UP497 'Buy It or Build It': Simon Denyer on the Billion-Dollar Sports Media Playbook

37:24Simon Denyer:He's been very, very good at that stuff, like actually optimizing the work. But they haven't launched in too many new territories or done too many new things. They've just done an amazing job the last four or a few years of improving the tech, improving the product, improving the revenues and that's that's a huge amount of work and they've done an amazing job so the question was well what are they going to do next right and i think people people just assumed they would launch in more countries and i think this club world cup thing took everyone by surprise and the idea which is which it you know a lot of people have asked me about it and obviously i wasn't involved at all in this one but the idea is well we are the zone are very good getting a lot of money out of very hardcore fans but what they need is they need more people coming in the funnel now they can either just buy those people and lose them or they can buy one month of content and suddenly get a huge number of people to register so if you do get 100 million people to register um and five million of those end up one day becoming a subscriber on one of your platforms that's a billion that's about a billion of lifetime revenue right so so just that alone makes sense if it works and i'm not saying they got 100 million registrations and 5 million subs but mathematically that is that works when you look at their lifetime value but where they were quite smart is they also thought well that's the reason we're doing this but also how about we do some more in the meantime to let's sub-license some of the rights let's get a load of advertisers and sponsors on the platform that haven't been on it before.

38:58Simon Denyer:So I also think they probably generated three or 400 million of direct revenue from stuff like that, as well as all the subscriber benefits. So for them, it was the first time they've done something where they went after other revenues first, and then the subscriber revenue is going to come in in the medium to long term. So I think it is this kind of phase three of DAZN. DAZN has got this amazing platform that has got, you know it's like the aggregator of digital sports content all around the world it's got to now find additional um content additional users additional revenue streams so that's what it was all about and i think they did a really they did a really good job of it i think the only market that was disappointed because we were just generally a bit it's great that chelsea won but you could see in the news flow the british we're all just a bit snobby about this stuff and they they did try really hard the day that the day the tournament started i was meeting ollie slipper who was obviously the founder of the company with me for a beer at the fire station by waterloo station and we're having both having a beer before we went before we got on our different trains it's where the pub we used to go to when we had an office there and i mean we were just literally laughing i'm not joking we sat aside we had two beers and every single bus that came past was disowned disowned and we were trying to talk about something else we were trying to talk about our kids we were trying to talk about our new business ventures he was trying to talk about pitch and cricket and i was talking about and we just couldn't stop laughing so everyone is like there in our face but you never would have thought you know 10 years ago let alone three years ago the zone would be buying buses in london they tried really hard in the uk to get us brits to engage and we were a bit snobby about it but if you look at the um if you look at the social media and the news coverage in other markets around the world.

40:45Simon Denyer:And I'm talking big markets in Europe, South America, North America. In Brazil, it was absolutely massive. And they would have generated a huge amount of revenue and subscriber leads from those markets. So I think when you look at it in a global context, it was a really interesting thing. It's funny that I find the DAZN brand or people, the way people talk about it is quite interesting. And the way it's reported, because it's quite often, oh, they're still losing money. and Len Blavatnik has spent this amount of money. And it's sort of, I don't care about Len Blavatnik. He's a rich bloke. He can spend what he likes, I suppose.

41:21But there's always a question of when is it going to break even? When is it going to make money? That's been a part of the story. And I don't know, is that a UK sort of lens on that? But it's certainly also in sort of stuff like New York Times and the Wall Street Journal's coverage. There is a sort of underlying what's happening. Why are they doing this? And why is it not making more money? And also, so the sort of caveat to that is, well, that's price question, presumably. And I don't want to pay any more money.

41:51Simon Denyer:Yeah, I think they have to be careful. You can't on any product, whether it's DAZN or someone else, you've got to be careful what you do on price before you start losing subscribers. If you lose too many subscribers, then obviously your revenues go down, not up. But they're very, Shai's very good and all the team are very good on that stuff. so that they know what they're doing. I think on the bigger story, look, if you want something big, you've either got to buy it or you've got to build it. It's as simple as that. So Len and Access have bought some really big things like Warner Music and stuff like that.

