Reimagining live, in-person experiences with the cloud

All right, good afternoon, everyone. And thank you for joining us today and thank you for coming to re:Invent 2023.

Today we're gonna talk about reimagining live in-person experiences with the cloud. And we've got three great customers here who are gonna talk about their experience and building out experiences for fans - both at the venue, on the go, and at home - and how they're using AWS to do that.

First off, we've got Scott Gutterman from the PGA Tour who's going to talk about the PGA Tour app and the new developments they've built into that, including Every Shot Live, which is an amazing experience. Their new ShotLink capability, which is combining LiDAR scanning of golf courses and new camera tracking technology to enable new experiences around tracking the shots and even predicting where shots may go and being able to follow every shot on every game on the app. And then TourCasts, which is a new immersive experience that lets you follow the tournament live with real time stats and visualizations, as you can see here.

We've also got Kyle Heller, the co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Veeps, which is part of Live Nation. Veeps started during the pandemic where they were initially going to start selling tickets to create a new experience for fans and rapidly pivoted into actually bringing those concerts to you at home. Their concept is "Never Miss a Show." So if you're a fan of the Foo Fighters or the Kings of Leon or bands like that, you'll be able to watch those live concerts and on demand on Veeps. And they've also built great experiences around things you would expect when you go to a concert, like the merchandise that you can buy there for your favorite band, but also leveraging the power of digital and cloud to enable fans to have interactive and immersive experiences talking to each other about the concert and even controlling their experience through the app.

And then last but not least, Evan Vernon from Riot Games who leads their global esports operations and R&D team. Riot Games is one of the largest massive multiplayer online game vendors in the world with League of Legends, which is their most famous, and Valorant, where they draw huge crowds to their in-person tournament events but also reach global audiences through their live streaming services. And they're a native digital company that's largely built on AWS and processing tons of data and analytics every day on the platform.

So with that, please join me in welcoming Scott Gutterman, the SVP of Digital Operations at the PGA Tour. Kyle Heller, co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Veeps. And Evan Vernon, the Director of Operations at Riot Games. Thank you guys for joining us today.

So, Scott, I want to start with you. You've been working for a while now, rebuilding the PGA Tour app experience and really trying to build that interactivity into the app with things like Every Shot Live. Can you fill in the audience here on kind of some of the latest innovations that you've been driving there and what kind of experiences they could expect as a fan, either at the course or on the go?

Scott: Sure. So we've, at the beginning of this year, we just relaunched all our apps and websites. We rebuilt them from the ground up, retired the old platforms. And the, the primary goal there was how can we better engage our fans, how can we serve our data faster? What can provide more video? And how can we create a set of services that our players use because they use the app as well too?

So we've had a great reception to that. We've had a 16% increase in year-to-year downloads, had a significant increase in video on demand consumption as well too. So the fans have really embraced what we've done. And really for us, it starts with trying to get the best shots from the best players on the best courses in the world in front of those fans. So, you know, make with us going with auto start, every time you open up the app, you get to see that shot, the latest shot that's right there. You get easy access to all of our live streams that we do with our rights holders with ESPN Plus and NBC and CBS. So every week in and week out.

And then when we come up to our big marquee events like The Players Championship or something like Every Shot Live, you know, the Tour is the only event in the world and the world of golf that actually shows every single shot from every single player from the first drive to the last putt. It really means capturing and displaying 32,000 shots over the four days, along with the 48 streams that run on Saturday and Sunday on Thursday and Friday and another 25 or 30 streams that we run on Saturday and Sunday.

A lot of that content gets distributed and deployed to our owned and operated platforms, but it also goes out to our partners. And we deliver Every Shot Live over the cloud. I mean, everything - three years ago when we started with AWS on Every Shot Live, we had a truck full of encoders sitting in our TV compound. But the very next year, we were able to move to bringing all of that video off directly the cloud, no more truck full of encoders. So everything goes up in the cloud, it goes to MediaConnect and that's how all of our partners use it.

Whether it's, you know, ESPN taking all of those streams from Every Shot Live and moving it into the ESPN Plus app for the week, or it's any of our international partners like Norway taking the Victor Hovland groups and they take it over MediaConnect and they go and they use it on broadcast and they create their own broadcast with their own graphics for The Players Championship right over it. So that's something that's been very engaging for our fans.

And then the apps have just been built on a new tech stack that is completely new - a stack of middleware that essentially uses AppSync to give us flexibility to deliver data as fast as possible. So typically, now what you're seeing is scores coming in within 30 seconds of a ball coming to rest on the course, you know, and we were usually about a minute, minute and a half before. So we really expedited that often because especially because our sport is non-linear - you're seeing the scores or you're seeing highlights, you know, on the app well before you actually sometimes see them on television, which is just where we want to be.

