Tom Washington: Hello, everyone. Good morning. Good afternoon, depending on where you're tuning in from around the world. Welcome to our webinar today, entitled The Future of InPlay, What's Changing and Why It Matters. My name is Tom Washington. I'm the Marketing Director at Genius Sports. I'll be your host for today. We're going to give it a little bit of time just for the rest of the audience to join. But while they're doing that, I'm just going to point out that there is some extra reading for you to pass the time in the download section. You'll find some links to things like webinar, previous podcasts, articles. There's a step-by-step vet vision guide in there for you as well. So feel free to peruse that while we wait to get going. As you know, I assume you know because you're joining, we'll be diving into BetVision today, which we believe is going to shape how we think about betting products in the years to come. And that is the first truly integrated and immersive betting experience. I'm delighted to say we've had a ton of interest in this topic. So thank you to all of you for joining from around the world. The session today is going to last about 45 minutes. There is going to be about 10, 15 minutes for a Q&A at the end. We do encourage you, though, to ask questions throughout the session. You don't have to wait to the end. What we'll do is if I can, I'll ask them as the session goes on. If not, we'll leave them to the end. And if not that, then we promise to answer your questions directly after the session is finished. You can also use the links in this app to book a better vision demo with our team. And please, if you do have time, there's a survey at the end of the webinar that we'd love you to answer as well. So I'm delighted also to say that we have two great speakers to cover this topic with us today. The first of whom is Matt Fleckerstein. Matt is a seasoned product management executive with a successful track record of launching innovative new products for the likes of Salesforce, Microsoft and Disney. And for the past two years, we've been lucky enough to have him as our chief product officer at Genius Sports. Next up is Matt Stevenson. Matt is our Global Partnerships Director at Genius Sports. He joined some 20 years ago and has been instrumental to the company's commercial growth. He's not only seen it all at Genius, but in the betting industry as a whole. So he's a great person to have to bring rich perspective to this topic. Before we jump into it, we'd just like to run a quick poll and take a bit of a pulse check on how you guys in the audience think about what we will call for now the watch and bet experience. So when thinking about the ability to bet on and watch a game at the same time, which of these capabilities excites you the most? Or perhaps we should say, which do you think would drive the most value for your sports book today? So I'll give you a couple of seconds to read these. But ultra low latency streams, prop markets integrated into the stream, contextual market recommendations, player and team stats integrated into the stream, or personalized bet tracking. So I'll just give you a little bit of time just to do those. And we'll come back to the poll answer a bit later in the session. OK, last chance. Awesome. Thank you very much for doing that. So for those of you who don't know Genius Boards, I'm just going to spend a couple of seconds talking about who we are and what we do. Working from the top down. So Genius Sports works with some of the largest leagues and federations in the sporting world. Lots of these badges, logos you'll recognize here, and lots of these deals, these partnerships involve the provision of official data. So what that means is for the most popular sports in the world and the ones that bet on the most, Genius Sports has the fastest and most accurate data to power live betting experiences. We also work with hundreds of brands and agencies around the world, helping them engage and advertise to sports fans with ad tech and marketing services that are built for the sports and betting industries specifically. We work with dozens of broadcasters around the world, ranging from the huge linear giants through to local streaming firms to take their content to the next level, which we'll learn a bit more about in a minute. And then for most of you on the call, I guess this last row is what you know us most for. So for about 25 years, we've been working in the sports betting industry. Many of you will know us as Bet Genius, stretching all the way back to those days and our role as pioneers in live trading. And today, there is barely a sportsbook in the world that we don't work with. But particularly for that part of the audience that knows us for that kind of historical business and those strengths in betting, it's really important, I think, to just pause and think about what Genius Sports has become today. And actually, it's far, far broader. than being in the betting industry. So as this slide shows, we are already revolutionizing live sports content. And through things like augmentation, through 3D recreations, through visual storytelling, we are already changing the way that fans see and understand and enjoy sports in many, many ways. And again, we'll come back to that a little bit later. But first, now let's get into the meat of this session. We're here to talk about that vision and to try and explain to the audience why we think this is such an important launch for the industry. That vision we launched in September 2023. This was in partnership with the NFL, and it marked the first time ever that customers could place wages from within the live video player itself. So a really crucial moment for us and a great product launch in the U.S. as it was then. Fast forward to this year, we have now launched BetVision for Soccer. It's available now with lots of great content coming down the pipe. And we're pleased and excited to say that BetVision for Basketball is right around the corner. So more news on that soon, I'm sure. OK, so I want to bring in our experts now and I'm going to bring Matt Fleckenstein in first. So, Matt, to you, when you think about live sports consumption, which is really essentially what we're talking about here, what are the wider industry trends you are seeing and which of those trends do you think the sports betting industry and sports betting operators need to pay the most attention to? Over to you.
