From AI to Instant Replay: The Technology Behind the Olympics

0:00Sports is interesting because it's the great aggregate. I talk to founders all the time and one of the things I'm cautioning about is how is what you are doing making this better. It's an extraordinary piece of technology because for the first time you understand the speed, you understand the ability of the athlete. A lot of people are sort of building technology without understanding how does this actually enhance the storytelling experience. This is incredible. This is amazing. I have absolutely no idea what the applicable value of this is. We're seeing the purest version of the human experience of what can the human body actually accomplish?

0:39Exactly one week ago, the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics kicked off, bringing in an estimated 10 million plus people to the city. That of course included over 11 ,000 athletes who have begun competing across 32 sports, including four new additions. bring dancing in its first games, plus skateboarding, sport climbing, and surfing, making their second appearance. And of course, there are a few events that bring the world together, quite like the Olympics. So, as we all watch an off, there's a reason why people are talking about the bunny hopping fencer, or the 11 year old skateboarder, or Kamyuji, the sharpshooter with a lot of swag.

1:18There's also a reason why you might not recognize the name Nathan Adrian, but you almost certainly know the name Simone Biles. even though their American Olympians have earned the exact same medals in their Olympic careers. Because the Olympics is as much about excellence as it is about story. And that's precisely what we discussed today with Charlie Ebersol. Charlie has long been a mercenathetics co -founded the Alliance of American Football and Infinite Athlete, where their building products ranging from AI injury detection to bespoke broadcasting technology. Carly also happens to be the son of Dick Ebersol, the longtime chairman of NBC Sports, where he produced 19 Olympic Games, and is also credited with the creation of NBC's Sunday Night Football, which as of 2023 had over 20 million average viewers every single week.

2:08So, as we welcome yet another Games with a whole new wave of technologies being showboated, this episode is about dissecting which pieces of technology have truly moved the needle and athletics. And equally importantly, my other innovations have historically failed to make their den. Alright, let's get into it.

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2:59So Charlie why don't we actually start off with your background. You've got a pretty deep personal relationship to the Olympics so maybe before we talk about what's going on today, what actually led you here? I had what some might call a very strange childhood. My dad was the Chairman of NBC Sports for 25 years, when he retired in 2011, the New York Times wrote that he had produced nine of the 11 biggest events in the history of the world, most of which were Olympics, including like the 2008. Beijing Olympics and the 92 Barcelona Olympics, he was the number two to the guy running all ABC production for the Munich Olympics when the Israeli athletes were kidnapped and killed and it's a crazy story about my father and his boss at the time of Rinarlage standing outside the athletes' pavilion waiting just looking up as a full moon, smoking cigarettes, having this beautiful moment and eventually one said to the other, you know we should really go home and years later when they did the security report one of the terrorists said they had decided that they were just going to kill the two guys smoking cigarettes out front and just go in because they'd been there so long and they were like slowing down the kidnapping.

4:16Wow. My very first job, 12 years old, was working at an Olympics as a runner, working for a producer -tongue stories. So yes, the Olympics were a big part of my life. And I mean, that puts you in a unique position to observe for many years, right? Not just the latest Olympics and the Olympics in Paris. What did you learn from watching your father, your brother, about what actually makes the game successful? My dad was the very first runner in Olympic history. And what that means, that sounds funny, it sounds like he's an Olympian. What that means is his job was before the Olympics started, was to research the athletes, not just the American athletes, but the international athletes and learn their back stories.

4:59And then they would tell those stories before the games. And so people would engage with nobody's following the 100 meter dash for three and a half years. And then all of a sudden it's like, oh, we all have to pay attention to you saying bold to Michael Johnson or whatever. In fact, oddly enough, the very first athlete he ever covered was an athlete who was accused of being transgender. And this is in the late 1960s or early 70s. It was the first athlete ever to sort of face that with blood testing and all this other stuff to try to figure it out. And it is probably the single most important thing about the Olympic success.