And so that's been a very big partner with that as well for us. And then to further that we continue to build new features and functions. Most notably, we lean into sports betting. So you'll find all kinds of new live scoring implementations. We, you can take our app and look at it, you know, in the portrait, but you can turn it horizontal and see a broader set of leaderboards that are available there with more data.

And then all of this drives our TourCasts experience, which you were showing before - it drives our TourCasts experience, which is essentially a video game-like experience and a digital twin of everything that happens on the golf course. We come to that through 3D mapping and with LiDAR and radar, creating a point cloud of the entire course. And then mapping with the position of every ball across the course, no matter where it is - typically 14 balls are in movement somewhere around the course during the peak of the day.

So it's a lot to bring together to get to people and then to give it to them in a way that they want to consume it, whether that's in TourCasts or on TikTok. So the teams did a great job this year, we're very proud of the work.

Um and so, you know, we, we see these global communities come together around these artists. Um it's really special. I think we're seeing that right now with the, the Taylor Swift of it all. Um people go into theaters and basically acting like it's a, it's a concert, it's a version of our concert.

So we see that same thing happen at home um in uh in those environments, whether it's with a family or just individually with peer to peer with other people that are in interact, they're interacting with inside the, the streaming environment.

You've had some recent news, I think, uh, you know, i, i noticed the Foo Fighters, uh, which is one of my favorite bands were about to announce a new drummer. You had an exclusive on that actually made some headlines. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Yeah, we've done, we've done about 3000 events over the past couple of years. Um, about 500 events a year. One of them this year was, uh, was the Foo Fighters. So we, we streamed that on VS uh uh it was a huge event. Um you know, i think we lit up every country around the world on that one. And uh they announced the new drummer that uh and uh it was, it was by far one of the, the biggest events we've had, we also, we were just nominated for an Emmy for, for Kings of Leon show. We did a O2 in London had, we had a, we had a huge global audience for that. That was actually during the daytime here. So that was pretty cool to see.

Um it was probably the first time there's been an Emmy nomination for a streaming service in the daytime category and the first concert. Yeah. Yeah. So that was cool that we were able to deliver that from a global standpoint.

Um but yeah, the Foo Fighters one was really special and uh it was really cool to see uh the fans from all over the world, you know. Tune in and watch. Yeah, they made a big splash.

Speaking of big splashes, Evan, you guys just had a major event in uh South Korea. You had your League of Legends World Championship, I think you set records in terms of ticket sales, attendance and live streams. Can you talk a little bit about Riot Games and your eSports platform and, and how you guys deliver those events?

Yeah, let's see. So, um we, a number of us just got back from, from Seoul, South Korea a couple of days ago, so I'm still very jet lagged. Uh so I'm normally smarter and more charming. Please take my word for it.

Um we, we had a phenomenally successful experience there. We, you know, we, we go, we throw tournaments all over the world for, for both of our main sports as well as some of our newer sports that are coming on. And this one League of Legends World is our championship, our, our, our super bowl, if you will.

Uh and we were doing this across four different venues in two different cities in Korea. Um in our final event where we, we finished it all off with the giant AR experience and with four different bands, two of which were virtual that we created. And um and you know, we, when you're on site at these venues, it's, it's just amazing to see the energy and the passion and the vibrancy of the, these audiences and you know, one of the things that we really try and focus on from a Riot perspective in general is making just the the best possible player experience and the best possible viewer experience.

And you know, when you go and you see one of these things on site and even when you're in a place where you don't really speak the language and you are just, and you're, you know, the, the, the the culture is a little bit foreign to you. Like fandom is universal, the, the power of this, you know, the, the energy, the, you know, the, the incredible ferocity of fandom is really something to behold.

And, you know, now as we also go and take a lot of work to distribute this across the globe, our broadcasting is something that we're really excited about the amount of reach that we're getting about the number of people that are continuing to tune in as well as a, a pretty sizable growing audience.

This is the biggest audience we've ever had for our World's tournament, which is our biggest tournament. It was also the biggest tournament, um eSports tournament and the biggest eSports broadcast in history.

So for us, it's these things are an incredible amount of work and they are absolutely exhausting and they were worth every damn second of it. So very cool.

You know, i i known eSports has been quite the phenomenon growing very rapidly. You guys have been an early pioneer in that space, but it wasn't until i went to Ballarat Champions in LA earlier this year and saw it myself how energized those fans are and how engaged they are in the venue.