Matt Fleckerstein: Thanks, Tom. It's a great question. Look, I think there's lots of research out there around how, you know, fan engagement behaviors are changing and shifting. A couple years ago when I was at Disney ESPN, I think some of the early research raised some alarm bells, right, where we were kind of Thinking that, hey, younger generations of fans, today's fans just aren't engaging as much as they had been previously. But the reality is, as you take deeper, you realize, no, they're just as engaged. They're just as fanatic about sports as ever. They're just really engaging in different ways. You know, gone are the days of kind of fans just wanting to passively sit back and watch a sport. They really want it to be a more interactive, more stats-driven, more immersive type of experience. You know, at the same time, multi-screen experiences are just the norm these days. You know, having kind of a a big screen up in my living room while you're also on your phone is just the normal way of interacting with sports. The second screen viewing and creating these second screen experiences is just a thriving space. The recent research from Deloitte looking at some of these behaviors, you know, called out that more than two thirds of sports fans want their sport to be more interactive. They want to do more than just sit back and watch. They want to be a participant kind of in the sporting event. And that can mean, hey, while I'm watching a sporting event, I want to be gaming. I want to be betting. I want to be engaging with my friends. I want to be controlling the views and the angles from which I'm seeing kind of what's happening on the pitch or the court. I want the ability to kind of have one-click commerce or one-click types of transactions. And so in today's digital world, that's just become the expectation and increasingly demand from these fans. At the same time, I think you're starting to see in sports what's already happened in you know, movies and television more broadly, which are these more personalized, contextually recommended experiences. You know, there's so many sports going on in so many countries around the world. How do you know what's happening at any point in time? And how can algorithms and recommendation engines do a better job of knowing who you are and delivering personalized content, personalized betting opportunities to you? So I think, you know, as you look across the trends, lots of shifts in behavior, but all of them point toward kind of these more immersive, more interactive types of experiences.
Tom Washington: Given those signals around fan behaviour and the demands of particularly younger fans, do you think that sports and maybe even in particular sports betting has been slightly slow off the mark to think about these and how they might be serving these fans better?
Matt Fleckerstein: Yeah, look, I think there's lots of opportunities for sports to adopt technology. I actually think we're in one of these cycles where that's rapidly picking up and we're seeing this rapid rate of, you know, kind of to use the phrase digital transformation in the world of sports as well, right? You're seeing everything from kind of some of these features and capabilities coming to market. to, you know, kind of started to bring, you know, a lot of the tried and true lessons from kind of gaming into the market. Things like how do you kind of track kind of bets more effectively, right? How do you create these visual experiences that kind of let a user participate, you know, kind of in the action? How can you touch the screen, touch the players on the screen and, you know, kind of get feedback? a certain experience as a result of kind of what you as the user are doing. So I think you're seeing this rapid adoption of a lot of this. I think it's been slow, but it's kind of one of these situations where the time is now. And, you know, if you don't really kind of lean in and embrace it, you know, there's always risk of falling behind.
Tom Washington: Yeah, absolutely. And Matt Stevenson, so to take this sort of even closer to the betting world, if you like, you've been in the industry a long time. Looking back over the years, what's your take on, I suppose, how the existing or legacy streaming product that sportsbooks offer today, how that's performed and whether it's fit for purpose effectively?
Matt Stevenson: Yes, it's a really interesting question, Tom. You know, the 20-odd years of being a genius has probably been two, three, maybe four sort of big leaps forward from a product perspective. I've got absolutely no doubt that BetVision is one of these big leaps forward. If you think about that period of time, loads has changed in the industry. The industry has evolved massively, you know, fast. Huge amounts of in-play, move to mobile, different products, features and everything coming in. But weirdly enough, the sort of watch and bet, traditional watch and bet experience hasn't really changed in that period at all. Still tends to be portrait mode. You've got this small screen, latency that's sort of all over the place, odds and data that don't match up with the stream you're watching. At best, it's sort of confusing. And I think maybe as an industry, we've been a bit complacent and just sort of shrugged and said, well, that's just sort of how it is. You know, so from an operator perspective, it's also really difficult to quantify. So what that's meant is they have considered reducing their streaming budgets, maybe cutting them entirely. So then as Matt Fleckenstein says, at the same time, you've got this new generation coming through. I've got two kids, both Gen Z or Gen Z, whatever we're going to say. And that generation clearly isn't just going to accept the a very dull sort of transactional, outdated experience, at best dull and transactional, really. Either it's frictionless and intuitive, or they're just not going to bother. They're absolutely just going to skip it and not going to bother. So back to sort of genius and bet vision. When we had this opportunity to work with the NFL initially and now soccer and basketball to overhaul what people call watch and bet, it felt like sort of perfect timing. The moons or the stars were aligning, you know. You know, step forward a couple of years, we're integrated across 365, DraftKings, FanDuel, Caesars, dozens of others. And what we've created by solving the latency issue, by putting all of this engagement functionality and personalization into the experience, we've created a brand new standard for watch and bet, which is now BetVision, the new standard. But actually, I think we've created a brand new standard for in-play in general.