42:26Simon Denyer:And in this case, they did already own the majority stake in a really interesting company, which at the time was perform. It was publicly listed. and it was a combined decision of the management at the time me obviously as part of that and the shareholders uh saying well we've got this thing it's a great performance a great company it was becoming a market leader in the b2b space but there is this huge opportunity we have all the tech we're already the biggest streamer in sport but we're just doing on the b2b best we have loads of access to rights loads of access to all the tech we know how to do this someone's gonna do this it may as well be us right and it was that kind of conversation and and i think when you're looking at it from a investor point of view you know that this is going to be capital intensive and it did require a lot of capital and lend support and accesses support for the zone is unbelievable and when people criticize it it even though i you know i don't have anything to do with them now it's like how can you criticize someone for investing in a company they believe in and creating a company that recently was valued at 10 billion from not zero because it was performed right so you did have a crew of people who knew what they're doing some technology and evaluation of say a billion but you still have built it from a 1 billion company to a 10 billion company and yes you had to put some capital in to get there but that's one way of doing it or the other way of doing it is just wait around for someone else to do it and then you have to buy it for 10 billion so um so it's like it depends there's different types of investors and and someone like access or lend they are really interesting investors they they think like private equity because they want returns but they can be bolder um than private equity can um because it's it is a one man's money and i think they should be you know it's it's it's what they did is so brave and they've been so committed and i'm really pleased it's kind of worked out well for them now they've just got to get through this kind of next phase and i think the interesting thing for them in the next phase coming back to the other streamers and and some of your earlier points is i think they're in actually a really good place because um the other streaming platforms are clearly not trying to build a competitive sports bundle so dazone's competitor still remains the like the sports channel bundles of canapolis movie star sky espn the the other streamers are clearly definitely with amazon prime amazon prime just want small volumes they've tried different things but it's very clear now they want small high quality pieces of content within prime disney want to do the same as per these deal we were talking about earlier within their main but their main pack they're not trying to create a separate sports pack i can't imagine netflix suddenly tearing up all of their pricing and creating netflix sports when everything's all in one price so if those three guys in particular plus others in the future just want a little bit of premium sport within their pack then someone's got to buy the rest of it right and someone's got to buy the other games and disown are in a great place to do that they have they've created a global business they are a volume business as well as they do want premium sport they also but they also want volume they are for the more hardcore sports fan in the markets they're in so i actually think The Zone have built themselves into a position where they're, for a rights holder, I now work for rights holders, they're the perfect complement to someone like a Disney or an Amazon Prime.

45:50Simon Denyer:And actually, if you look at the markets where Germany was the first big market, Amazon bought the Champions League package, it was great news for us. Because basically, suddenly, we were negotiating Champions League when I was working for The Zone, and suddenly Sky just disappeared. So Sky had the Champions League, all of it, and they just disappeared overnight. and then suddenly Amazon had one match and DAZN had the rest. So for DAZN, that was great news. And I think for the whole market, yes, there's more to look forward to. But if you really look back at the last five or six years in Europe, I just say thank God for Amazon and thank God for DAZN because there hasn't really been anyone else doing anything different and bringing any new money in into the whole of the European market other than those two.

46:33Yeah. We did a thing with the guys at LiveScore about convergence and you know the betting sport the media and betting convergence thing and there's a question here for you because obviously you've been it's you've been central to this i'm really interested in the aspirations initially of when i hear that there are people who say right it's complete convergence that's what's going to happen it's going to be the betting firms will be buying rights and there will be no difference between you know what would have been sky and sky bet in back in the day or you know whatever it is and now i look at so espn's adventures in betting in the states and again the the line is that actually the duopoly at the center of it have done all the have got all the wallets and it's not a gold rush it's more of a honey trap there's less opportunity there than people thought and you've got this question about okay if the espn brand barstool didn't work pen then went into espn there's a sort of opt-out you know coming up and there's a question mark over that so if the as you say espn brand there's probably no better or stronger sports brand in the in the world if that isn't working i'm wondering what your view of that argument is and whether or not that was overblown and actually it's not going to be convergence is sort of you have to tone it down a bit yeah i i don't necessarily agree that with