I mean, i, i've been to the Forum a few years before the last time i went for a Justin Timberlake concert, but i have to tell you there was more energy and excitement in that eSports fan base than there was at the concert, which is really interesting.

One of the things i noticed though was that a lot of the fans who were, there were clearly, you know, younger digital natives and they were watching the event, but they were also on their devices and they were having the second screen experience. How do you guys uh support that sort of in venue, second screen experience and, and deliver that for the fans?

Yeah, our, our, you know, our sport is a really interesting one because it's unlike most sports that you see, you can't really see the sport being played from the venue, right? Like the our players are in our, and our athletes are playing on their computers. And so we have to have a very complex broadcast ecosystem that not only allows us to broadcast out to the broader world, but we also have to bring that experience back into the venue in giant screens and in, you know, like, like huge laser opportunities and you know, we're Riot so we like to blow shit up. So we got pyro and all that fun stuff.

And so, you know, when we think about our audience, we're trying to really focus on what we just create the dopest experience for them. And as, as Chris said, like these, our audience tend to be younger, they tend to be completely digital native and they really want to have that, you know, their phone is always in their hand, whether they are on, you know, whether they're posting themselves at the event or whether they're actually watching the the event itself and also just ingesting all of the data that's coming off of it and kind of enjoying the statistics.

Our audience is very like, especially, you know, like, like these, do you guys like our, like the power users are just data junkies. And so these are the kinds of experiences that we can help provide via the cloud and via our ability to take all of our data coming directly off of our games and you know, repackaging and repurposing it and, and, and showing as much of it as possible and we don't have to pack it all into the venue.

We have the nice opportunity to create these, these alternate experiences knowing that no one fans across the world, you can see it. But our people who really spent the time and the money and the effort to come to our venues and to, to really have that in person experience. They're not missing out, they can just pull out their phone and they can just rock out right then and there.

And we can also provide them more on that knowing that they're gonna, they're just going to know how to find it. So it's an interesting challenge from broadcast perspective because we got to, we got to broadcast to everybody including to ourselves, but it is something that has been very worth it and we're really only starting that journey.

So Kyle, you guys have done a lot of work on fan interaction as well. Talk to us a little bit about what you guys have built in terms of the fan experience, the interactions and the capabilities that you provided for fans to talk to each other and share their experience and also the, the merch table concept.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, our, our consumers are really focused on being at the show that they're watching right there. So it's, it's not like other like platforms like a YouTube or Twitch where there's 10 or 20 other things that you could click on.

We see, you know, our consumers are watching about 45 minutes per session on average. Um and so they're there because of the artist because of the content. And so we actually see about 20% of, of sales happen through our merch table that we have, which is a fully integrated merch table from every viewer.

Um and that's a merge that slides out from the, from the a button that's on screen, whether it's through their apps. We have um TV and, and mobile apps and then we have our, our web experience.

Um and we have their, since it's a ticketed live streaming experience, we have their credit card across. It's basically a one click checkout. Um that we can offer them. It's fully integrated, we handle all the back of house store. Um integrations.

Um and as you can imagine, for artists, that's fantastic source of revenue because they're actively trying to sell merch when they're on tour and they can't reach fans that um that uh you know, sometimes the merch line is so long, they just, even if you went to the show, you can't buy merch.

So um it's, it's a, it's a really compelling offering that we have. And then in addition to that, we have um our own integrated chat across TV, um and, and mobile and our web experience. And so you can actually chat from your phone to see it on your TV while you're watching the concert.

Um so we have sort of a uh a companion, we call a companion experience. Uh that's, you know, i think even kind of better than a second screen experience because it's actually like you're watching on your big screen and interacting, buying merge.

Um and that chat is really special because it's like that it's that global community of fans, even if it's a smaller act that's playing at a 500 cap room at Irving Plaza in New York City, they may have a couple of 1000 fans around the world that are now all connecting to each other, having conversation, talking about their favorite songs.

We've seen people like, like, actually meet each other and like go get married and like things like that. Funniest stories that we've seen happen through the, the chat experience because of the fandom that you were talking about. Evan.

It is like, it's really special and it's even in our world, it's very kind of in some ways consolidated to the individual artist, uh which makes it really interesting. And then with a Foo Fighters, you have, you know, an incredible amount of people where you have to manage the chat to actually be readable and we do a lot of really interesting things to help with, you know.

Yeah, memory and, and, and managing the UI and the, and the user experience in those situations. Yeah, i'm curious how you do that.

I mean, if you get thousands of people all trying to interact, how are you managing like queuing and the technical aspects of that? I mean, we're talking like multiple multiple, there's no stadium that can fit like the amount of people that are watching these, some of these shows. So you're talking, you know, hundreds or millions, hundreds of thousands or millions of people um that you're, you're either we're, we're doing, we're starting or we're breaking them into sections or we're doing our own regulation with, with speed and publishing and a lot of uh complicated mechanics kind of behind the scenes.