Tom Washington: Yeah. And taking a sort of sidestep, if you like, into the into that that sort of core in play product, if you like. I think it's there's no doubt that it's been the key area of investment and innovation industry wide across the past few years, particularly in the sort of the post PASPA world. The opportunity is enormous. What are your thoughts on that evolution? And then I guess, you know, to bring it back to the topic of today, how do you see those two components of the sort of the existing streaming product and the investment in prop bets, micro bets and so on that's driving quite a lot of growth? How are those components working together, if at all?
Matt Stevenson: Well, again, I think sort of stars are aligning in that regard, but it's probably because I'm ancient. But just to sort of take a step back again, you know, if you look in the pre-PASPA, pre-US regulation world, that. 15 years or whatever, that I was around, 50 to 20 years, was sort of characterized by an in-play arms race. That's what happened. We had an in-play arms race over that time. In-play became, you know, 70, 75% in many markets of overall turnover. That in turn became a huge catalyst for growth of many of the biggest operators, the big beasts, right? So 365 and the Flutter brands and the Entain brands and dozens of others. And also sort of Genius and other similar companies to us in the industry is a catalyst for our huge growth. Post PASPA, I think everyone just sort of assumed that the same thing would happen. America would just quickly catch up and Inplay would become the dominant share of wallet, if you like. That hasn't happened or it's happening more slowly. So I think in 2021, it was about 20%, 21% of turnover was generated by Inplay. That was up to 30% last year. Although as an aside, I think DK reported in Q1 they're up to 50%. So perhaps we are moving towards that inflection point. But what we've got to recognize from a product perspective, and so we're talking about The biggest operators in the world, you know, yes, they might be joined at the hip with European organizations, but they're the ones that are often driving the development here. So the share of wallet in the US is being driven by bet builders, by same game parlays and, you know, some of the fast markets as well. So, again, timing for Genius and BetVision. We thought we wanted to overhaul streaming, watch and bet, as it was called previously, to create this BetVision product. But we needed to look at what was going on globally in the market to pull those learnings in. And so, you know, with player props front and center, we've got this touch to bet functionality. We'll show everyone later. No one else has ever done this before, but player props are front and center as our in-play bet builders, as our cash out, as our track my bet. So you've got all of these bits of functionality that are now within the landscape view. You're watching it on a big screen. So, you know, I think that you'll continue to see InPlay growing fast in the U.S. with BetVision encouraging engagement in that regard. But it will also be leaning on the products that are prevalent in the U.S. And, you know, I mean the player props and the bet builders. And then I suspect that will filter through to the rest of the world as well. Does that roughly answer the question? Okay.
Tom Washington: It answers the question very well. Thank you. Yes, and I think that we've got some other great questions coming in. in the Q&A box. We'll probably come to them in the next section. But if you've got the question yourself, please just keep putting them in there because that's really great to see. So, look, I think that sets the scene really well and goes a long way to help us understand why we're investing in this product and the need for the industry to kind of rethink the betting experience. Now we want to sort of zoom into the product in a lot more detail. starting with a little short sizzle video, which should pop up on the left-hand side of your screen about now. Okay, so quick recap on the answers to our poll here. Prop markets integrating the stream was the number one choice of you guys, but interesting to see that it's fairly well spread out. So I think the nice thing is that we're going to take a bit of a deeper dive into some of these now, but that's interesting to see. Prop markets integrated into the stream is the top choice. Okay. Matt Fleckenstein, I would like you to take center stage now, please. If you could give us a bit of an overview of how BetVision was built, why we pursued this strategy and highlight some of the key features and functionality, that would be fantastic.