47:55Simon Denyer:convergence of betting and sports broadcasting. I think there's been one good example of it, which was Sky owning Skybet. They did a brilliant job of driving subscribers to Skybet. That was a time where I knew the people that were running Skybet really well. We were providing them with a lot of their content. You could see the influence that if Sky Sports and Sky Sports News in particular really got behind something, you could see it driving traffic to Skybet. I think that is a really good example of where it has worked but I don't think there's been many many more and I don't think it's really critical I think um the people see it as two different things so I have one or two platforms that I watch live sport on but I I also have three or four apps that I bet on and for me they are just mobile apps they're obviously not tv apps so my viewing experience like most people's now is connected tv right so i i want the best viewing experience for my live sport so that's on a connected tv that is not a great place to stick a betting app or betting functionality it's really clunky you you know if you get logged out and you have to put your password in how complicated is that right you're suddenly you're suddenly trying to do an accumulator with five different bets whilst on your remote control it's just not going to happen so i think the market you take something like the uk which is obviously the most mature in play betting market and one of the most mature sports broadcasting market it works perfectly well that i am watching something on tnt on my connected tv and on my mobile i have a theory on this game and i think it's going to go this way so i'm just going to do a little bet builder with my daughter and play around with it and we're just going to put a silly little bet on and see what happens that's perfectly fine to be sitting i'm just sitting there whilst talking to you putting a quick bet but it's completely normal behavior and if you try and make me do it any other way it doesn't really work um from a functionality point of view so the great news is for broadcasting especially ott broadcasting like disown and and disney pluses that these guys have got into the home right they're not they're yes if you're on the train and you're late home you want to watch a champion's league match on your phone you can but you don't want to be watching on your phone you want to be getting home in time so you can watch it on your big tv with so so the great thing that's happened especially in the last the hardest thing when we launched a zone was getting into the living room once you're into the living room it i mean no one's going to churn once you're in the living room it's like any other tv so it's it's like a it's a big tv it's a communal experience you have a couple of mates over you have your kids over whatever you're doing it's great that's very different to me just putting on a quick bet and building it so i think um corporately people feel they should try and put these things together and there was there's lots of people doing it in america there's still people trying to do it here the zone tried to build a betting app as well that works with the broadcast so there's no harm in trying it but i don't think it's a must have that but betting companies are going to end up merging with sports broadcasters i think they can they they work quite well together in a commercial relationship as they are already at the moment and presumably it sort of hits a very very valuable advertising market i mean what what proportion of so when you're looking at the rights and evaluating you know a set of rights where does betting advertising come into the equation what sort of proportion would you then be attributing it's still uh although it may appear to you to be quite a large piece of the inventory um as you as a viewer it's a it's still a relatively small part of the revenue so if we're building a model if we're if we're advising a league on their domestic rights and we're saying this is how much revenue the broadcaster is going to make if they acquire this set of rights you're talking max maximum 10 percent from advertising overall and let's say betting is 30 percent of that max depends depending on the country you may not even be allowed to advertise in game in a lot of countries like italy still at the moment you can't advertise around live sport.