And then there's the client side facing stuff which is just the like making sure that the memory utilization on your device is actually doing all the things that it needs to do. So it doesn't affect the stream experience that's happening because you're because the people may think it's the stream but it actually might be your your cp us locking up because of all the memory uses that's happening from the chat, right? It's important balance. You don't want to layer in too much in because we might take away from the core viewing experience. And a lot of people don't understand that a lot of uh companies during covid that they hoisted up infrastructure to launch live events, live streams, uh ran into that challenge and didn't know that that was actually the the the the the issue. So they were all crashing while these live streams were happening and then it was resulting in refunds and, and you know, issues all around around the board.

Scott, you mentioned uh reaching global audiences earlier. How important is that to the pga tour and how are these digital platforms enabling you to go after that audience who may not have it on their local broadcast? For example,

Sure. So it's really important. I mean, we have, uh we look at the way that we manage our rights, we kind of manage our rights domestically and internationally. Uh but the, the digital platforms are sort of ubiquitous. Uh they, there are some restrictions that we have from time to time because of the rights about certain highlights or the amount of highlights that can't be in certain regions or things like that, that we have to manage. But overall, uh continuing to have a global growth for the gulf is extremely important.

Um and the tour has been all around the world. So, you know, we have one, you know, we actually run five tours at the pga tour. We have the pj tour, which, you know, is where uh rory mcilroy and tiger and others have played. Uh then we have our kind of minor leagues, which is the corn fairy tour. Uh we have the uh what now called pj tour. america's which happens in canada, uh and latino america. Uh and so we are also partnered very closely with the dp world tour, the european tour. And so there are are times when collectively we have a weekend or four days where there's six events going on all around the world.

Middle of the summer, we do uh a couple of weekends and one of which is the genesis scottish open where we open the day with the genesis scottish open. So the teams are going from one or two o'clock in the morning in the, on the east coast and we finish up with, uh, i think it's the barbers hall event in reno, uh, now in the second half of the day. So the guys that aren't playing in, in, in, in genesis, out in scotland are playing over in reno. Uh, and so we run from, you know, from one or 21 or two o'clock in the morning to almost midnight, uh depending on what's going on.

And so that breadth and, you know, getting fans to kind of embrace the global nature of golf, i think it something that's very important. And of course, you know, with our, with our, our colleagues at the four majors, they run, you know, we have the rn a and the, uh you know, that runs the open championship. Uh and so we try to work with them around different events and make sure that we continue with that global growth. So it's very much, you know, very much, uh aligned, uh like that and more and more of the golf organizations around the world are working together, uh to, you know, really build those audiences and create that reach next.

We just seem to work on the american team on the writers cup. We, we do, we do ii i uh saw that luke donald today was named the captain again for the european team. Uh so, yeah, well, it's gonna be interesting because i think beth page is gonna be a very different place than, uh, uh, italy was, than rome. Uh, uh, so i think it'll be very interesting but luke was a really good captain. So i think he'll, i think, and he knows what he's getting into when he gets to beth page. We'll see who, uh, who's gonna step up and be the captain. There's even the captain on the us side, a little little bit of rumors, maybe tiger might be thinking about becoming a captain. So he would be a really good, yeah, he would be a really good us captain and, and speaking of global audiences, a lot of your concerts are in live nation venues, most of which are in north america. But how are you reaching that global audience? And, and what are you seeing in terms of growth and engagement?

Um you know, i think you gave me one story about, you know, argentinian fans just blowing up over. I mean, you see, we see certain countries light up around certain artists and we have the benefit of kind of knowing ahead of time because we're ticketed. So we see, ok, there's, there's, there's interest in this, in this region so we can then push on marketing and maybe spend more on marketing or do more activation through live nation within those regions early on.

Um but yeah, there's really interesting data that we get back to actually give back to the artist to say, hey, maybe you should do a tour here. Maybe you should think about this tour stop even in the us and say, hey, like, why are, why are you missing omaha and not, you know, going to kansas city or, you know, instead like those types of decisions are being made and, and we, we actually just launched comedy t so that's, it's gonna also play into some of that.

Um that you're using analytics based on your behavior, your behavior, we're building, we're also, you know, we're also, we're, we're, we're reaching new and existing fans. Um and so those, those new fans, sometimes artists don't know, or a lot of times the artists don't know where their fans are actually located. So you help me just like a lot of times i think artists are disintermediated from their fans because of the, the business of touring and booking and ticketing is, is, you know, is abstracted and so is uh so is streaming and so is uh social media.