5:34is that the Olympics, unlike all other professional sports, are a majority female audience. And they've done decades and decades of research. The reason they found out is because they created an emotional connection with the athletes through the storytelling. And so it's really not the guy behind a football mask who you don't really know doing this stuff. It's someone you've gotten to know over the 16 weeks of the Olympics. And then there's the patriotism of, I wanna see America win, but my dad is largely credited with being the greatest storyteller in the history of sports. The people that he worked with were Jim McKay, originally in the Bob Costas, and Al Michaels were telling these stories.

6:13And I think what gets lost, often in the day -lose of sports now, we are drawn as humans, I think, to the struggle of what got us there. There's a famous line, the joy of victory in the agony of defeat. The idea that Sean White had three open -heart surgeries before he was three years old and then went on to win or Michael Phelps, his mom didn't swim. He'd never been in a pool and she was a single mom and an educator. This incredible American story and he goes on to become, I mean certainly the most decorated athlete in the history of the world if not maybe the greatest athlete. And it's the background that we care about.

6:50We learn to love these people and get to know them and we care about them so deeply. Let's dive into that idea of storytelling because the Olympics have been running for a long time. I mean, the original iteration of it, we're talking thousands of years, but even in the last revival, we're talking over 100 years of modern Olympics. That's a lot of games. But when I originally reached out to you, I had this thesis. The last couple of years is all about AI. We're going into this new Olympics. It's going to completely change the games just like everyone's saying. It's going to completely change everything.

7:20But when we chatted, you had a really interesting take that kind of took me back and made me reconsider the original thesis of this episode about how technology maybe in itself is not enough. What are the different technologies over, let's say, the last couple decades, that have actually moved the needle in sports versus what I'd imagine are hundreds or thousands of other attempts to do the same that haven't quite succeeded? Sports is interesting because it's a great aggregator, right? It's what brings huge amounts of people together for a singular live event, we all watch it in unison, the Super Bowl being a great example, the World Cup, etc.

7:57And I think what gets lost, oftentimes in the storytelling of technology around sports, is that the technology has to actually move the experience of watching the sport forward in a way that makes it better, more accessible, more palatable, not just cool. I mean, there's been a lot of really cool technology, but at the end of the day, when you talk about the most transformative technology in the mid 60s when my dad's former boss Ron Arlidge introduced instant replay. It was game changing because unless you are a professional athlete, you probably can't see the nuances of what have just happened on this play.

8:32But now all of a sudden, if you've got Frank Gifford or Al Michaels or John Madden or Chris Collinsworth saying, no, look right there. See how he twisted on his right foot to do it? That's incredible. Now all of a sudden you're like, holy, that is incredible. It's amazing. did it. So there were four, and this is by no means the definitive list, but I think of four sort of transformative moments in terms of changing sport positively with technology. Instant replay in the 60s for sure. It was a massive change. In the early 80s, the introduction of cable. So now all of a sudden two things happen.

9:04One, sports basically became entirely live. People forget the NBA finals until the early 80s were on tape delay. People were not watching this stuff live, and then all of sudden you get cable showing up and they're telling you, look, this is all gonna be available all the time. And that cable ultimately became OTT. And so you've had this one great access point. And then in the mid 90s, probably the most transformative piece of technology of our era of our generation is the yellow line. That for the first time, you could watch a football game and anyone could just walk in the room and instantaneously understand, oh, they've got this amount of distance to go to achieve their first down and be able to do this.

9:44And what's interesting is you look at how much augmented reality has actually been brought into sports. Very little of it has been as effective. I mean, I think the shot tracer where you're able to follow the golf ball or eagle eye with tennis where it's, okay, I can see if the ball is in or out. Those technologies actually help the storytelling of the sport. And then I think probably in terms of just sheer engagement other than Taylor Swift, fantasy is probably the single biggest thing that is affected sports in general because all of a sudden you care about every single game. Like one of the challenges of baseball football, et cetera, is I am a whatever LA Rams fan.