52:03Simon Denyer:So it's kind of from zero to 3 % of the overall mix. So it's not as big as you realize. And I think that's the thing that drives in-play betting is yes, they want live sports on TVs because that then gets people picking up their phones. That's the thing that drives the big turnover moments at the weekends when people are watching the big football matches. There's almost like two businesses if you're an in-play bookmaker. there's that marquee events millions of people watching something huge surge whether it's a premier league game a world cup game cheltenham something like that it's a huge surge you can make a lot of money in one weekend if you get it right and then there is this kind of long tail which actually adds up to quite a lot of monday to friday of just horse racing tennis loads of other sports around the world which is which is where people get into in play betting sometimes they just want to have a bit of fun people used to play poker at night so instead of playing poker one evening you've got a couple of mates around well let's just bet on the darts and you you might just spend an hour watching a little bit of darts or a little bit of tennis and between you betting 50 pounds and seeing what happens that's the other piece that's really interesting if you're an in play sports because it's very competitive going after the premier league turnover or the world cup turnover or the chelton turnover but if you've got a good product a good in play product you'll then automatically like i will if i'm wanting to bet on something like that like the darts i know which betting app i'm going to because i just know they do all those other sports really well as well it's interesting i was listening to george pine talking about tgl you know the new p the sort of golf television product and betting was quite i was surprised at how high up his list of reasons for liking this new format betting was and i i sometimes wonder what private equity sees when they see that sort of the betting question in sport and whether or not it's higher up their agenda than is quite often sort of uh i think yeah yeah i mean when when we're looking at as as either peak when we're looking to advise a league or as a cbc as a private equity company a sport that has a second or third main revenue stream is really interesting because if 90 of your revenue comes from tv that probably means that 80 comes from domestic tv so 70 to 80 percent then you've got international tv and then you've only got a tiny little bit of sponsorship and other if you've actually got a sport that actually is quite interesting to the to the betting community and the betting operators you've got a material second revenue stream and sometimes it's actually bigger than sponsorship so you suddenly you've got selling content to tv companies or streamers selling content to betting companies usually via one of the aggregators like genius or radar or stats perform and then you've still got sponsorship you might also have some hosting or some event revenue as well so when you're looking at a sport you like that kind of diversity one of the sports i'm on the board well both two of the sports i'm on the board of volleyball and wta their revenue base is actually really diverse they they make they don't make all their tv money from one country they make their tv money from a whole load of different countries they have a very strong betting business in the case of volleyball world they have a very strong ott direct to consumer business and they've got sponsorship and they've got event hosting so when you actually look at the top level pnl you go this is a really diverse business so there's a little bit of risk in that bit and a little bit of risk in that bit but overall it's a much less risky sport to run or advise or invest in and just as a it's interesting that so just a slight build is if i was so you take a sport and turn it into a betting sport you know or i wonder what that process is because i can you know tennis again is one that is quite and golf they're quite high up in terms of people's you know as betting sports when i look at something like women's football the wsl or whatever you know a league would be how and you know your point there is really interesting about diversifying revenue streams and if it's not all going to come from a big media rights deal is not going to be all you know sponsorship's going to be a bit of it presumably if i'm a just again back to your if i'm privately run if i'm a business person i'm looking at betting and saying this has got to be part of the equation and i don't know how it fits in and how you capture it without it leaking out just to the betting industry so i don't quite know what a betting data deal is i guess is my question yeah i mean you can capture it i mean with the one we just did the peak just to do all this work for Serie A and you basically the way you capture it is you you look at how much revenue is being turned over on Serie A football in Italy obviously first of all because that's where the biggest market and in all the other major markets around the world and then you go well how much of that is in play right and you'd be amazed it's like sometimes it's 90 % so you go well hang on a second if 90 % of it is in place it's not on the uh it's it's not just on the outcome it's different things happening it's accumulated it's it might be a correct score but it might also be number of shots or something like that so these are all things that require data and these are all things that are enhanced by having the live video stream so when you look at a sport like cr and 90 of its betting turnover is in play then you know that the betting companies need to have the official data feed and they need to have ideally the live streaming as well and that's the basis of them.

57:29Simon Denyer:So you look at the revenue, you look at how much of it is in play, so you filter it down there. Then you look at, well, if I do a deal with a genius or a radar, how are they going to go to market? What then proportion of the market can they get? So who's got the best sales team? Who's got the best market share? Who's got the best coverage? And then once they've captured the market from all the bookmakers, how much am I going to let them keep and how much do I get as the league? So that's how you value it and you negotiate it and that's the kind of typical work that we do for a rights holder. and yes yes you're losing margin you're filtering off little bits through the way but it still adds up to quite a significant amount of money if you're uh if you're a big football league or if you're a big football league or a tennis tour or the nba or nfl there are the thing i'll say about new betting sports is as with anything not just betting it is very it's relatively easy to create a new product that does something everyone was doing better and suddenly the world changes that's very different to completely changing behavior so so if you were already betting on tottenham hotspur on your way to the match in a betting shop 20 years ago it's very easy to convince you to do it on an app right it's because you're it's just the same thing just a lot easier for you to suddenly bet on something that isn't tottenham hotspur every satellite it's something completely different on the other side of the world or you're not going to suddenly start doing that so i think when you have a new sport whether it's women's sport or any new sport you have to be realistic you're not just going to overnight change people's behavior and they're suddenly going to start betting even if you make it attractive from a betting proposition point of view people are already in their habits and habits take a hell of a long time to change so the the goal is not well is the goal to make i'm not a better so is the goal to make me a better is that is that part of the equation so in terms of if i don't know what proportion of sports fans bet was it 20 15 uh yeah i'd say it's about 20 yeah depends on the country it's in the uk it's probably like 20 but in a lot of markets it's less than 10 so so i mean 20 years of bet 365 advertising and you know i'm not i'm still not betting so the advertising hasn't penetrated me it's not part of my behavior my mates do i don't but if i then so it's part of the equation saying right okay we need to get me and people like me over that line and i always wonder whether fantasy is actually a sort of gateway drug if you like into betting and fancy fancy yeah fancy fancy especially in the us when when typical sports betting wasn't allowed fancy is a great way especially when betting isn't possible fancy is a great substitute that can then lead to betting as it did in the US.