Um so really the only data collection that they have is through merge and, you know, that might be a small sample size because it's just your online store possibly. But being your co-founders are both musicians um uh in good charlotte, did they have a certain mission in mind in terms of trying to make this a more artist friendly platform?

Absolutely. Yeah, i mean, we're, we're building a new category in music and in this, you know, i in live in the live space where it artists depend on. I mean, we had some artists, you know, make more money on, you know, on veeps than they had in their entire touring career or, um, and then we certainly carried a lot of artists through covid to stay above florida, their teams um through that, through that period of time. And then that's now, you know, carried on as a new category within that space. It's like you're already performing your show, why not make more money on top and reach more fans. And especially for shows that are heavily in demand.

We just did, um we just did a something corporate 20 year reunion show at the house of las vegas a couple of weeks ago and the show blew like the show sold out in minutes, uh the live show and they hadn't played in 20 years and, but the, the online we streamed it and it was the most insane thing. We were like, this band has 15,000 people following its social media account. But the ma the demand for the stream was out of this world. It was insane.

So seeing those types of uh moments happen is really quite special. And we just did a show in, in uh in paris at bataclan with against the current and they, they had, they haven't toured in a while and, you know, they lit up, there was their first show back, they lit up the the the world with uh with their show. So it was, it was cool to see like it doesn't matter where the show is happening, people can watch from anywhere.

I think we take that for granted with like other like social media and stuff. Like you don't actually think about it from like a premium content experience. Yeah, this isn't just a clip. This is actually a fully immersive concert experience where i can watch the entire thing and even maybe control my own experience a little. It's very similar to sports in like 30 or 40 years ago where you could only see the game if you went to the game and then there was like a pay per view option and then, you know, espn came and kind of changed everything and pga s now exist in every year.

Um evan riot probably has more fans outside of north america than inside. It's truly a global platform. Uh and you, you're distributing your live e sports events to audiences all over the world. How, how are you managing that sort of distribution process? And how many, you know, how do you see that growing and evolving as you and how do you scale that as it grows?

Yes. So we, you know, we this just this year alone have done seven global shows across six different countries. Um we have huge audiences around the world and they all you know, have very different kind of needs, desires, cultural tastes. And so when we produce these shows, we need to make sure that we can produce them in a way that we have, we give everybody the best possible experience.

And so one of the things that we are really focused on and we have increasingly have to do more and more of is is increase our footprint of availability to our partners that can create regional versions of these shows, right? Like we can't just, it is not at our standards to just distribute one of our events in english or one the language of the place we are and then subtitle it that don't fly for our audience. It's just not good enough.

And so we have really focused on building out a distribution capability that is international in scale. It is a combination of private cloud and public cloud and and it is really allows us to take kind of the base feed, the world feed if, if as we call it and then distribute that out to a number of regional partners who can put their own, their own graphics, their own languages in the, you know, in the chyrons, they can put their own casters in that are doing their own analysis, they can put their own music in, they can do everything and then they can distribute to that region and that audience in a way that is a genuinely authentic and exciting and cool experience and so that is something that we have really focused on and, and every year we have a bigger and bigger footprint that we have to cover on that.

Um i think the other thing that we have to really think about, and one of the reasons that we have kind of gone the route of going from like more regional um uh broadcast remote broadcast capabilities is that we not only run these global shows, but we also run hundreds and hundreds of regional shows a year because we have a number of regional leagues that feed into the global is kind of like if you are a soccer football fan, you know, like the european leagues and then the champions league.

So we, we have to really be thinking about how quickly we can scale, how far we can reach and what kind of tools we can give these regions to, to self support. But also that we don't have to buy this stuff like 12 times like it just doesn't work. So we have really tried to focus, especially in the past two or three years on creating a distribution capability where we can centralize into our regional broadcast arts, remote broadcast centers across all of the regions and our global shows, but then also expand into the cloud services and capabilities.

So we can very quickly spin up excess capacity, we can very quickly create um more like new tool sets that we can offer to any of our, our first party or kind of second party providers that we can reach anywhere in the world. Because what we really need to do when we produce shows and when we distribute shows is the infrastructure, the capabilities, the software, the production, it has to be invisible, it just has to be completely invisible to the people who are producing it and it has to be seamless to the people who are watching it. And so that's where we have to think about everything at global scale. We have to think about everything at high redundancy

And we have to think about everything in the context of what are the ways that this is going to break. One of the biggest problems with y'all. We have so many chainsaw problems. I can't even describe how many times we have been woke up in the middle of the night because somebody got too wild with a chainsaw and cut something and it took everything down. So we're going to, we tried to get rid of chainsaws, they said no. So like, all right, we're going to have to figure out how to distribute this stuff a little bit better and how to make sure that we have redundancy, not only in physical locations but also in virtual capabilities so that we are safe and that we are highly scalable and no matter what our production team needs, no matter what our audiences demand, we can be there, we can be there instantly and we can be there at whatever scale they ask us for shifting gears a little bit.

