Beyond Tennis - The AI-Driven Tennis League and Coaching Game

You're listening to Sports Tech Feed, the global sports technology podcast. Welcome back to Sports Tech Feed. Today we have a really exciting episode with Ridley Plummer and Peter Davis talking about Beyond Tennis. Beyond Tennis is Tennis Australia's new app, which is an incredible blend of AI, competition and community.

I recommend this podcast for anyone wanting to see what the future of engagement in sports might look like. We hope to have Ridley and Peter back on the podcast in a later episode to talk more about them specifically. But today is all about Beyond Tennis. Let's get into it.

Peter and Ridley, welcome to Sports Tech Food. Appreciate it. Thanks for having us. Thanks for joining me.

It's great to hear about Beyond Tennis and where Tennis Australia is looking to the future of Web3 and the metaverse. But firstly, what is Beyond Tennis? Beyond Tennis is a free-to-play app that we have designed where the user essentially gets put in the position of a coach and mentor to an AI-generated player. Nice one.

And what was the real motivation for building this out? So I guess everything that we do at Tennis, or in my role in particular is how do we use innovation or new technologies to grow audience? And that's a global audience and typically a younger demographic of audience as well. So not only is it accessibility to the sport, but leveraging technologies that are becoming more readily available to us to enhance the interaction of new users with tennis.

And it really is on the cutting edge of technology. And how did that development look like? What was the arrangements with different parties that you had to bring in to turn it into what it is now? Yeah, it hasn't been an overnight project, certainly.

I think Pete and I have been chatting for or had been chatting for probably 12 months or 18 months about sort of how AI was coming to play in sports and what the potential was for us to bring some of this technology that he and his team were working on to tennis. And we probably conceptualized different products for, I'd say, about six months before we actually got to the solution of what Beyond Tennis is today. And then pretty much started building probably back in August or September with the run-in to launching in January.

There you go. And for those that haven't downloaded the app yet, I jumped on last night and got a bit out of the way. I've got Liam Jackson, I think is his name, as my player. And you can interact with the player through chat and then also train the player as well.

And I can see he's got a tournament coming up tomorrow. What does that sort of tournament look like? What is the core function of the game? Yeah, what we want to do is create an environment where people are sharing in the experience of a tournament.

So it's not that you're going off and kind of gaming in your corner of your bedroom and managing your own football team to win the Champions League. It's more about saying we've got a tournament that's happening. There'll be tournaments that go across the whole year. And each of those tournaments give you an opportunity to get involved and help shape your player to win matches.

So every tournament that happens is teams against teams and players against players. and it creates basically a model where you can watch your player and help your player to play every two or three days across the tournament. So the very first tournament is the Australian Open. It'll run a little longer than the Australian Open that we have here in Melbourne.

And then after that, the players will have a break and then play another tournament somewhere else in the world and they'll play four tournaments across the season and there'll be a winner at the end, which is a team. A team will win at the end, which has one male player and one female player. There you go. And with that, you talked about how it's sort of a community thing and it's not someone gaming by themselves.

How does that work? We all shared in that player's experience. So the training that I contribute to the player and the training you might contribute, Peter, to the same player, is that all added together when it comes to the competition and the tournament? Yeah, exactly that.

So you made a great choice with Liam. I'll help you. I'll do my part if you do your part. But yeah, exactly that.

So you will train Liam on the things that you can help train him on. I'll train him on things I can help train him on. And so when he goes into his next matches, we want to be the guy that Ridd got on his team And so yeah ultimately that conversation happens wherever you want it to happen So you might drop a comment onto his Instagram page and say hey everyone let make sure we train Liam on his second serve this week because I know in the last game he was down a bit. So you can have that conversation wherever you want to have that conversation.

And we see that happening already is that people want to get behind these players and pull together the power of community to help improve them. Yeah, it's really exciting to see. and how do you sort of see the engagement also from brands and sponsors? You know, that's more the community side and the players side, but there's also the brands and sponsorship engagement.

What do you think that will look like moving forward? Yeah, that's been a big part of the design of the product. And one of the reasons that we created it in the first place was to open up additional opportunities for us as a brand and Tennis Australia to potentially commercialise the product as well. So we're very fortunate to have a great partner in Infosys who's come on board as the presenting rights partner of the platform.

And they've also got a team within the league. So the Infosys Aces, who, as you probably know, Liam Jackson represents, but also with his partner, Anya Shah. And so, yeah, we see it as being a great opportunity for us to commercialise down the track. We've created these players that we own the IP of and we can create great stories and identities around and then we can link partners to them in the future as well.