10:25I don't really care what's going on with the dolphins unless it affects my standings. But now I've got fantasy and the quarterback for Miami, Tua, is on my fantasy team. Now I care about what's happening in the Miami game. So now all of a sudden you've got this engagement. I mean, let's be honest, fantasy is basically a glorified Excel sheet. It's technology that's been around since the late 80s, but inherently it enhances the story time. I talk to founders all the time, and one of the things I'm cautioning about is, how is what you're doing making this better? Gambling has become such a massive thing.

10:58So little of it is actually transformative because it's not really enhancing the experience. And then you look at a company like, for example, PrizePix, which has figured out how to really add drama and excitement around parlays. It's like the technology is only there to enhance the story, telling not the other way around. I think the thing people constantly get lost is, in the lead up to the Olympics, you're seeing it already. They're like AI Michaels and all these different things that they're bringing to the game, are you really gonna engage with the majority of those? I don't know. The ones that actually make the game better, like the drop cam in the high dive, with the camera drops with the diver.

11:36It's an extraordinary piece of technology because for the first time you understand the speed, you understand the ability of the athlete, there was a piece of tech a couple of years ago that they were trying out the Olympics. It was like bullet time, like the Matrix basically, where they line up a bunch of cameras in an arc around an athlete, and then they all take a picture at the same time, and then you stitch the frames together, and it looks like you're rotating around the athlete. Very cool. Very cool. Basically never got used, because fundamentally people didn't engage with the technology, because it wasn't enhancing their understanding of the game.

12:08They used it in the home run derby at the All -Star game baseball all -spot game this year. Again, really cool technology, but I don't understand how it's making my understanding of the game better, whereas Statcast where they're explaining the launch angle of the ball, like we know this is a home run because of the launch angle before the ball ever travels far enough, that changed my understanding of the game. And I think that that's a really hard thing for people to understand, particularly in technology, because they constantly lose track of the fact that just because my mom used to say all the time, not her quote, someone else's, but just because you can do something doesn't mean you should.

12:42A lot of people are sort of building technology without understanding like, how does this actually enhance the storytelling experience? Let's kind of roll through those. I mean, you mentioned yellow lines. That helps people understand the way football works. Instant replay also helps people understand what just happened and also hear from experts. Cable allows people to engage all together and fantasy, like you said, kind of also expands the game, helps people get involved in other teams. So there's a lot of really clear learnings there, but to your point, a lot of people are kind of just Exuberantly excited about what's on the horizon.

13:14Let's use AI as an example. If you were a founder having just heard all the things You shared about the few technologies that did actually move the needle and sports and the reason that they did How would you kind of coach them almost into Adjusting their approach so that they can actually address a real problem for your point? I'll quote Shamath who is quoting someone else when the refrigerator was invented, the guys that invented refrigeration did very well. But the people who did transformatively well was Coca -Cola. Like as soon as you figured out how to use the technology to then make another product, the reach was exponentially bigger.

13:52I'll give you an example. Sports betting. Sports betting is really not a good business. It's usually four to seven percent margin business. Parles in game, multi game, Parles, et cetera. They go to like a 27 % margin business, but they're only really possible because it's technology because you have to move so fast and sort of be adaptive. The beauty of sport is inherently it is this human endeavor where the rules are known. They're very static. You're not seeing a lot of change. So what can you do around that static component that can be really compelling? It's like what AI was designed to do.

14:26And so I'm constantly finding myself talking to founders and saying, There are 20 companies that are doing computer vision right now. Like, they're all losing money. They're all have cameras pointed at the field. They're all basically doing the same thing. And it's a race to the bottom because someone's going to commoditize it. And once we all sort of set the standard, a lot of those companies are going to get killed. And so if you can use AI to start to take the output of those technologies and start to build specific categories for players, coaches, betters, field technicians, et cetera, but you're gonna find businesses there because right now most of it's still being done with pencil and paper.

