Real-Time Streaming and the Viewer Experience with Jed Corenthal of Phenix

Hey, everybody, welcome back to pro live today. You know, one of the interesting challenges about being in a broadcaster and a focused community is everything is now live streamed, right? Whether or not we want it to be both on the enterprise and in user experience levels. And one of the challenges that has come with that over the years is that there's a lot of unpredictability from the delivery of the stream, not only reliability and bitrate issues, but actual real time interaction issues. There's kind of a delivery time sometimes of up to five minutes after things have happened. And that's created a lot of issues, especially as we start to move into a more sports betting focused and real time interaction focused environment. And, you know, one of the guys that's trying to beat that cycle and Buck that trend just a little bit is my next guest here today. We've got Jed Cornwall over from Phoenix. Jed, Thanks so much for coming on the show today. It's my pleasure. Great to be here. You know, Jed, I touched on it just a little bit, kind of in jest in the intro. But, you know, as a community, it's hilarious to see what users have been OK with for the last 10 years when it comes to live streaming, because there has been kind of no standards, for lack of a better term. There's been all kinds of different rates and protocols and delivery types and different apps. And, you know, that's created a lot of challenges. I mean, especially coming out of the terrestrial broadcast world, you know, the expectation for typically the 8 to 10 second delay has been there for like 70 years. But for some reason we haven't been able to figure it out until recently. Over on the broadcast side, why has that been? You know, not only hasn't there been any standards, there's really haven't been much of a choice either. You know, with acls, which was developed around, I don't know, 18, 20 years ago, give or take, that which actually wasn't even developed for viewing. It was really developed for data storage. As you know, this to your point, this was just what has kind of grown as the industry standard for streaming video. You know, it was successful has been successful primarily because of its scalability, the fact that you can stream to a large audience. So if you're NBC and you're streaming to the Super Bowl to three, four, 7 million people, whatever that might be in their mind, they've got to have a reliable workflow that is going to reach those five, 7 million people without failing, without breaking, without crashing, et cetera. So up until somewhat recently, ALS was really the only industry standard technology that everybody used. And to kind of counter the reliability issue, they would sign up multiple CNS. So you have this sort of multi CD approach. So if Akamai went down or limelight went down for whatever reason, you know, they could quickly switch to another CDN and you wouldn't necessarily lose the stream and everything would be copacetic. But fortunately that is not the case anymore. And webrtc as a protocol was developed around eight or nine years ago as a Google Open Source project. It's basically what we're using right now. And, you know, it has served the market from a chat video chat perspective extremely well, but most people have not figured out how to scale webrtc. And so this sort of misnomer comes out, well, webrtc can't scale. And it's not that the protocol, webrtc is just a protocol, it's matching two points. So it's not the protocol, it's how you use the library and what you use and how you build your technology to scale. So what we've done at Phoenix and what our founder has done and and I must just say our founder, Dr. Stefan berrier, is one of probably, I don't know, 20 people in the world that has the knowledge he has about just the streaming environment. It's really quite remarkable what he basically has built from scratch. We built a real time scalable, synchronous video solution that doesn't use the open source library we based. We built it from scratch, so we have some proprietary tech involved, but it is compliant, standard compliant with all the browsers. It sort of comes out as web artsy, if you will. So there's no need for plug-ins or downloads or any of that craziness. So it's a he actually it was very interesting, if I may. He made a bet about six or seven years ago, and this was way before webrtc was compliant that people would want to stream their content in real time. And you know, he just figured out, OK, now that I am going to make that risk or assessment or that judgment, how do I get there is basically, what he was saying to himself. So he reverse engineered the protocol and then from that he rebuilt it. It's like rebuilding a car once you break down the engine. Now we have a product that we scale, we probably stream 2 to 5 million streams a day around the world. We have 33 pops all around the world connected by private fiber and unlike or similar to the acls, multi cloud approach, multi CD approach, we have a multi cloud approach. So we work with Google and we work with Oracle and Azure and many of the other cloud capacity providers. So the same sort of reliability exists for us. If Google has an outage on the East coast, we just switch seamlessly to another cloud provider and the user has no idea what happened. Their stream is never interrupted. Well, Jed, you bring up a really good point, one that I think is important to bring up. You talk about the innovation and the need for real time connection and collaboration, really starting on almost the video chat side, right, with whether it's your Skype or Teams or whatever. And you know, even on the acquisition side, you know, a lot of the control rooms in major studios have been doing a good job of actually getting those real time feeds, whether it was through a set connection or even, you know, you look at companies like high vision creating their own protocol with SRT and then moving a little bit more towards the open source model with NDI and webrtc. You're exactly right. You look at that, that real time collaboration protocol really being one of the big catalysts, right? Even two to three years ago, it feels like the end user wasn't necessarily demanding that you'd be watching a real time stream. But as whether it's sports betting, whether it's interactive elements have evolved, the end users are demanding that. Now, talk a little bit more about the end user experience. I think you're right on right on the mark. You know, one of the things that we've actually seen to that, Thanks to our great PR partnership with diffusion, is we've been tracking social