So we see them as though they're a real person or a real asset that we can leverage in market. And as they build their followings and as they build their coaching staff and as they build their profiles online, we can actually utilize them to bring brands and bring promotions and incentives to market as well. So as you would have seen, the chat feature in the app is very intuitive, but we can also then have a one-to-one conversation with a user where we can promote products or incentives or discounts to some of those partners that may come on board down the track.

Yeah, that's really interesting, that chat feature. And how does that sort of work in with generative AI? Are all the chats sort of predefined tree-like sort of decisions in terms of if I say this, it's set in response? Or is there some elements now that are going to be or moving forward are going to be more generative and more creative in that sense?

We definitely see a world where we want to create more freedom around that, around you being able to talk to Liam whenever you want to, to have that conversation. but for now the model is as you described it's kind of a tree-like structure where everything is pre-built everything is predefined and we we let people go off on the direction that they want to so in some ways it's more kind of choose your own adventure than being completely free licensed to reign and roam um i think we'll change that over time i think we'll get there but for now yeah it's about you being able to ever learn everything you want to learn about your player help make decisions that shape their career help help make decisions that shape their off-field lives as well um and so you'll see that rolling out if you if you spend a bit more time in the app you'll see that rolling out and that experience for you to you to dive in and have a good interesting conversation without it being you being able to completely open open language the whole thing there you go and i suppose the other part that's very interesting in the app is is the tournaments in the actual way that the games transpire at the moment you sort of go in and you uh answer a few questions sort of predicting how the game might go.

And then you sort of see an interactive scoreboard about the game. As it progresses, you can see the sets and the games and everything to the end of the match. And then you also get some great sort of feedback in terms of whether the things you predicted were actually part of the game. Do you guys see that part and that engagement growing out into something which is more lifelike in the way that the game is shown?

Is it something that you see that in a few years' time, it might be you can actually see the player playing on a virtual court? Yeah, the short answer is yes. But I was watching a video recently on LinkedIn where people were talking about the rise of indie gaming across the US and in sports gaming as well and the games that are engaging people are not the ones that are saying we have to build the highest fidelity of everything it's about the ones that get gameplay right so for us we will we can't win on having the highest fidelity game experience that won't be how we win but we can win based on being able to build something that you care about being make liam someone that you want to win make liam someone you want to check in with on a daily basis you know if you think about the Tamagotchi experience Everyone remembers Tamagotchi and how long you could keep your little hamster alive or whatever it was And that was because you checked in every day that you fed them you bathed them you played with them And that was a cadence that you had to keep up But it was a little 8-bit character with the smallest screen in the world.

So for us, it's about getting gameplay right more than it is about trying to get fidelity right. We know that technology will race us along with that and in no time we'll be able to say show us a video Liam crunching a backhand down the line but that won't be the biggest thing for us it's it's gameplay first and the visual part that'll come out of it will come out of it yeah that's that's a really smart approach and it does make a lot of sense I know a lot of people that did spend a lot of time on a Tamagotchi back in the day that's for sure how do you see also as well that engagement with beyond tennis and the Australian Open as a physical event.

Do you think that there's opportunities that where, you know, players might or fans might be able to see part of those interactions and the game actually come to life at the Australian Open? Yeah, I think that's a great question and something that we've ideated and talked about. How do we bring this to life as much as possible in the future and whether it be using the technology or possibly advancing technologies that may not even be available to us now. Yeah, how do we bring Liam or Anya or Victoria or some of these players to life more realistically in an environment like the AO?

So I think that's, yeah, it's something that we need to work through and be realistic about the opportunity for people to, in a way, meet these players in some form of real life or virtual reality environment that we might be able to create and then put a headset on someone and they can have a conversation in real time with one of these players or they could be standing on the court with one of them or potentially even playing against them and trying to put their skills against someone that they've potentially coached or one of their one of their athletes opponents as well yeah it's it's super interesting and there's so many great paths that you can take this down with with what's already built and it's going to be really exciting for those initial players who do you sort of see as being the initial growth within the beyond tennis community that's a great question so around our office a lot of people are coaching victoria chambers i'm not sure why what it is um she seems to be the one that a lot of people are leaning into uh we've also noticed a lot of people coaching liam So, yeah, I think there's unique personality traits and unique looks that we can create with these players that people will natively or naturally lean into.