15:04Yeah, and just to double click on that, are there other technologies that you think we might see in this upcoming Olympics, whether it's applied to actually making athletes better at performing, whether it's in the distribution of the content or something else entirely? I remember this is 16 years ago, but in the O8 Olympics, the swimmers were allowed to wear suits, like full -bicycle. And they were shaving like seconds off of world record times, which in sprinting is unheard of. I mean, even like you saying, Bolt, I think over the course of his entire career shaved a second off of his time, let alone doing it on every single race.

15:43And it was clear that the suit was doing. It was like a shark's can suit it, like cause the water to move faster, like all this other stuff. And they changed the polyurethane or whatever the composites for track and field, a couple of years ago and then all of a sudden, like world records were like getting decimated because the rebound on the foot was so much higher, which is to say nothing of what Adidas and Nike and Puma are new balance, what they're doing inside of a shoe where someone can run a sub five minute or sub four minute mile or a two hour marathon. So what I'll say is this, I think that if Michael Phelps had won 16 gold medals, but we didn't know Michael Phelps' story, his background, who he was, what was going on his life, I don't think people would remember it.

16:26I think the greatest athletes who ever lived are the athletes we have nostalgia for. We remember the story of Michael Jordan leaving for a year and coming back, or LeBron leaving Cleveland only to come back and win it for Cleveland. We care more about that in a lot of cases than we do the stats, right? And so when I look at the technologies that I think are coming, AI Michaels is a awesome technology where they're using AI and AL's voice to be able to recap. And I think from a pure experienced standpoint, you're going to have a better experience because it's not going to sound like Siri telling you what happened or seeing it in Infographics.

16:59It's going to feel like you're getting a studio host telling you what's going on. And the new camera technologies that they're introducing around track and field and water polo are incredible. In reality, I think the technology that's going to really change our experience is basic stuff that we take for granted. like peacock. The fact that the streamer is set up in a way where you can create a bespoke experience of what you want. Like I tell people a lot of times all of the technology that really moves the needle in sports is super unsexy. Like I'll give you an example. The yellow line, people are like how do they do it?

17:36They isolate the players and they go no they're chroma keying the green on the field. It's 50 year old technology. I'm not discounting what they did what they did was incredible. Like the technology is amazing but like the most difficult part people had over thought for years because, oh, we have to create masks of every player. No, they had a green field. They've been working with green screens in Hollywood for a decade at that point. They're just like, oh, what if we just take the green away? Boom, right? And so the thing I constantly go back to people with is like, you have to be solving for the solution, not solving for the technology because people have shown me stuff in sports technology that is insane.

18:14It's mind blowing. Somebody did a recreation of all a messy shots from Messi's perspective live in 3D in an unreal engine. I'm like, this is incredible. This is amazing. I have absolutely no idea what the applicable value of this is to a broadcast storytelling, but it's really cool. You know what I mean? And I think people overestimate the value of cool over the value of how this makes the story better. And I see it so much. I go to all these sports conferences and they're talking about like digital jerseys where we can change the number. Amazing, cool. Oh, not useful. Yeah. Yeah. Another example that you shared with me before is even just latency, right?

18:54We basically have the technology to have essentially no latency. But is that really necessary? I mean, there's certainly a difference between zero seconds latency and a day latency, right? We've migrated from there. You want some immediacy, but do we really need to get to zero? Is one second too much? Is three is 12 is 20. And I feel like there's maybe a parallel there in asking that of any technology, right? Do we need precision or do we need something that to your prior points actually enhances the story? And so what is the right question there that people should be asking themselves if they're evaluating like does a digital Jersey That allows you to change your number Help in some way what's the right question they should be posing?

19:34Let's use latin season example my company works inside of latency a lot because is for certain things that matter a lot. For officiating inside the NFL, they need to know instantaneously at sub -second latency, whether or not the ball was in or out and they've got to be able to look at it from every angle and they've got to be able to do that. Latency to the mass of people, like I'll give you an example. If you're delivering video that people can bet against, you have to deliver it in sub -two seconds of latency because the belief is somebody sitting in the stadium with a cell phone if they have more than two seconds, could be like, home run and you cheat the system.

