Reimagining Fan Engagement with Presidio Captivate

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Digital transformation has become one of the buzziest of buzzwords. This podcast is where we decode and deconstruct digital technologies, strategies and best practices that are impacting the way companies deliver value their customers. No buzzwords nobs, Let's get to it. Hello everyone, and welcome back to the Digital Dcode, brought to you by Presidio and our partners over at Cisco.

Today's talk track is super timely as we are right at the end of hockey season and nearing the Stanley Cup kickoff, and it might actually be the end of the Stanley Cup depending on when this episode comes out, but either way, it's the perfect time for us to talk about one of our newer solutions that we launched at this year's NAB conference, and that is Presidio Captivate. Joining me from the Presidio side, I have Near Apshaw, Managing Principle of Industry Solutions at Persidio and Jason dworkin head of Industry Specialist Business Development in the Americas at AWS.

How are you guys doing today? Doing great? Alec doing great? Happy to be here, Well, I'm happy to help have you on.

I mean, this is a super exciting, very new solution to the industry and it is solving a lot of issues and problems that we've been seeing a lot of challenges and Sonior, I've actually first off, I'm going to kick it off to you. Can you just talk talk a little bit about the trends. Will definitely go over what Presidio Captivate is in a second, but I want to just talk a little bit about the trends that you've been seeing in fan engagements and what challenges there were there.

Yeah, great question, Alex. I mean, what we've been seeing over the last several months, in several even decades, is the fact that fans are not as engaged in sporting events, and that's really due to the amount of content as well as the sources of content that's been available. And really what we've noticed is that whether it be in a venue or be in streaming app we're seeing declines and the engagement levels across sporting events and other types of events from the fan due to the fact that there's a second screen device, this nasty little device that sits on your hand that people are scrolling on.

Great example that I saw the other day to illustrate this, as I was with a major sports team sitting with them and their daughter was watching We're watching a big game on the television and his daughter was sitting there going like this, what are you doing. It's like, Oh, I'm trying to stay engaged with what's going on with the stats when the big screen and the TV was right there. So it really highlights the fact that. Fans are trying to engage and be more engaged in the content because there's so much of it that they want to be immersed in very different areas.

So, you know, what we really try to do is take the learnings that we've had, you know, and this builds on the rich history that we've had with Amazon and sport Leaves, and learn how do we capture and harness that and really simplify the solution as we go forward. Yeah. Absolutely, And I mean it makes total sense now that we do have iPhones which have more capabilities than we've ever seen before, You're going to want to have more engaging content on there that is relating to the game that you're watching on the big screen.

And I think this is where we kind of go back to captivating and try to introduce it. I'm a very simple person when I think about captivating and how we looked at it's a solution, but really it's a collect of lego blocks. We call them accelerators at Presidio, and it's a way to capture content and allow you to stack solutions on top of each other. And many of those come back at the heart of what AWS does in terms of leveraging the great components and solutions and tools that I have from Media Live to Media Connect, to direct Connect and other things from Amazon to help layer and build those solutions.

To simplify the experience I used through the three words to describe Captivate is really about simplify. We simplify for the operations to get and bring in content. We make it simple to catalog the content so you could actually drive personalization. We then enhance it, right.

Enhancing is creating that viewership, right, taking the tailor, applying mL and AI models that's associated with content, enhancing that to make it available to the user, and then we create the experience, right, how do we position it on the content? And this is where we have used the tagline your content, your way, so you become in charge of the content, right. Really kind of customizing the experience for each fan and however they want to engage with whatever sport they're watching at that given moment.

Exactly right and awesome. You know what I'd love to do is you know, there's a lot of things we talk about here, from content to content owners to content rights, and we truly try to design this in partnership with AWS to really fit a framework across leagues teams and coaches, venues, and even the fans themselves. And when you think. About it, it's not just how you create the fan experience for the fan, but how do you build that platform to really immerse everybody in the overall experience?