Matt Fleckerstein: Yeah, I think you probably saw some of these kind of in the video, but if you just, you know, before drilling into specific features, maybe step back for a moment. We talked about this changing shift in kind of consumer trends and behaviors. And, you know, really we factored those in from the ground up while we were designing this and really built it around what I refer to as the three I's. How do you create experiences that are immediate, right? Ultra low latency. As the action's happening, you're experiencing it. How do you create experiences that are intelligent? It kind of knows what you're interested in. It knows what's happening in the actual match or event itself and can feed up contextual recommendations. And how do you kind of make it immersive? And so if you kind of think about those three I's, immediate, intelligent, and immersive, they really manifest themselves in a variety of key features, which you're seeing kind of up here on the screen, right? Obviously, team players and stats, you know, the ability to kind of have these things updated and constantly updated as the action's happening. It's not just stats that get updated. It's the odds that get updated. I did see that there was a question in the window around, you know, hey, look, is it just genius odds that are available? And that's certainly not the case. Like, we work with all of the Sportsbook partners. If you're producing your own odds, not using kind of our genius trading service. um and and you know we can render those in in near real time um in the application itself like we do with many of the players like draftkings fanduel um bet365 et cetera right so the ability to kind of render these low latency team players and stats and and live odds The ability to allow you to have an integrated bet slip. The ability to place a bet is always just one click away. You can look at our touch to bet feature. Because we have a lot of underlying intelligence and we have this knowledge of tracking kind of where the players in the ball are on the pitch, you know, you as a user can touch any given player, you can immediately see their stats, you can see kind of their prop bets that you could make. And within, you know, kind of a click or two through that integrated bet slip, you could place your bet. You know, you've got this ability to have these contextual market recommendations. This allows you to get recommendations about the match that you're watching based on what's actually happening in real time on the pitch. So it can present new and interesting betting opportunities based on what's going on in that match. But it also has the ability to guide you and provide recommendations to maybe another match that you want to go check out. Something else is happening that's of interest to you based on your past behavior, or something else is happening kind of that's interesting in the match, and there is a moment that you may want to go jump into. And the ability to kind of serve up those contextual recommendations and allow you to kind of click on those and get personalized, contextually relevant information at your fingertips is a core part of this. And so, again, kind of a variety of different features that we're talking about, but all kind of related to this shift in this dynamic and this trend around how fans want to engage and be interactive.
Matt Stevenson: Yeah, everything, like we've really just tried to make everything as intuitive as possible as we've been developing this and rolling it out with the biggest operators in the world. Let me give you a sort of real world example of how this can play out, right? So next season, you know, you're sat at home, you're watching League One and your favorite operators website application on your phone and PSG versus Marseille is on. rather than the sort of previous clunky, you know, transactional experience that we've been talking about previously, everything I need is literally at my fingertips, right? So let's say, you know, the game's five minutes in, Dembele started brightly for PSG. I can check his stats. I can see how he's developing versus how he's going versus other players in the game. Switch to an operator perspective for a second. And I know there's plenty of operators tuning into this today, but We give you the opportunity to integrate your personalized bet offers into the stream. So perhaps you've also recognized that Dembele started brightly. And what you want to do is you want to boost his odds for over 3.5 shots in the game from 9 to 2 to 6 to 1 in old money. you know, that then, that offers appearing to the user, so back to the user side, he simply taps Dembele, Dembele's got the ball, he taps him, brings up the betting proposition, you're still watching the game, you're still within the framework, nothing's changing, but you're able to transact, you're able to add it to the bet slip, place your bet immediately, and away you go. That then, in turn, feeds through to cash-out functionality. We all know how important cash-out is to modern operators. We can pull in your cash-out feed. And so Dembele's had a couple of shots on target. Dear user, here's your cash-out price. Would you like to do this? Then finally, you get to halftime. One particular bugbear of mine for sort of watch and bet historically is you get to a break in play, and it might be the end of a quarter in January, basketball or halftime in football or whatever, a break in play. And at best, you're seeing a blank screen. Sometimes you see some strange sort of international adverts that are always quite exciting. But at best, you see, you know, a blank screen. And so we're working with our operator customers to be able to utilize that dead space. And so you might want to put a personalized free to play game in there. Genius does, you know, some brilliant free to play games that can be inserted in. You might want to include some important RG messaging. Again, you've got that. You've paid for it. Effectively, you've got that bandwidth. And so we're encouraging you to use it. So, look, as Fleck has sort of highlighted, Genius has changed the way sport is broadcast, right? We've already changed that. We're in the process of changing it. It used to be this passive one-to-many system. You know, it's a broadcast and everyone watches it and then that's it, basically. With our Genius IQ and all the various assets that we've got, we've already changed that on a broadcast level. We're now bringing that personalisation back into betting streaming. And so we're going to do exactly the same. We are doing exactly the same by evolving the sort of historic watch and bet product into the genius bet vision solution.