20:07So this sort of general thesis is sub two seconds and There is technology that allows you to deliver sub two seconds of latency to video not at Scale yet there are a bunch of companies that say they can do it But I mean Amazon's one of the three biggest companies in the world working on this They are by far the fastest in delivering video from live sports and they're still in double digit But part of the argument is what like what do you need it for if you want it for betting when you look at the percentage of population that's actually taking in -game bets still. I'm not saying they're not going to.

20:39They clearly are. Let's clearly where we're going. How we do that and why we do that is the question. I have had employees and partners and mentors and investors in this business and my last business who were fixated on these problems. And I found myself at odds with them a lot, just basically saying, I don't disagree that that's where we're going, but do you want to be there when the adoptive part is going to occur? And I think people forget that. And to your point, people forget. When you watch a game on cable television, it is a minimum of 30 seconds of latency. And if you're watching it on someone's streaming platform, I won't name any of them for the risk of pissing people out.

21:21But they're like at 90 seconds of latency. If I'm watching on my Android and you're watching on your iPhone or I'm watching on my iPad and you're watching on your Samsung or whatever, they're different codecs. There's all this other stuff that's going in. the latency is really significant. My dad used to take a ton of crap from reporters because they would tape delay a lot of the Olympics so that it would happen in primetime. So I put the gold medal game for the dream team. They would hold the game and then air it live. So even if people knew results, they could watch it live at eight o 'clock at night when everyone is home.

21:53When they're not at work, like trying to watch it on their screen. So they did this study. First of all, at the time I did the study, which was like 20 years ago, less than 18 % of the population in the United States live west of the Mississippi. And they were already getting it taped to late because people forget that almost everything appears on the west coast later than the east coast, meaning they delay it three hours. The ratings were always higher on the west coast than the east coast. So even if the east coast got it live, the west coast got it taped. The ratings were higher on the west coast because the west coast, even if they knew the results.

22:27They wanted to see the storytelling. They were engaged with the athlete and they wanted to see the event actually occur. You know, if you talk to sports reporters, they'll be like, it's very important that the Premier League, the World Cup game or the UEFA game or the match has to be live in America. Like, at 4 a .m. those people are going to figure out how to watch it. They're going to VPN it. They're going to whatever. That is not your audience. Your target audience is Bill and Sue who live in Colorado and who have three kids and they want to get their kids down and have dinner and then they want to sit down and they want to watch the thing together.

23:00They're not getting up in 4 a .m. to watch this. They want to have a produced experience. The other technology that we talked about a couple weeks ago, but I think is really important to drill down on this for the last 30 plus years. Actually, this goes back to 96. Giving users the ability to pick what camera angles to watch again. So there's a guy who's Freddie Gidelli. He's arguably, if he's not V -Best, he's one of the three best live sports producers, who's ever lived, right? I mean, he did zillions of super bowls. He basically did all of a sudden in a football forever. He launched Amazon's Thursday and a football.

23:37Like Freddie is a transformative figure in sports. Freddie has spent every day since he was in his early 20s, perfecting the art of understanding that you got to go from camera number one to camera four, to camera 16, to camera 11, go to the audience, I wanna see the crying mom reacting to, okay, come back to Michael Felves, because this is really beautiful, okay, now come wide, I wanna see the expanse of 60 ,000 people cheering him on, okay, now come tight to his opponent, all the agony of defeat, now come back, why are you just gonna get the flowers from his sister who recovered from cancer?

24:06That storytelling, right? Yes. Joe Blow on his couch does not wanna do that. And every single time anyone is introduced, the you get to pick your angle thing. It never works. There's never they put all these BS numbers about engagement. Now, if someone built an AI platform that knew who you were and knew that you hated seeing the audience shots, you wanted to stay on the tight shot of Steph Curry because you care about Steph, you don't care about random people and whatever. If AI knew that and had all the access to the cameras and all those stuff and AI Michaels is a great start, but if someone could actually to produce the version of sports that I want to watch that's tailored to me while you are also watching your version because as dark as this is, the Democrats on Instagram are seeing the chat that they want to see in the comments.