Right I think, Aws, Jason, you might want to chat about this data. BS does a great. Job of bringing and surfacing a lot of that data to light. When you think about the fan engagement from F one to tour of ads, I mean, they do such a great job of doing that and we are truly blessed to be partnered with them as we start to launch and introduce these new solutions.

Near I think you hit on a couple great points. I mean, as you look out at the industry right now, you're at this inflection point for convergence. I mean between sports, between media and entertainment and games, all of this stuff is coming together and I think that's shaping the way people want to consume content. So if you think about what Fortnite's doing by hosting live concerts in a game console just for players to go and watch, I mean that's huge.

You never would have done that before, and sports is no different. I mean people are coming up more and more with that personalized viewing experience where they could sit there and pick their own camera angles, see the stats happening in real time, check how their fantasy football or basketball or hockey team is performing, purchase the jersey of their favorite team, order Uber Eats and have the food delivered to their house at halftime. And then oh, by the way, go buy the merchandise and have it delivered to you on Amazon Prime, Like what else do you want as a fan?

I mean that gives you that experience, And I mean I spent the early part of my career in professional sports and my job was to engage the fans in the venue for home football games, and just how the information and the consumption models have changed since then is crazy. And I think you're one hundred percent right on the mobile aspect of things. I mean, the. PGA Tour relies very heavily on their tour cast app and with all the data that they collect on the golf course and scoring to tell you what the flight of the ball was, where that ball bounced, how it landed, what's happening.

You could look and follow a swipe for every single shot that's taken on the golf course and what they recently rolled out was, now, instead of just seeing dots on the screen, how do we add some commentary and using tools like generative AI to create that commentary to tell you that it wasn't just Scotti Scheffler hit a three hundred yard drive, but why is that drive significant? What's coming up next? And really putting some perspective around that. It's helping people understand the sport more and follow the golfers who they care the most about.

And I think you're going to see that trend continue across the other leagues as well. Since so much content is out there and so much data is there to be consumed, it's how these organizations are going to start to morph that and make that meaningful to every single viewer on whatever device that they are. It's no longer we're going to create content for television. It's now we're going to create content to meet the user exactly where they want to be at that point in time.

And that's a great comment because just to piggyback off of that, Jason, it's one of the reasons we've built Katua with the ability to do custom highlights or we even go into a coach and I'd say, here's a custom play or event that you want to see, and you want to capture those from individual viewpoints or angles. I mean, how many of you know that there are a number of cameras around a venue, right from the goal line cam to the spider cam to all those things. Yeah, I mean a lot of people, but how many people actually see what's happening?

Right. Captivate puts the power of those cameras in the hands of the individual user in the video of the coaches. I think one of the pieces that really struck me recently as we started to talk about captivate outside of traditional professional sports, as you go to college, Kativate really helps you create those custom highlights to expose. And drive nil revenue.

Right. One of the big pieces that I've found talking to coaches at large universities is the fact that they have struggles retaining their talent, right, there's a fifty percent turnover year over year. How do we make it easier for them to give their players the opportunity to exploit those nil dollars? This is where Cattivate comes in, not just from the teams of their leagues, but also starts to go into showing real tangible results for the player themselves.

Oh absolutely, I mean to your comment on the cameras right, like, there's one hundred and eighty cameras around the golf course just for the purpose of scoring. But again, you know, when you start thinking about what you can do with these video feeds and how you can personalize this, the other thing that these organizations and going right to that nil comment, need to think about now is how do you monetize this. How do you start to understand who that consumer is. You know that sending me an ad for shampoo is not going to get you very far, but if you feed me an ad for a razor, that might actually yield to click through it.

So now as we start tailoring this broadcast not just with statistics and camera angles, but now with personalized ad content that speaks to me based on what you know about me, the possibilities are endless. Now for these organizations to actually see this as a revenue generating tool as opposed to just a cost center to create that experience, which. I think is really great point because a lot of times when we start talking to leagues and broadcast where it's coming from the tech.