1:00:17Simon Denyer:But if you can bet and you enjoy betting, it doesn't necessarily mean you do fantasy because fantasy may not be as exciting because it's a season-long commitment of something you've got to do properly and you don't necessarily win much, whereas betting is a kind of instant risk and reward. And you're willing to take a risk on£20 and this is a bit of fun and wow, it worked. And now I've suddenly got£200, right? And what a great night. you know saturday night's now just been transformed or i've lost 20 pounds right so i think there's there's a lot of differences i think what in that example of bet365 and advertising they have been around 20 years they were the first ever client that took all of our streaming services and they've got the best in play product they always have done they're an amazing company they're not trying to convince every human in the uk to become a better they're just making sure that the people that do bet continue to see them being proactive continue to realize they've got the best products, continue to realize they've got the best prices.

1:01:16Simon Denyer:In the same way that if you don't drink Heineken, it doesn't matter how many, or let's say you don't even drink beer, right? It doesn't matter how many times you've seen a Heineken advert, I'm never going to drink Heineken and I drink beer, right? So it's the same in any sector. There's a certain amount of advertising you have to do. Otherwise, people will move to a different brand within your sector. It doesn't mean everyone in the world is going to start consuming that product. It's a sort of mental availability argument, isn't it? It's that sort of Byron Sharp line where you have to be, it's like Coca-Cola.

1:01:47It has to be there because when you are in the market, it's in your sort of choice set. In terms of how promiscuous are they between products? Again, as a non-better, this sounds like a naive question, but I'm wondering, is it a product question or a brand question, in terms of why I go with one over another?

1:02:07Simon Denyer:So it used to be about, I'd say it would have been product and price. So if someone's a regular gambler, they'll probably have two or three apps, and they know that one has got an interesting way of doing accumulator or one live stream, something that they like to watch. So you will know that because you've used them all every month or so. And then there's obviously people that are just price conscious, and actually they'll say, this is a really important bet. I'm convinced it's going to work. This is going to be great fun. Well, which one's got the best price? Well, it's four to one on that app and five to one on that, so I'm going to go on the five to one.