Tom Washington: Great. We have got a ton of questions coming in, which I think I'm going to get to. I've got one question for Matt Fleckenstein, which I want to just go back to something you mentioned earlier around the underlying tech that makes this possible. Because I think it's interesting for people to understand why we're so excited about BetVision and why we think it's unique at the moment. Can you just give us a bit of a flavor of that kind of tech and data capabilities powering it?
Matt Fleckerstein: Yeah, look, I think we've hit on some of this. You know, over the years, we've built out really our capabilities to offer low latency data streaming, right? It's kind of been the core of our business for a long time. And, you know, kind of processing more data faster than ever before is just kind of the norm of the day. Ultra low latency video is an area that over the last couple of years we've invested heavily in, you know, to support a variety of our different stakeholders. But I think, you know, kind of some of the more recent advancements in terms of the ability to track all of the players, all the ball action on the pitch. You know, these types of things, I think, are the types of kind of technological advances that we've invested in that really help change the experience from being kind of passive to interactive. Right. These are the types of things that allow kind of the. you know, the punter to come in and kind of, you know, have a role, participate in the sport. And they're also the types of things that just help to create kind of these wow differentiated experiences, right? So I think there's a variety of kind of investments across a variety of different areas that we've all brought together to kind of manifest itself in this Budvision product.
Tom Washington: Excellent. Okay, great. I'm going to chip away at some of the questions coming in. So a question, is this a built-in bet slip or would allow us to integrate into our existing bet slip?
Matt Fleckerstein: Yeah, I'm happy to take that one, right? I mean, kind of as we've designed this, right, it's designed to kind of actually present kind of the sportsbooks bet slip, right, into kind of our experience, right? And so, you know, kind of the things being presented in it are coming from our sportsbook partners. The bets kind of actually being executed, right, are actually being executed on the back end by the sportsbooks. And so this is very much kind of an experience where, you know, You know, we've tried to kind of take the best of the things that we do here at Genius really, really well and combine it with the best of the things that you all at the Sportsbooks do incredibly well to create these experiences.
Matt Stevenson: There was another question a little bit about that, about talking about other bet types and making sure that things that customers might usually bet on wouldn't be somehow cast away or left aside. And what Fleck said is absolutely critical there. It's the bookmakers bet slip and so and the bookmakers betting feed is coming in and so we're able to work with all of the operators to present the exact information that they want in there. And again, this can either be generic or really in the ideal world is personalized based on my users based based on my. Experiences based on my history and what I do with putting something very relevant and contextual in front of me.
Tom Washington: Great OK, Is there a priority for any other sports after basketball implementation?
Matt Fleckerstein: Yeah, look, I think a lot of the focus right now is kind of on getting these initial sports out. I think kind of really optimizing kind of the recommendations and the contextual recommendations to guide users. You know, when you start to have, you know, 24-7 global coverage of, you know, tens of thousands of fixtures across, you know, kind of 200-plus leagues, you know, being able to kind of guide people to the right content, the right experiences is increasingly important, right? This is not... you know, even though we talk about it as kind of this interactive kind of experience, you know, it's not the type of experience that's meant for you to just be kind of stuck into a single fixture, a single match. Watching it is designed to allow the user to come in, actually understand what's going on, look at some interesting betting opportunities, place a bet, have that be tracked, leave, go look at something else and come back, right? And so I think a lot of the energy is going into those features. With that said, as we look beyond 2025 into 2026, we're definitely going through the process right now of figuring out what sports are next. You know, I think we really have seen some strong results, which we'll probably get into a little bit later here. And really think that, hey, you know, everything we're seeing as we've launched now football on top of kind of the NFL season, You know, all of the data supports that, hey, this is not sports specific. This is kind of a sport agnostic kind of experience that's really driving lots of positive, you know, kind of KPIs across the board. And so, you know, we haven't announced any future sports. If there are things that you are super interested in, we'd love to talk to you. We'd love to hear your perspectives. But we definitely have plans to keep rolling this out to more and more sports in 2026 and beyond.
Matt Stevenson: Yeah, we're in the really great position of already working with hundreds of sports leagues and federations around the world. You look at these presentations and you see the same sort of logos that you'd expect us to put in on the front page. And it's the NFL and the Premier League and the NCAA and so on. and so on and so forth but actually we work with hundreds of sports competitions federations on every continent and almost exclusively all of them have contacted us and they've been like right we want this is bet vision we don't want any you know the old streaming just looks terrible compared to what it is so How do we do it? How do we work with you to ensure that it can be presented to customers? So, yeah, we're not short of options when it comes to new sports or new leagues. And ultimately, we'll be speaking to the operators as well to get an understanding of what they want. But the first three are as outlined and after that will be based on demand.