Side, of things. We always sit in the space of, oh, how are we going to improve operations? But what we've done with castivating partnership with AWS is really bring to light the other side of that equation is really about really focusing on profitability. How do we generate more revenue, not just ad revenue, but like the merchandising piece.

The one that I really like is that I was talking to another sporting channel and at the end of every game or every match, I always see this as like they come and want something signed, right, But as a viewer at home, I never get to experience that. Why not if you know me through what I'm watching, have it directly sent It's ten fifteen to twenty dollars. What a great way to create loyalty and stimulate loyalty. And this is where the pieces of cativy start to really come together to help to your point, Jason, drive that profitable piece and the profitability part of the equation.

Yeah, and really showing how you know that fan and how you know that audience because you can capitalize that on that. And you know, I work for a CTO once who famously said not all content drives revenue, but all content drives cost and they're one hundred percent right. So as you think about how sports have such an international flare and flavor to them, and you're creating world feeds and you're doing all of this localization, well now you could start to think about that ad revenue model in that case too.

Just because I'm creating this one feed doesn't mean I can't have derivatives that have advertising for Japan and Australia and the UK and the US. Having that flexibility maximizes the earning potential that these organizations have, and again, adding that hyper personalized layer into that is going to spark those outcomes even more and really give the fans that experience. And I think, you know, we see this all the time. It was, like I said a few minutes ago, from one interface, if I can order the match special that they were giving out at that event and have it delivered to me two days later.

That's awesome. I mean, it creates that affinity for the brand, It creates that lifelong fandom, and more importantly, as the organization, you're collecting a ton of data about who my favorite player is, what my demographics are. I saw that I ordered that give out or giveaway in kid sizes. Clearly I must have children also, So it all starts to build this massive ecosystem of data not just about the game being played, but about the attendees, both in venue and virtually.

The possibilities become endless with what you can do with that. I think that's right. We spent a lot of time as Jason talked about the fan right. What we're also seeing is that I don't know how many people view experienced it, but I've had a college athlete student athlete, and when we go into venues, I never got to see any of his games, right because or not where they're not on camera, they're not on big events, they're not across ESPN broadcasts.

Right. So captivate personalizes by bringing this technology and tools down to the lowest level to allow universities and other people show games that are typically want have shown before. And just as the stat you know that we saw from some of this, as you get fans and families more engaged, you get a twenty to thirty percent upcrease. In engagements and dollars that go back to the university.

Right. So directly tying the use of sports and video to the family generates revenue for university, right. I just wanted to bring that up because it's a different side of when we think about the fan absolutely. And you guys have just given me so many examples of how you know why the breadth is how much you can do through prosidio captivating, like right from the top of the food chain, you know, the NHL down to the universities.

Are there any really cool revenue driving use cases that forward thinking content and rights owners are currently doing. I'll take an example that we've worked on where we've worked with a major league and one of the challenges. That they have they had content from the nineteen sixties. Oh wow, it was sitting in a vault somewhere, right, And if it wasn't for somebody going into a room and saying, hey, we have all this content, it would be gone.

And we were able to work with them and basically say, here's all this content, let's catalog it. Going back to what I talked about earlier in terms of enhancing the. Experience, let's catalog it as we digitize it. And what we've been able to do is be.

Able to create historical searchable content that you can tie back to relevant events I call it bringing the past to the present. Right, that's a use case and an opportunity that wasn't available before. Right, That's cool. Yeah, And I think what you're seeing that the leagues do is we're in the era of alternate telecasts and alternate broadcasts and again going back to how the fan wants to consume.

But you've seen the NHL do this with Big City Greens and transforming all the hockey players into animated characters to appeal to a different demographic. You've seen broadcasts like Thursday Night Football have those alternate feeds that specifically cater to people who want to look at the All twenty two camera or see all of the stats coming in from next gen stats and create that personalized viewing experience. And I think as this continues to go, and as you've said, from the top leagues to the universities, this creates potential new revenue streams and again building that next crop of fan and building that next demographic that they want to go after.