1:02:40Simon Denyer:so it used to be just about product and price um but increasingly now it's more about kyc which is um the regulations are so tight on these guys now the bookmakers that they have to do full kind of know your clients so they so i can't suddenly decide to set up a paddy power account i can't say it's five minutes before the rugby starts i'm going to put this bet on paddy power i've got a great price because now in the more advanced markets betting's gone through an evolution it's kind of gone bang a little regulation opens up everyone advertises everyone acquires those are customers it's a little bit of a charge which is kind of where brazil is at the moment or maybe the us and then it kind of slows down a bit the customer acquisition costs come down the marketing calms down a bit and also the regulator looks at it saying hang on a second that went a bit too fast the regulator then starts saying depending on the politics of the time we're going to deliberately slow this down a bit and we're going to make sure these people are not problem gamblers and we're also going to make sure the bookmakers are checking who is setting up accounts because we want to check two things we want to check there's no money laundering going on and we also want to check the affordability so if i wanted to set up a new account here in the uk other than the ones i've been using the last year or so they would want to see my bank statements they would want to see my pay slips and they would want to check that you can afford to bet the amount you're planning to bet and if they don't think you can they will actually set a limit on you so that's when betting has gone through the whole cycle like it has here in the uk that's the kind of big issue it's you can't just suddenly decide to open up an account it's quite heavily regulated now and it's to protect the consumer which is the right thing it's just made it quite cumbersome from a product point of view right yeah well i'm conscious of your time we've got one more question if that's all right just yeah i can't let you go without talking about YouTube because every time again we mentioned LinkedIn earlier and on the occasions that I click on everyone is seems to be promoting YouTube as a as the sort of answer to all questions relating to sports media I guess it's I we did a thing with uh the EBU in Bratislava earlier in the year and we had Thomas uh Grace on from YouTube with Mark Oliver but the room was full of public broadcasters you know the EBU audience and it ended with are you ever going to pay anything to anyone or is it you know are we just going to be putting our stuff on youtube and what's the deal and is it going to change we started this conversation you know talking about the platforms and your role but we didn't mention youtube and i can't let you go without just what what's your sort of view of youtube and as a obviously it's become my television i'm sitting in front of it and you know it's just one of the things that i watch now and i'm interested in its relationship with sport as everyone is but what do you advise your clients to do so i would say they are firmly in the the four um earlier we were talking about subscription economics and subscription pods so we were talking about netflix prime and netflix prime and disney but for me is like sitting in strategy meetings with the management team of peak it youtube is in that for so we we we spend more time talking about those four than than anyone else and obviously our clients make a lot more money off his own movie starter so you spend more time talking about those four than you do any of the other broadcasters that are already paying quite a significant amount of money over to rights holders um but obviously and those are the four that are most interesting at this point in time but things change very quickly like the paramount and potentially apple thing that everyone's talking about at the moment but i think the four that make most sense commercially is netflix prime disney and then you've got this youtube thing but it's different it's different economics and it's not subscriber economics so subscriber economics flow through to a lot of money really quickly because when we talked about that flow of money earlier you're saying there's 20 million people interested in a league there's 10 million that will watch it on a regularly five million in the winter pay four or five million end up paying but they're paying like 25 30 euros so that's 100 million a month right boom that's 100 million a month just come from nowhere and that's why domestic rights often end up being worth about a billion because 100 million a month is about a billion so when if you're using that high level theoretical example i used earlier you quickly get to a billion for youtube to get to a billion it's it's almost impossible because you would have that you'd have those 10 million people watching something live which is great but their only revenue stream is to serve ads to you and they're very sophisticated in the ads that they serve and they can only serve so many ads within a certain number of windows where you have a match and that 100 million i just talked about probably only adds up to about 10 million if you're doing it on advertising so the difference between subscriber and actually that's right because remember you asked how much money do you make from advertising i said 10 so there's the advertising economics are literally 10 of subscription economics but youtube have something which obviously no one else has and it's just sheer scale so i i was looking at the nielsen um nielsen us video consumption rates in the us it's just completely bonkers the whole of linear tv put together is 18.5 percent of video consumption for the whole of linear tv netflix is eight percent uh disney is five percent prime is four percent which is interesting because disney is a little bit bigger than prime in in in the us youtube is 13 so youtube is bigger than Netflix and Disney or Netflix and Prime put together.

1:08:14Simon Denyer:And it's actual revenues from advertising. Just YouTube advertising is bigger than the whole of Netflix, right? So forget about the rest of Google and all the other stuff they're doing. Just YouTube's ad revenue is absolutely mammoth. And it's because they have so many people, so much time, and they're selling ads across content that generally doesn't cost much. It's usually free, right? so it's an unbelievable business model and it's a bit like the the discussion you said you had with peter earlier our job is not to tell youtube how to give us money our job is to find out how we can give youtube content that makes money that they're willing to share with us that's the reality of it and it's very complicated because they're part of google it's a huge company um they do pay over money they do pay if you have a load of content on youtube they will pay you a share of it if you're the official rights holders and that's a lot more than you can say about meta facebook instagram and people like that tiktok they drive me mad because it's very difficult to you can put a little bit of a sponsored message in there but we've got clips all over instagram that's driving huge amounts of traffic they don't give us a share of anything so i will say that youtube have got two things going for them they are absolutely massive far bigger than anyone else from a video consumption point of view and they do know that they need to pay content owners money it's just the content owners that make the most money are the ones that create the most traffic and they're often influencers and that's how casa tv started in brazil because it's a tv is not a sports broadcaster it's a person it's literally a guy that's a crazy brazilian commentator that had a huge following and then he became a sports broadcaster so if you want to make more money off youtube which we do for our leagues you've got to think more like an influencer and less like a league to drive the traffic and we're doing a load of projects with them where we have sports that have free-to-air carve-outs or free-to-air obligations.