I wanna go a little more technical if that's ok, scott, you, you've got some really interesting new, innovative things you're doing with uh shot link torao tying into tour cast, but also tying into broadcast experiences and even uh the, the officiating aspects of the game. Can you talk a little bit about what you guys have done in terms of the investments you made around scanning and then camera technology and how you guys are gonna use that today and then maybe some of the ideas for the future.

Sure. Sure. Uh so, uh for us, we are just getting ready this year to officially roll out scoring with our new shot link 2.0 program. Uh what we're going to do is replacing the 20 year old shot shot link program with 100 and 20 cameras across the course and two radars on every hole radar on the green and a radar on the tee box. Uh scoring will largely go from being a volunteer driven system where the volunteers would go along and help score and have walking scores to one that will have many less human beings involved. Um deploying all of that. You know, i was listening to evan talk about it. We also have a chainsaw problem. So we put fiber, we put, i think it's like 15 miles of fiber around the course for all of these cameras. Uh but we have mowers uh and the mowers will come during the event or after the event and they'll clip and scoring will stop. Be like, ok, uh that and that happens to us probably two or three times a year. Horizontal chainsaws. Exactly. Exactly. So, uh but so that's all getting deployed there.

Um it has to meet a very strenuous sl a in order for it to be executed because our scoring not only needs to be delivered to our fans, but it needs to be delivered to our betting operators and there's very strong slas that go against that. Uh so typically what the team is seeing right now with the new system is they are delivering uh uh uh scores within, you know, to the, basically back to where we are uh uh uh or into the cloud um within seven seconds or less. Uh all the way from the course to our partners at img in europe so that they can then distribute uh the, the that, um you know, you guys may have heard earlier, heard me say that we deliver scoring to our fans in 30 seconds or less.

Um we always have to balance the delivery and as, and as many places do the deal with betting, you have to balance it, delivery of accelerated delivery to your fans and then to the betting of, of betting operators because what we don't want is we don't want fans using our apps to gain the betting operator systems by having our, our scoring be faster than their. So there's always a little, yeah, yeah. So there's a little bit of latency and actually it's something a lot of people in sports and betting and talk about. There's always a little bit of latency built in between the non betting experiences and the betting experiences.

So, as you can imagine all of that is happening, these hun 100 and 20 cameras now are gonna be capturing uh, uh uh every shot. Uh and they're gonna be following every ball and the systems that they put in place that we've rebuilt on top of aws. Um basically, it follows every single shot. It allows you to, allows a player when a player hits a tee shot from the moment they hit the tee shot. Our systems are predicting where that shot is going to land within a really uh acceptable realm of error between where that shot actually lands and where it was predicted to land. And so we are not only predicting where the shot lands, but now with these new systems, we're able to predict where the impact point will be, which is where the ball first touches the ground or sometimes touches a tree or a rock and then where the ball comes to rest. And so you're getting, we're getting a lot more information out of that, uh, for our fans, it'll be a lot more precious.

So it's something like tor cast, you're gonna be able to see stroke trails. We're gonna eventually probably in the coming months roll out, uh a second, you know, impact point and the point where the ball comes to rest. So fans can actually do that. See that. We are also because of the cameras around the, uh, uh, greens are gonna be able to show true putt paths uh on the green and in tour cast and in places even more easier. Now on places like the broadcast, it used to be that we kind of knew the straight line distance of what happens. And probably one of the most famous putts is the tiger woods better than most kind of big s putt on the 17th hole many years ago. Uh and uh nobody using green, by the way, right? Amazing green light our skin in his pocket. Yeah. Yeah, i i can't remember correctly but like i think our, our data like to the point to point data was like, oh that was a, you know, 30 ft putt, but it was actually like a 45 or 50 ft putt because of the way it had to travel.

So now we're gonna be able to show all that and show that immediately in the broadcast, show that in immediately on our digital platforms and really begin to, to, to show fans what that looks like. And then further with the radar, we've had radar now coming off the tee boxes for a while. Um, and this past year we put, uh, ball movement into tor casts. So you can actually see off the tee whether it's moving right to left or left to right on the t spin or hook or spin. Yeah, we have all the radar data.