I think this is what's going to happen is the alternate broadcast isn't going to be known as an alternate anyone. It's going to be that personalized journey that says this is how I, Jason like to watch my sporting events, and this is my configuration and my view and my layout. My daughter might have a completely different one because of she wants to monitor the social media feed so she could comment on that too. But everybody's gonna have a different experience and a different feeling.

And what we know of how sports are broadcast on television today is going to be the old standard very quickly as we start using the technology around us to morph and shape what that experience is person by person by person and near off to your point, I mean with the technology that's there, the expandable and burstable services like you mentioned some with AWS Elemental, you have this flexibility now to provision what you need, spin down what you don't, and tailor that from your professional game to your high school sports happening in a field somewhere, to create that same viewer experience and that experience for families.

That only is going to help drive fandom, it's going to help bring new fans in, and more importantly, it's going to push the boundaries of the technology here to make it possible to appease all these audiences. Yeah, and I really love that point, Jason, because you hit out on a nerve while I was out on a conversation last week talking about cost right and everybody and you would know this better. Everybody goes to that Caulif I move everything to the cloud, it's going to cost me so much more money.

But to your point, you can scale up and scale down the services right. You use what you require right, and that's the big value added. And component of how we do things. And going back to the simplification, a lot of people don't spend time.

Looking at the AWS services and the crisis. We help you do that with Captivate to make it economic and affordable for you to get into the game. And I think you know you amplified too. You did a great project for an archive migration and to add and enrich the metadata or the information about that content.

And people do that because they want to make sure they don't lose those gems and they don't lose those moments. But what if you knew that my favorite player from the sixties, seventies, eighties was and you started to push me content probably going to consume it. So now that content that you just digitize, that you just move is generating revenue and not just generating cost because you're using it, you're putting it in the eyes of the fans, you're bringing it back to life, and you're thinking about other creative mechanisms.

Again, people joke all the time from a generative AI standpoint, right, what if it was Arnold Palmer playing Scotti Scheffler at TPC Sawgrass vintage Arnold Palmer Well, Generative AI can help you build that and create that type of experience which probably appeals to a specific demographic and if you could pick that matchup, that would be super cool. And again starts to give those organization that insight to who your favorite players are, what do you like to see, And now I can start to make that archive work for me smarter and driving more eyeballs, adding more advertising revenue and creating an experience for the fan that they can't get anywhere else.

And just to amplify that. To piggy back off of that golf analogy, I was just with a CIO from a major golf brand I won't say the name, and we ended up talking about what if you could put the fan playing the pro at the same time on the same course, Like what a great experience, yeah, right, and the coup tools, the cameras to be able to capture all that stuff. That's what we've harnessed with this awis captivate type of solution. What I also want to emphasize here is that this partnership isn't just with sports in itself, Like media is pervasive through every type of organization, and we've been in discussions like I had a conversation with it news outlet.

Right, can I personalize my right from news a remote capture and video? How do I personalize and tailor those two different areas? How can I as a political candidate think about my speeches and deliver the right messages? So bringing out Jason's point of view of like, hey, my daughter wants to see one thing and I want to see a different thing.

The use cases are endless. Sports is just the first pointy tip of the spear of how we've gone to market with this. But the possibilities are endless, right, And this is this is where I go back to the building blocks. If you create the right legos and the building blocks, you then can stack and build solutions on top of that.

Yeah. Absolutely, Wherever you want to go, wherever you want to go. I mean it's so new. I mean, PSIDI will captivate.

I mean when did we really kick it off near av Was it just at NEAB? Was that when we kind of just put it out there to the public. Yeah, we put it out to the public at NABA. We're really excited about that.

We get great feedback in partnership with AWS. That was awesome at that event. I'll make a plug for like. One of the big things from a prosidio perspective is that we built it in less than eight weeks.

Oh wow. Right, we went from zero day I'm going to call it hero in eight weeks. And we did it by leveraging some of the core tenants that we have inside of Persidio from We have a tool called high Modernize and high Build where you can take and use legacy code because remember a lot of the components that we had were built from experiences that we've done from sporting teams and leagues in the past, and we're able to take that, modernize that, and deliver that in record time. Wow.

