in college right now—and those are all separate webcasts to go into in detail.

  Speaker 1:
  I think this one’s more for Keaton and me. What are effective ways to acquire early funding for sports-related startups and initiatives?

  I’ll be very, very early—bootstrap. Be creative. Find people that are passionate about what you’re doing to be early investors.

  When you start to have product-market fit or an obviously great idea and you think institutional money is the right thing to do—I believe that 95% of all companies should never talk to a venture capital fund about investing in them. But if that’s the right way to go, you’re going to need something to show to get that type of funding.

  But it’s—be creative. There are a number of different ways. And try and match your funding to what you want your company to be. How do you want to run it? How much control do you want? Is it a lifestyle business? Is it—you want to do something for the social good? There are different ways to fund different missions.

  Are there means to utilize NIL for non-U.S. players? I don’t believe, other than tax potential implications, there’s any restriction on that.

  Are you listed on an exchange?

  Speaker 3:
  No, we are still privately held.

  Speaker 1:
  Alright. What do you think about women’s sports’ recent success and investment in teams and leagues?

  I think it’s great that we’re getting more eyes.

  Speaker 3:
  We’re working a lot in women’s sports. We were early supporting WNBA teams when their budgets were really small.

  We championed something in the UK with the Women’s Super League—part of the English Premier League for Women—where we got 12 different teams to do a collab together, where they’re sharing information and understanding how to harness the power of their own data and be able to go to market in addition to the men’s team, if that’s what’s best, but also be able to do something more as a network of women’s-focused teams.

  So we continue to see the growth and the values being generated. We have partners like ESPN, who have done a big deal with Ally Financial, and they’ve been focusing on women’s sports and doing something specifically around the ACC. So you’re going to see more partnerships between media companies and brands focusing on women’s sports.

  So it’s absolutely another huge area of growth. And it’s also exciting because it opens up more opportunities for more athletes, right? The more business opportunities, the more professional leagues there are, the more opportunities there’s going to be for girls to get into competitive sports that they can play for a long time.

  Now—that also has an impact on what we were just talking about earlier, about how far does it go with NIL and the professionalization of sports, because if that happens, then it could shrink other sports. Because the only oxygen can be the biggest revenue-generating sports, which is football and men’s basketball right now. And that would be bad for other collegiate sports.

  So there is a balance here that has to be struck. It doesn’t mean maximizing what is potentially possible for two sports is the right thing for all of college sports—but there are going to be different opinions on that.

  Speaker 1:
  Yeah. How do we get rid of all these apps and why can’t they streamline this to one app per sport?

  Speaker 3:
  They’re trying, I believe—partially.

  Yeah, there are some things that are being done. There’s still going to be more M&A done in the media world. So I think having to go to Google to figure out where your game is and figuring out when you can log in—I’m thinking the peak of that was last year. And that it’s going to continue to get easier.

  Because, look—the leagues and the media companies heard loud and clear that that confusion and trying to figure this out is harder than when you could just turn on cable and find your channel.

  I’m going to pile on something that was an early question about trying to get your startup funded.

  I’ll say this for people who want to be a builder—it’s never been a better time to be a builder because of what’s going on with generative AI and its ability to generate code, your ability to find international technology talent.

  If you’re not a technologist—majority of our engineers are in Latin America—and you can get an AWS account, or an Azure account from Microsoft, or Google Cloud. They’ll give you credits as a startup. It will give you $15,000 in compute credit.

  So if you can start with what problem it is that you’re trying to solve, or what is a really interesting idea that doesn’t yet exist—and do your research and keep vetting and just make that your learning hobby every day—and then if you think that you’ve actually got an outline to what kind of product or solution you would build, it has never been more efficient from a cost perspective to build this.

  There’s a lot of VC funds that feel like there’s going to be our first 10-person-company billion-dollar-valued companies—or even five—because of what you can do with technology now. That small teams with not a lot of funding can really actually generate outsized value.

  Speaker 3:
  So that is the world that we are in and heading towards, and so it’s really just—make that passion and intellectual curiosity a part of your daily routine. Look, I still do it, right? And I’ve been doing this for a long time. I had a long flight the last couple of days and I had loaded up a bunch of PDFs and stuff that I hadn’t read yet and had a notebook open and doing it just like I would be if I was a recent grad trying to decide if I was going to do a startup or not. I’m still doing it.

  Speaker 1:
  Yeah. I think most of the other questions on here are NIL-specific questions, which we’ll try and create a webinar for that. Generally speaking, we’re not experts on it. There are certainly a number of questions here about how to address them, how to get it. It’s going to be school-specific—where you go to school. And I’m kind of a little bit old school. I think you should go to the university that’s going to prepare you more for what you’re going to make in the 30 years after you’re an athlete than the four years you’re there.

  Speaker 3:
  There are a lot of NIL portals out there that you can go to and see who the athletes are, what they do for their NIL deals, who the marketers are that are involved. So there’s a lot of resources out there to go and get smart on what’s currently happening.

  Speaker 1:
  Okay. Someone’s iterating on a startup and would love to chat with Jay. Is there a way they could connect? Is that something you’re open to?

  Speaker 3:
  Sure.

  Speaker 1:
  Okay. What’s your favorite preferred connection?

  Speaker 3:
  Yeah, we’ll just grab my email and we’ll go there.

  Speaker 1:
  Okay. We’ll get Jay’s email to Sanja. I think we’re kind of towards the end of time here. Jay, thank you very much for a very informative conversation. Hope it was enjoyable for you as well.

  Speaker 3:
  Yeah, always fun.

  Speaker 1:
  The large group of people who joined us today.

  Speaker 3:
  Yeah, I’m looking forward to the Sports Fund and being involved in helping source some ideas and helping you guys evaluate the companies.