And it depends on where you are from in the world as well. I think one of the things that we've really focused on is creating players from tennis heartlands. So that's your Spain, your France, your Australia, your US, Canada, et cetera. but then also pairing those with growth markets like Indonesia, the Philippines, China, South American regions, et cetera.

So we really want to tap into a global audience who can get behind a local hero as well. So obviously we have Anya from India, we've got Wei from China, and we'll continue to introduce more players as the platform grows as well. So we have 16 players representing eight teams now, But ideally, down the track, we want to grow that to as many as, say, 48 and have a real league where we can almost sub players in and out. There's going to become stories around injuries and retirements and new rookies coming through.

So storytelling is a big part of the platform. And we want people to invest in that storytelling and understand why we're doing that as well. Yeah, it's really interesting. You brought up that idea of the international engagement and the Australian Open is, you know, such an internationally recognised tournament.

How does that engagement work, though, with sort of the international groups and communities versus the Australian community who, you know, has the Australian Open in their backyard every year? Well, this is a 365-day program. This won't be on for three weeks in January. so while the Australian Open is core and central to this the tournaments will tour around the world and as Ryd says we have one Australian player we have one English player we have one Italian player there's definitely a different representation so ultimately this is a totally global platform we'll partner with different tournaments around the world to work on future tournaments that fall within the season of Beyond Tennis And then I think an extra part I would add on to what Ridley said before was when we look at how sports expand around the world it's almost always athletes that take new sports into new territories.

So when you look at the NBA before Yao Ming, and then the effect that Yao Ming had on the NBA, before Yao Ming, there was a million people a week watching the NBA in China. Yao Ming joins the league, 30 million people. You know, when Li Na was playing in the final at the Australian Open, the extra 50 million-ish Chinese people watching is a nice bump, right? And so I think a big thing for us is about using the power of sport to engage people, get them playing more tennis, help them fall in love with the sport through gaming, which we see a lot through FIFA, has done a great job of doing that in the US, for example.

And so this is a totally global play. It starts here, the first tournament's here, and then we go on the road and we may not be back until the final of season one, and then we'll be back for the Australian Open next year again. So, yeah, there's definitely a very strong international flavour to that as well. Yeah, absolutely.

Sorry, Callum. I can add a little bit more to, I guess, the objective behind that for Tennis Australia as well is we see this as sort of an opportunity where a rising tide lifts all ships in a way that we want people to engage with tennis 24-7, 365. So our platforms like AO Adventure on Roblox and some of the other esports that we're entertaining and involved in are really always-on products. And that's also been led out of the growth of social media and platforms like YouTube that are literally always-on.

And when we do look at how we grow not just the AO brand or the Tennis Australia brand, but tennis more holistically. There's platforms and opportunities like Beyond Tennis or YouTube or some more traditional social medias that we kind of need to be playing there if we want to be talking about being the biggest Grand Slam and the most watched and the most engaged with. It makes sense to be sort of fishing where the fish is swimming if you like. Yeah, 100%.

And looking through the app as it is now to try to build that international engagement, You mentioned earlier that there's platforms like Instagram where communities will start to build. But do you also see that community potentially building within the app itself? Yeah, look, I think a part of what we want to do is not force this whole experience to happen through the app. So I think you naturally have to look at different channels, different ways people are using media around the world.

if we say everything has to come through this gate and everything has to exist here that might hold us back a bit more than saying look Wei Liang should have a channel on Weibo in China so let's let people talk to him over there as well as through the app the app's important the app will drive a lot a lot enough will happen through the app if the engagement happens anywhere so yeah I think that the community can be can become a much stronger part of this does it need to be something that we wrap up inside the app experience?

I don't think so because that's not how sport works. You know, I was talking to someone the other day. I was playing some tennis on Wednesday night and the course were full, which is great for Ridley and the crew to hear. But I was talking to someone about the Daniel Collins stuff that came out of the Open and, you know, her really showing personality and bringing something really interesting in that we haven't seen a lot of.

and he hadn't seen it. It was a guy I was playing tennis with, a big tennis fan, but you've got to understand that people are not always on the same pace. People are not always using the same apps and not always using the same experiences, but we have to let these things organically flow out and we want conversation to happen in text messages, private WhatsApp conversations, open forums like Reddit and Facebook and X and Weibo and everything else. So I think it's about leaning into where the communities are happening, giving them the ability to run what they want to run and then providing the core functionality that we do through the app.

Yeah, nice. It's looking really great. And it's what you guys have built so far is really exciting. And I think people should really jump online or jump onto their phones and give it a go.

I know the Google App Store and the Apple App Store as well. You can download it there.