Tom Washington: Great. We have got some kind of early results from BetVision on the next slide, but I'm just going to fire off two quick questions. First one aimed at you, Matt Fleckenstein. If a broadcaster owned the media rights, is BetVision additive to their ratings and audience, or is it measured separately?
Matt Fleckerstein: Yeah, I mean, this is one of the, I'll call it kind of quote-unquote benefits of starting with the NFL, right, is this was definitely one of the requirements that, hey, this experience needs to be additive, right, to kind of those rights. So if you think about that vision, I think about kind of what we've done in the NFL, you know, we've integrated Nielsen tags, right, into kind of the entire experience. So both from an audience and from a ratings perspective, um you know you're getting you know the the the rights holders are kind of getting credit for right and it's kind of accruing up to kind of um on the investments they're making at the same time um you know we're uh you know the advertising that they're selling right and that they're using to kind of monetize kind of the rights fees that they're paying for those are also being presented to the users and being tracked and so they're also kind of um um accruing up to kind of those those with the broadcast right so you know i think this is one of those situations where one of the reasons why we maybe haven't seen more technological advancements is you've got to figure out how do you enable these types of things while still maintaining kind of all of the um important kind of um you know kind of rules and and kind of facets of you know a fairly complex rights management landscape
Tom Washington: Excellent. Okay. And final one before we move on to some of these early results. Oh, hang on. Just lost that. Is it a concern that BetVision is effectively steering bettors away from combination bets? And what potential impact could this have on margin? Matt Stevenson, do you want to take that one?
Matt Stevenson: Yeah, I think I sort of half answered this earlier on. The whole point is we're going to work with the operators to ensure that they pull in the betting propositions, the bet types, whatever content they want inserted in, we'll work with them on it. in our idea in our sort of ideal world that will be extremely highly personalized and so on but there shouldn't be any concern about operators losing the opportunity to present exactly what they want in front of their users okay great there are more questions which we're going to come back to but i'd like to just move on to the next slide because i think there is a question about have we seen some early results and can we share them with with the audience here's one we prepared earlier um
Tom Washington: Matt Stevenson, would you like to pick this up and then maybe Fleck, you jump in as well?
Matt Stevenson: Yeah, I mean, look, there's statistics and all that stuff, right? But like, as I mentioned earlier, like some of the biggest operators have pulled their streaming budgets. They, you know, they've decided that It isn't worth investing in, particularly in the old watch and bet world, because it's really difficult to quantify. One of the main reasons, very difficult to quantify. There's a bunch of data we've been up and running with BetVision for a couple of years now, and there's a bunch of data that we can sort of point to. Obviously, there's tons of different bits of data, but the two most important ones I want to pull out here are the increase in average bet size, two and a half times increase in average bet size for a bet vision user versus a non-bet vision user. You know, that seems to me something that. You know, the BAs and the BIs can model through and start understanding the sort of value return for the investment into something like BetVision. And the other one also on the left hand side is that in-play turnover per BetVision event versus a non-BetVision event. You know, it's just double the turnover, two times the turnover of a bet vision event versus none. So, you know, it is being a thorny issue in the industry about the quantifiable nature of the lack of quantifiability in, you know, in watch and bet. But I think the early days that we can point to suggest there's a real sort of value return that flows through both the bet size to bet size, but also to overall turnover numbers as well.
Matt Fleckerstein: I think the only thing I'll add on to that, right, is just I think if you look at the history of BetVision, you know, we went through two seasons with the NFL before we started rolling this out globally across kind of multiple sports. And I think it was really to make sure that as we were building this out, right, we were building. modifying the experience, building the right experience that really led us to kind of, you know, seeing kind of positive upticks in kind of these key metrics, right? And, you know, an example of this is I think in the first version of BetVision, you know, we had an experience where the live stats and kind of the odds weren't always present. They were in a tray and you were, you know, popping the tray out from time to time and we didn't really see the boost that we wanted to see as we've made kind of the last round of adjustments in terms of the user experience and kind of, making kind of the markets omnipresent and making it really easy to get to player props by touching players. We've seen really nice uptick in kind of these numbers. And so you're starting to see us now roll it out on a more global scale. Right.