So, you know, spin, you know what it's called smash factor. You know, the, uh, uh swing speeds, all those things now get reported on tor casts. So now we're gonna have the same things for similar things for the inbound on the green, for the radar. Uh and so you'll actually eventually you will, you will see the ball come in, the radar actually tracks it on its way in and then follows the ball around the green. So it's all going to be really great stuff.

I mean, and again, it, this uh this data will make its way into, you know, engagements like we work with golf plus vr, which is a vr platform is most popular golf game on the metas right now, like a million users on that game. And um uh they actually are have our courses and they're official partner there. But we also have started to bring in actual live shots into that environment and different engagements so that i could actually try to hit like tiger. Yes, you can only actually try to, yeah, you can only try to hit like tiger. But this past year, the 16th at waste management and the 17th, uh, at, uh, at t pc sawgrass, uh, you were able to try and hit the same shot within minutes that the shot landed, uh, in inside the game. It was immediately post, sorry from the course to the game, it was immediately posted and you can actually be side by side that game. We would show you the actual shot and then give you a chance to do it. And the guys would, the guys had worked it out so they set up targets and they were fan cheers and boos depending on how well you did.

Um so things like that are gonna be more and more you think of real time in broadcast but similar to like what, you know, evan and, and team have done with gaming like we see that as well too. So i think eventually our partners at two k, our, our partners ad a will eventually be going in that direction as well too. So it's bleeding into and we see this a lot, a lot of, a lot of convergence of industries uh crossover between games and media and entertainment.

Um you're collecting a ton of data and you're making that available in all kinds of new platforms. A rvr you mentioned uh tour cast, which is like a digital twin of the course. Um i can think of a number of new applications. Uh oh yeah, we we think of them every day. So it's just a matter of trying to get them done. I think we're also very excited. And one of things i've been talking about this week is generative a i and how we're gonna use generative a i.

So we've been working with aws and the bedrock product for the last eight months. We're one of the first groups into bedrock. Um, and really, it's been about us trying to figure out is it gonna be able to generate a new golf swing for me? I, i'm hoping it'll first do one. So that, that would be great. Yeah, i'm gonna be the beta tester. So iii i hope so someday it'll do that. But, you know, we're, we're looking at generative a i as an opportunity to not only create new content for our fans and give fans access to content that they really would have had a hard time accessing through thousands of stats tables or, you know, wanting to do that and really having context around what happens. But, you know, creating potentially a player bot, you know, players walk off

"We have a new member app that we're going to be building a player app that we're gonna be building this year. Retiring our old one. I want Rory McIlroy to be able to walk off the course and have that player by say, ok, based on how I know you like to play your game on this course. Here's how you perform today and be able to give them those updates or give those updates to their coaches so that they can evaluate their games overnight. They already do that. Now, by looking at video, we deliver to them overnight. Um, so between the video delivery and that, I think we can create something pretty powerful for our players.

And then the last side of it, I think we can build some really great tools for our broadcast partners. You know, over the uh with a nance and a uh a nimble man calling a cbs broadcast and they know the groups of players that they're following. Why not let them have a console that says, you know what, after every shot that rory hits or this group hits or these guys hit, give me five talking points about that shot so that they have that console there. They're able to actually see it and they're able to work that into their commentary. You know, how, you know, roy just hit the shot to the 18th green at the tour championship. He's made that shot 10% of the time. By the way, here's a video of that shot from the past. Let's, you know, give them an opportunity to immediately move that video right out to the broadcast for replay. That's gonna streamline the broadcast business significantly. Having worked in the business. There's a ton of research that goes into preparing notes for the color commentary, uh announced crew tons of material, notebooks, research documents and all that. You, you're telling me basically, you're gonna create an app that does all that work for them. Yeah. And our team that actually does exactly what you were describing. We put guys in the trucks every week. They're working on this with us and they're like, this is gonna be fantastic because they're usually they, while they do all the preparation as you know, you can do all the preparation. But you, you, you think rory mcilroy is gonna win and lead this event, but you end up with wyndham clark or you end up with somebody that you weren't expecting that we're gonna have to. Yeah. And so how do you get to that, you know, media guide from, you know, three months ago or to his stats right away. So using natural language processing rather than, you know, guys having to write some of the guys now write sql queries, they'll go into the shop engineering and yeah, and then exactly that's what they're gonna move towards. And eventually we'll end up with a reactive system that will basically we look at as an assistive, you know, a i uh experience for our teams.

I love how you're thinking about collecting all this data in telemetry. You've got, you know, light r scans of the course. You've got uh telemetry on the ball itself but you, but you're turning them back around for all your stakeholders. The players themselves, you're giving performance enhancement tips to them based on how they actually performed moments ago, the officiating, the scoring crew, the broadcast crew, we need to talk about the officiating. That's right. That's really cool.