And it just can keep on evolving as we as we go forward and we keep on you know, making the solution become real for you know, right now for sports, but in the future, like you said, political candidates, media. Really there is so many things that we can do with this. But I do want to ask you a question like, what are some of the results and benefits that you've been seeing from your customers using persidio Captivate up to this point. Yeah, and I'll take some of This is a great question.

Please Jason, if you have AT's on your side, chime in as well. What we've been working with and working through companies like Deloyte and others are getting data In one specific area, we talked about revenue and monetization, and working with a large organization and a sporting organization, they saw with using video and using social media and creating tailored components to drive personalization, a ten percent increase in revenue might not sound a lot, but ten percent across billions of dollars, it's pretty huge.

More importantly, when you think about another pieces we've seen, you know, people like to do fantasy sports and betting. As we created more engagements and links with the fantasy leagues and links with betting and applications where applicable and legal, they saw twenty percent growth in participation and user growth. Right. We saw Jason mentioned earlier the world feeds.

Right, we've been able to see and show you know about a fifteen to twenty five percent increase in engagement for protectular Japanese viewers for a golf event example, or a different thing, or increases in watch parties in different areas and more. Partly, I go back to what I talked about is as we've built these solutions and enable them for families, we've seen a thirty percent increase in social and donor funding. We in partnership with looking at the stats out there. So these are all anecdotal components as we've worked across the organization on taking data from other pieces to show how fan immersion can improve the.

Revenue and the profitably portion of the equation. Jason, did I miss anything anything you want to add there? Like? No, I think you're right.

We're seeing organizations take these speeds and use them in multiple ways. And that's not spinning up multiple control rooms, that's not bringing in additional personnel. It's giving them a lot of flexibility to use some of these automated tools to create these more personalized or alternate experiences. And I think bringing that convergence again together of not just thinking about the screen that's sixteen by nine, but also thinking about how you would reformat for nine by sixteen and appealing to that audience.

Again, doesn't mean you need different cameras, it doesn't mean you need a different control room. There are tools there that will do that for you. So it makes it more advantageous and easier on ramp for these organizations to think about all of these different ways they want to program to their viewers and where they are, versus thinking about the list of outputs that they need to create. And I think the time savings and the cost savings aligned very much with what you had just rattled off.

Awesome, Yeah, do you have anything else tod here? No, I just want to say I'm really excited about this. I'm excited about the engagement that we've had with the Amazon team as we go forward, and the ability to really think about how we revolutionize traditional personal viewing and broadcasts as we go forth. I think we're ushering in I've been broadcasting for thirty five years, and I think this is the first time I've actually been excited about a transition that's happening in this industry and making things going forward.

And I'll end on a note that you talked about earlier. It's like, if you think about captivate, it's simplify, enhance an experience. We're doing that across the viewership and improving fan immersion. Jason, do you have any anything you want to end on before I close us out today?

No, I think I'm good. Well, I mean, this is just it's so exciting to see, you know, like Nirv just said, we're broadcasting is going, how the fan experience is changing. This is just such a like not to simplify it even more, but it's just fun. And there's also so many benefits that can come from it from using this solution, which is Prisidio Captivate.

So I'm really excited, you know, see where the fan experience goes and over the next couple of years or so, see what personio Captivate you know, brings to the table. So we might have to schedule another podcast here in the next year or so to say, hey, you know, where are we now and what have we been able to accomplish through this solution. But I mean, super exciting stuff. Thank you both so much for joining me on the podcast, and thank you for everyone for tuning into this episode of The Digital Dcode.

Please rate, review, and subscribe to The Digital Dcode wherever you are listening right now, and make sure you connect with myself, Nirav and Jason and follow Prosidio and Cisco on LinkedIn to stay in the know for all things tech and all things Prosidio Captivate. Tune in next month for another episode. Thank you everyone, Thank you Alb, thank you. Navigating the digital transformation of your business is no joke.

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