Tom Washington: So it begs the question, what's next? And I think actually we've covered quite a lot of what's coming next for BetVision itself. And Matt Fleckstein was talking about some of the new functionality and the move to definitely be like a sport agnostic product in the future. But Matt Stevenson, I think it'd be interesting just to get your take on where some of this underlying technology, particularly the kind of the the type of data that we're now collecting as a business, as an industry, through optical tracking and where that takes in-play betting in the future. Have you got any thoughts on that?
Matt Stevenson: Yeah, I mean, again, we're in this really fortunate position that we sort of sit in this sort of cross-section between sports, between betting, media and broadcast. Obviously, we acquired Second Spectrum a few years ago, that Genius IQ technology with the camera's that are now in all sorts of sports leagues around the world. And they're collecting level and depth of data that's frankly mind-boggling. Every second, thousands of bits of data on every player. And there's been some really interesting conversations with operators on both sides of the Atlantic about taking that data and productizing it. Every few years, you get these new features coming along, new betting propositions, and particularly with the focus on player-based betting, there's some real interesting things that can be done with this data, understanding how fast people are running, how far, how hard they're kicking the ball, whatever it might be, all of this data is being collected. And so, yeah, I'm expecting us to continue working with our operators to nurture that, to nourish it, and to try to develop betting propositions that reflect the data that's now available there.
Tom Washington: Great. Okay. And I have one final question for you both, and then we're going to get through the remaining questions in our chat box. So let's imagine it's five years down the line, it's 2030, and you're watching and betting on a game. Describe to me what that looks like to you and where we need to get to in those years as a betting industry.
Matt Fleckerstein: Maybe I'll start on this one. And I saw this actually relates to a question that was asked, right? Look, I think first off, everything you've seen so far today has been kind of on a mobile device, right? But we've built this in a way where the widgets, the capabilities are fairly modularized. And certainly there's nothing kind of that prevents us from kind of, you know, lighting up kind of OTT experiences or kind of, you know, making this available in gaming consoles or those types of things. And so I think you'll see a lot of that in addition to kind of going into new sports, you'll see a lot of that as we go forward, which is, you know, this experience, you know, kind of is highly designed for mobile where you've got kind of touch capabilities, but a lot of the underlying fundamentals of what we built and the foundation of what we built is easily extensible to other platforms. All of those platforms I just talked about are all kind of 2D screen in nature. But you also, you know, Matt Stevenson was talking about, you know, our genius IQ technology and the cameras that we have in venues that allow us to create live digital twins of these sporting events that are happening. And so you can imagine us lighting up kind of rich 3D types of experiences that you could either see on your tabletop through your phone or through kind of the next generation of augmented and mixed reality headsets, right? That are starting to come to market, right? The next gen after MetaQuest, Apple Vision Pro, like those types of things. Certainly we're looking at that. And I think in 2030, you'll be seeing that, you'll be experiencing that type of thing. You know, at the same time, I think at that point, you even can go and really think about simulated sports and what does the future of simulated sports look like? And if you have all of these rich kind of 3D digital twins and models of actual sporting events and all of this historical data, you know, you can rely on kind of. algorithms to really come up with these really, you know, simulated sporting events that allow you to bet on your favorite sports year round and do it in a way where it really feels like a live kind of in-game experience versus I think some of the experiences that are out there today. So then you can see a lot more doubling down on that notion of these immersive experiences, right? That you can kind of create as we go forward.
Tom Washington: Yeah. Brilliant. Matt Stevenson, do you have anything to add there?
Matt Stevenson: I was going to say roughly the same thing, but I think what I expect in five years' time is actually a move towards hyper-personalisation. I think that's where we end up through the betting experience, through the BetVision streaming experience. I do think that will still be often a second screen thing, certainly for the bigger sports. I still see people... you know, communally watching big sports on a big screen at home or at the game, but having the second screen for all of the other stuff. And the other stuff, the betting, will be just much more personalised, much more built around what not only what I've done before, but trying to predict what I want to do. It's a careful balance, and we're working with operators to try to strike that right balance, but that's what I'm expecting. I think the days of, I said it earlier, but the days of one-to-many, both in BetVision, in betting streaming, and also on wide broadcast, are really over. We are going to end up in a true one-to-one experience, and And that's what I'm expecting in sort of three, four, five years' time.
Tom Washington: Okay. Excellent answers, both of you. So we'll carry on for a couple of minutes just to get through the last couple of questions. So feel free, everyone, to stay on the line. There's one question around our current coverage, both in sports and the leagues we cover. I think it's probably quicker if we just – reach out to you directly afterwards to provide you with those coverage documentations. There's been two questions around front-end customization and to the degree in which operators can own that. Can one of you jump in and answer that question?