media for the last several years. And to your point, two, three, four years ago, you get the occasional social media complaint, wow, my stream broke or crashed, or why is my friend watching this before I'm watching this? And they were still, excuse me, fewer and far between. But to your point, what we're seeing now is a completely reversal of that, a complete reversal of that. We are now seeing hundreds, if not thousands of people come on to social media and talk about why am I watching this a minute behind? Why am I subscribing to a streaming platform? And I'm still 30, 60, 92 minutes behind my friends. So, you know, it is bubbling. It has been bubbling. It's slowly but surely bubbling up. I think, you know, the broadcasters know it. They see it. You know, we believe we are in a when environment rather than an if until things switch completely over to real time. Because to your point, the consumers are just getting to a point where why do I have to deal with a delay anymore? I don't have to do that. And certainly and I know we're going to get into bedding. Certainly, if there's anything that has some sort of interactive element to it, well, then you can't have and I can't have a conversation like this if we're two, 3 seconds behind each other, it just doesn't work. Well, there's your transition. That was the easy segue to make you look at live TV today, and obviously one of the biggest drivers of meaningful live linear TV or live streaming is sports, right? Whether that's college football, NFL, you know, you look at the MLS1 who just signed an exclusive agreement with Apple TV. The reality is sports are everywhere now and sports are live stream at a scale that never seen to continue that point, NFL plus. Right that is brand new, just launched. And, you know, the reality is that as we look at not only the sports environments but the betting and even the Sportsbook environments, sports has always thrived on the instantaneous what I'll call the community side. Right whether that's posting on Twitter the same time as your friends or being able to. Real time on plays. Sports is one place where this technology really thrives. Talk to me a little bit about that market specifically for you guys. It thrives because it is really the only content left that's destination television. And television to me and to us isn't just the big screen that hangs on your family room wall. Television is this is your mobile device, is your laptop is your game console. I don't believe that there is a first screen or a second screen or a third screen. I just believe it's your screen. So, you know, sports is the one piece of content that all of the broadcasters out there are still fighting for because it drives traffic, it drives engagement. And it's the only real content. I mean, we've seen the award shows are kind of like that, but the interest level has really waned over the award shows significantly. Agreed but not with sports. I mean, what was it? What did I see? Something like 90% of the 100 top broadcast shows over the last year were all sports or maybe even being higher than that. So so. Yeah so for what we do, it is absolutely a top vertical for us. And you mentioned fantasy, interestingly, which has grown just out of control the last five, 10 years. But right now, you cannot watch you cannot have your A screen open and watch a game and assume that you're not going to get what's happening before you see it on your fantasy. So I on my son is a big fantasy player and he has to turn his phone off if he's going to watch TV on a big screen or he typically watches on his laptop. He can't really stay with the fantasy until kind of after the, you know, like for football, like after the 1:00 window because he's going to see everything before it happens. So we're getting to the point now where it's really sort of impeding on your day to day lifestyle and what you do while you watch sports because to your point, 60% or 70% of the people that watch sports are involved in social media or participating in social media. They're tweeting, they're texting, they're checking, you know, ESPN plus or getting push notifications or whatnot. So we are now at a point where this is becoming completely unacceptable. Well, and not only from an acceptability rating, from an end user perspective, but, you know, as you see more sports leagues and organizations partner with books like MGM and caesars, there are gaming regulations that have to be in place, especially from a broadcast side. You know, when it comes to relationships like that, specifically on the enterprise streaming side, how do you guys navigate those waters? Well, it's interesting, you. Most most of the broadcasters have developed big partnerships, whether it be PointsBet and NBC or Caesars and ESPN. Typically, they're mostly at least in this stage, they're still kind of marketing, sponsorship, branding type relationships. But we see a day that when you're watching a game on whatever it is that whatever device you're watching that game on, you could conceivably have the choice of choosing two different feeds. If you are a better or interested in betting, you can switch on, for lack of a better way to describe it. Switch on the betting feed and that betting feed might have different announcers and different graphics and having odds role all over the place and different overlays and and you have your Sportsbook open and bet as you're watching the game if you're not interested in that which still is the majority of people today you can choose not to watch that and just choose your normal feed and watch Troy Aikman and Tony Romo or whoever it is that you like to watch and watch the game like there's no other there's no other option but the ability to start integrating betting into the experience and converting or switching it from a betting watch where now you're betting on your Sportsbook app and then watching the game somewhere else to a watch and bet where you're now watching and betting on the same app or same device is that's where we see the US in kind of the next iteration of sports betting. It's it exists in the UK, which has obviously had a 50 or 60 year head start, but that's what we believe betting will start to go to. Well, and I love a point that you brought up to specifically around the quote unquote, multi screen, second screen, third screen environments where at the end of the day, it's your screen, right? It doesn't have to be your 90 inch TV or your phone. Right there is a combination. And one of the things that I think that you guys have done a fantastic job of, even as you're talking about switching those feeds naturally on your devices, is creating synchronous broadcasts. So