Um kyle, so what's next for veeps? You've got, you mentioned comedy, what are the other avenues you're getting into? And how do you see that uh sort of evolving as your business grows and continues to thrive? Yeah, we just launched our subscription product. So we were ticketed live streaming for years and then we still have ticketed. Uh we just launched what we call it, our beeps all access like an annual pass, our monthly pass to all the content on the beeps platform. So we've been working on expanding our content library. So we've brought back a lot of past concerts, we've brought it. Uh we've been licensing some great shows. Um and we're also um now getting into original content. So we've just started a green light some of our own um artist driven content. So really a space, we, we feel like there is a space open in the streaming world where um the kind of mtv left to be desired where um there was artist driven content that is really about connecting to communities, but doing it in a way that's um premium quality focused on, you know, um delivering that the part of culture being part of culture and music. Very cool.

And last question, then we'll take some questions from the audience. We got about 10 minutes left after that. So evan, we talked about the digital twin concept here at uh the pga tour. Um riot games are digital by nature. They are basically uh running in the cloud natively as a virtual world you're collecting and managing millions of data points per minute for these games. How are you taking that data and enhancing that live experience in the venue or uh on the go for the fans? Yeah. So, you know, we we're, we're lucky, right? Like, you know, scott and his team are doing all kinds of extremely cool stuff around tracking. Like our, we are a digital playing field. So our field tracks itself, our players track themselves. So we get, we get a lot of that work for free ie thousands of brilliant developers who actually built the game for us. Thank you guys.

Um but you know, we because we can collect so much data so easily, it actually turns into a bit of a problem for us, right? Like how do you separate the wheat from the chaff? And how do you actually find the really interesting data that is more than just like here's, you know, your kills, your assists. Like here's how much gold you have. Like we are really trying to push more into that space and because of the amount of data that we have and the amount of data that we have access to and around data we can request from the studio from our studio teams. It really does turn into a problem of like what we find relevance with our audience and you know, and, and it's a journey that we're still, i would say in early days on, like we did some really cool stuff with aws earlier this year around like a win rate prediction that basically chugs through thousands and thousands and thousands of professional games and look through for statistical, you know, indicators of when a team is looking like they've got this thing in the bag, even if the the match looks quite close. So these are the kind of things that we've really started on that journey and putting that into our broadcast and putting that into our audiences hands and then creating experiences around the celebration of that with our, you know, with our casters and with our analysts and helping them, you know, judge these things and provide them similarly, like a lot more capability to enhance the broadcast and to make it more compelling for the audience.

Um you know, next up is, you know, ideally world domination because why the hell not? But the, what we really are looking to do next is to start to, to really sift through this for much more complex capabilities, right? Like a lot of use of, of ml to figure out where these statistically significant actions are occurring that are good predictors or or, or something that might just be fun for our audience. Like here is how many times in the last six years that fake or got a pet to kill, right. These are the kinds of things that would be very hard to look up organically on the fly. But something that we can lean on our systems and our capabilities, whether they be in the cloud, mostly in the clouds in, in order to, to generate and to just crunch through this stuff constantly. Because our player community is massive. It's 100 and 30 million plus people. But our pro audience is much, much, much smaller, right? Like we have a lot, a much smaller audience of professional players that are still generating a lot of data, but they played the games quite differently. Like i suck at our games. I hate to say it but it is true. I suck at our games and i'm not even allowed on the field with half of these guys and which is for the best. So we have to think about them differently than we think about the rest of our audience who doesn't move as fast, who doesn't, who can't see into the future? Like some of these player athletes can that we have and this is where we really have to start to get smarter with not only what can we discern but what can we throw away? Like what is actually probably not something that is resonating what is something that might look interesting, but it turns out it's not really statistically significant. And so this is a journey that i don't think we will ever be done with. But it is a journey that we are, you know, really starting to work much more aggressively on today. And it is one that we think will pay really big dividends in, in satisfaction for the audience because they are data junkies and they really, you know, every time you can show somebody something that they had not thought about or something that, that they remembered from like two matches ago. Like that is the kind of place where we really get that engagement to hype up another level. Yeah, i'm glad you said data geeks because, you know, the fan base is, are their stat junkies. I mean, i, i kind of went down the rabbit hole and doing a little research for this panel looking into all the stats that, uh, folks are out there. I mean, there's, there's dozens of websites out there tracking all these players in every aspect of their game play. It's really amazing that that's developed so quickly into such a robust sport. So, congratulations on that work.

All right. Those are all the questions I have. Do you?"