Matt Fleckerstein: Yeah, I'm happy to take this one. Look, I think on the front-end customization, right, a lot of the energy to date has been kind of going toward How do we actually figure out kind of the right user experience right in the right interaction model to kind of drive those metrics that we talked about up into the right right? And I think now that we feel like we're in pretty good position to kind of do that, I think the next phase of kind of our work in our development is to allow for more customization by sports books in terms of, you know, kind of. Just getting the experience, aligning it with kind of their branding, you know, those types of things. And so I think this is an area where there's some limited ability to do that today, but it's definitely an area that we know we're going to want to partner with you all on and enable more of kind of as we go forward.
Tom Washington: Great. Another question is, would any team and player stats also be available outside of BetVision to allow for consistency across the site? So I guess using the same data that's within the BetVision player elsewhere on a sportsbook site.
Matt Stevenson: Yes. There you go. Yeah, it already is and it will continue to be.
Matt Fleckerstein: Yeah, I think that's actually a valuable part of the experience, right? Is how do you bring that to somebody kind of in the BetVision experience, right? But how do you extend that and make that same types of data available kind of regardless of kind of where they're engaging with your book and its brand, right?
Matt Stevenson: Yeah, great. I think the interesting thing there, I think the interesting thing there, Washi, is actually into broadcast as well. You know, we talked about the different betting types and what... is going to be helpful, I think, you know, speaking to operators, actually what gets turnover. Like a few years ago, no one knew what XG was, right? No one really knew what XG was in football. Then suddenly talk, you know, people talking about down the pub and it's sort of common parlance now. referred to in broadcast and so from an operator perspective what they want to see is some of these new data that's available being referred to not necessarily with regards to betting but being referred to in the broadcast and so that's sort of down to us right we work with all the biggest broadcasters in the world They have people, they've got teams that are crunching this data. So we're working with them to ensure that we can present it. They in turn will present it to the user. The bookmakers create the product around it and the whole thing goes round and round.
Tom Washington: Yeah. Okay. Another question. Someone's asking for some clarification around the latest deal that we've done with the NFL and what that means as part of this BetVision conversation.
Matt Stevenson: Yeah, I'll take that one. I mean, look, it just means, you know, further investment from our side into it. You know, we continue on this path. We're super excited to, we're thrilled to extend our relationship with the NFL, obviously. And, you know, most of our big rights deals are through to the end of the decade. we can now, Matt and his team of brilliant product guys and the developers can develop safe in the knowledge that we've got all of our really important rights locked down and that feeds through specifically to the development of BetVision, which is just going to continue at a very strong pace.
Tom Washington: Great. Okay. Last chance for people to send in their questions. The most recent one, I'm not sure we'll be able to answer it, but we'd like to see you aggressively obtaining new high-level rights competitions now in order to expand the BetVision product.
Matt Fleckerstein: I'm happy to take a first stab at this one. Look, I think obviously, right, kind of, you know, having rights and the ability to kind of enable these experiences is key. I think some of that's about kind of genius and geniuses kind of owned rights. But I also think there's opportunities for partnering. If you look, for example, you know, at our soccer product, you know, we've got kind of content of our own where we have rights to it. We also have partnered, for example, with Infront, right, where they have content that, you know, they have the rights to. And, you know, if you have a license to kind of their content, right, we actually have the ability to kind of light up those experiences in FedVision as well. And so I think some of this is about us continuing to kind of build out, which we always do, right? Our portfolio of rights and fixtures and what's available continues to grow year over year, really month over month. But I also think there's interesting opportunities in some cases to partner as well. And I think you'll see more of that from us.
Matt Stevenson: I think that's exactly right. We've built it in an agnostic framework to allow to integrate other content into the platform. And look, as I've sort of probably labored the point slightly, if you're looking at a traditional watch and bet option versus a bet vision option, just look at it. You can see the quality difference, and that is going to feed through to customer behavior, to engagement, to turnover, to how long people are hanging around, to how they feel about your brand. All of that stuff. And so we're available to have conversations with other other rights holders to ensure that they can get these benefits of that vision as well.
Tom Washington: Great. Well, look, we're going to have to end there. There are some questions we have not got to. We'll endeavor to get back to you directly to help you answer those. I guess all I'm left with is to say thank you very much for Matt and Matt for being great experts on this call today. Thank you, everyone, for attending and all the great questions. As you leave, if you could fill in the survey that will pop up, that would be fantastic. Don't forget, if you do want a demo, you can You can request it directly in the link section that you'll see on your screen. And I hope to see you all again soon. Thanks very much for joining.