I could think of about 25 times where I had to turn my phone off because my stream of the Cowboys game was two to three minutes late and ESPN would send me a dang notification telling me that we missed a field goal that I didn't even know we were in position to kick. And that's something that you guys have seen significant technical progression in, right? Being able to deliver that synchronous experience from one device to another. Talk about that for a little bit. That's that is significant from an end user perspective. Yeah I mean, obviously, we agree and to the point where it's a patented technology of ours called sync watch. So yes, indeed. I mean, look, you know, there's everybody sort of knows the term latency or delay and and what happens, you know, the delay between the field of play, not the broadcast, because the broadcast has delay, as you alluded to earlier. You know that 7 or 10 second language or wardrobe malfunction delay that's built into the broadcast. I'm talking about the field of play itself and the device that you're watching that could be 20, 30, 40 seconds or whatever it is. And even some of the newer technologies like caf and some of the lower latency type streaming can get that down to maybe five, eight, nine, 10 seconds. But what most people don't also recognize is the drift between users. And so it's not just that you can get your latency down to 5 seconds. That's great. But the problem is not everybody is down to 5 seconds because your stream isn't in sync. So what sync watch is basically it allows us the technology is such that we're streaming this we're syncing the stream across all devices within one to 3 frames, which is imperceptible to the human eye. So whether you're watching it on a mobile, a laptop, a connected TV, a game console, if you put them all next to each other, each one would be at exactly the same time watching that stream. So that drift that exists today for us is eliminated. So your field goal example, would not exist if, if they were using our technology. Well in it's 60 frames a second. You're talking about some tenth of a second difference. And that is you talk about it being imperceptible. I mean, it truly in 100 milliseconds. Yeah Yeah. Then that's look, that's just incredible from a technology perspective to it. We could never doubt about that all day. And I could probably talk with you for like four or five hours about it, but. And I'd stay here with you. Well, it's fun. It's fun. But we have talked a lot about sports, and obviously there are applications for the tech far beyond even sports applications. Specifically talk about some of those markets that you guys are seeing growth in. Sure a couple of things that we've seen is the ability to watch together or having people, your friends, especially during the pandemic, where you're not in person or hanging out with your friends as much as you used to, and you want to watch a game and still kind of trash talk or, you know, talk some stuff. It's awesome. You know, you you're able to watch a game in sync and in real time with several of your friends using our technology. One of the other features that we've seen a lot of adoption with, especially with Verizon and some of their partners partnerships with the NFL and the NBA and the NHL, some of the racing properties like F1 and Indy is what's called a multi view application. And the basic gist of that is it allows you to watch a game, race, whatever it is, a sporting event from up to multiple six, seven different camera angles. And all of those angles are in real time, and they're all in sync. And when you switch from portrait to landscape and you don't miss a frame, which is unbelievably, unbelievably difficult technology to create. I mean, I've seen it obviously 100,000 times, and it's still I'm still marveled because being able to do that is extremely difficult. While you're thinking six, seven cameras and you're keeping them as though you're at the stadium. And this really started at the Super Bowl a couple of years ago in Miami. That was the first application for it where people it was only four people in the stadium that were able to watch these multiple camera angles. So those are some of the features that we've been using quite a bit. Well, I love to hear it. It's funny because I like to mention this, too. This isn't a paid show paid for by Phoenix. We're at the point now where literally there aren't many if 0 people doing exactly what you're doing. And we're at the point now where, you know, you guys really have come to a point where you're dominating the industry and everybody else is kind of behind you. Right and I love to have these conversations with you guys in the industry leaders because, you know, it's very indicative of where the market's going to be in 5 to 10 years because, you know, companies that may not even have this on their radar are going to have to start thinking about some of these things. And with that in mind, to what's next for you guys? Even thinking 5 to 10 years down the road, what's on the roadmap? Well, I think there's a couple of things. The micro betting market is one that we foresee growing quite a bit over the next year or two as we move from 33 states plus DC to into the 40s with, you know, there's going to be a couple of three states that probably never pass sports betting laws like Utah or some of the others. But mostly, I would say within most estimates say within about two years we'll hit 40, 45 states. So it becomes a national, a national we're into national betting. We believe that micro betting or betting on every play, every pitch in a game, every play in an NFL game, you know, will become a much larger piece of the betting handle. And then the other area that we're extremely focused in on is the metaverse, because we do see that there are applications within the metaverse that you have to be in real time. If you're going to create avatars or shop in real time or shop in the metaverse and converse and attend a concert or, you know, play a game or watch a game with your friends in the metaverse with 100,000 of your friends. That all has to be real time technology. So we're working now to reduce our latency even further. We're at now 500 milliseconds guaranteed, but we're looking to reduce that to one 200 milliseconds. So it's getting pretty exciting and we're looking forward to where this is going to go. Well, Jed, I love hearing the vision. I love the great work you guys are doing over at Phoenix. Ladies and gentlemen, Jed Cornel from Phoenix. Jed, Thank you so much for coming on TV today. Oh, Thank you, Ben. I really appreciate it. And Thank you guys for tuning in. Be sure to join us next week.