1:10:04Simon Denyer:I think they're a great solution because free-to-air is definitely not – PayTV is delivering that, and we're being topped up by streaming. It's flat, obviously, PayTV. Free-to-air is not flat. It's in decline, right? So the free-to-air budgets are going down. So we have to get free-to-air content onto YouTube, and we have to find a way to make it work for them. The second thing that is an argument for another day, which is a big beef of mine, which is more people in the UK are there are more there's more consumption of Netflix in the UK now than there is of ITV. And it's more or less the same as BBC.

1:10:43Simon Denyer:Right. So why isn't Netflix? I know you have to pay to get Netflix. right I'm not stupid I know there's a technical definition of free to air but Netflix is in more homes than BBC and ITV is and because most homes just have connected TVs and most homes fire up Netflix every other day and not many people fire up the BBC iPlayer ITVX other than for major tournaments or things like that so I also think there's there's a there's a lot of work to be done to bring YouTube to the table more for live sports free to air I also think there's a bit of an argument to be had with regulators around the world on well when is Netflix going to be considered free-to-air it's in a more or less every home it's being used the more than any other viewing platform so why can't we put our free-to-air obligations on platforms like Netflix as well from the from the regulator's point of view it's interesting to put you in the seat of the regulator and see what you would do with that challenge because you're right in that the regulation is always out of date with the market that's always going to be the the issue but one of the things i came away from ebu is just because we talked about what is the what is free to air in the youtube era is the title of our panel and there is something that the national broadcasters do that youtube doesn't and i'm i'm trying to sort of get to it there is a specific role that they play and there's a relationship that you have locally but for us maybe not if you're 15 if you're 15 if you're 15 and you follow um a guy a guy or girl on youtube who finds you the greatest goals across europe every single day and is is literally doing let's say it's a euros and every single day they're finding these amazing funny little clips if you're 15 that's far more important to you they're going to drive more traffic than the bbc are if you're 15 to 20 so it depends on the age demographic i think yeah yeah there's a same there's a guy i mentioned this in the last podcast but there was a one reading of the oasis moment the concerts at wembley you know they're just incredible scenes is is it's people of my age it's nostalgia for the monoculture you know there was a moment that that time was a sort of the last moment where everyone was seeing everything at the same time and we don't do that anymore and you know that's that's never gonna come back but it's it's quite a it's quite a nice sort of uh frame yeah no i know everything's There's a lot of parallels in music and sport.

1:13:06Simon Denyer:Things seem like they were simpler than when you turned up to an Oasis concert and bought a ticket on the door. You didn't have to sit there on this dynamic pricing trying to figure out whether you could get in or not. But I do think with the thing music and sport have in common, the Oasis thing has in common with all of our sports, is it doesn't matter what happens with technology. It's not even social media. It's like technology, AI, the metaverse, whatever it is, you're never going to replace the feeling. of walking out to see your favorite band live or your favorite football team or being at Wimbledon for the first time or whatever it is you're into, right?

1:13:41Simon Denyer:It could go down to something quite niche. So I think the live event business and the viewing of that live event business has got no concerns whatsoever because the more time we have available because technology is going to automate our life, the more we're going to want to use our spare time on things that are real. And the things that are real are the buzz of a derby, in a football match or the buzz of your favourite band. You can't get that from any other form of technology. If we've got a job. So there's that, you know, the sort of AI question. That assumes that we have a sort of luxury. We can afford to spend all of our time going, yeah, we can afford to spend enough time going into football and gigs all the time.

1:14:21Simon Denyer:Yeah, maybe. You know, they'll come to podcasters eventually. But anyway, Simon, thanks so much for your time. Really enjoyed it. Come back soon. Really, there's so much to talk about. Brilliant. Thank you, Richard. Thank you.