UP506 Chat_UP: LiveScore, Grok and how AI will disrupt sports betting

Hello there, it's Richard Gillis here and welcome to Unafficial Partner, the Sports Business Podcast. Today we're talking about sports betting and we're talking about AI and the relationship between those two things and the way into it is a conversation with Sam Sadie who is the Chief Executive of LifeScore Group which combines sports content and betting across brands such as LifeScore, LifeScore, Bet and Virgin Bet. Last week, Sam announced a groundbreaking new partnership which he's broke between LifeScore Group and X, Elon Musk's company, formerly Twitter obviously, and X AI which includes things like GROC. For this conversation, there's only one distinction, one differentiation that matters. GROC has access to real-time X data. And in terms of like all the other metrics, it's a race between open AI, GROC and Tropic, very comparable, one release gets them ahead, another release catches up, but there is no AI model right now that can access real-time information and sports and news remains very much a real-time topic. So you can go to GROC one minute after the end of a Premier League game and ask, how was this game, who was the best player? Can you analyze what happened in the Premier League today at 5 p.m., you know, with all the 3 p.m.s finished? And it's incredible the depth of information and analysis that GROC can provide. So it's a conversation which talks about, well where is this market going to go? So you've got the sentiment that is going to be gleaned from Twitter as I still call it, or the X audience, and how that feeds in to the betting experience, content and the role, increasingly relevant role of tipsters, which is betting market speak for creators. So we've got all the bits of the puzzle that we talk about on a fairly regular basis, but we're taking that and pointing it towards one of the most significant sectors in the business of sport. I really enjoy talking to Sam Sady. He's really open, he's really knowledgeable. I don't know anyone else who can bring such clarity to what is a really complicated area that he's been on a few times now, and I really value his input. So I'm really pleased to bring this to you. I hope you enjoy it. Let's just start with the obvious place and just bring the up to speed with the X relationship. It's going to be a bit of context on it in terms of what it is, and then I've got questions that build out of that. It's many things, it's like three things, so you can take it in all three directions and then go deeper into one or the other. Just give me a bit of context for it and what actually we're talking about here. It's actually based on three quite separate Russian outs, and they're all united by my principle of being paranoid in terms of, yeah, you remember that's one of my guiding principles in business on terms of life. Exactly, more to business than life. So it's sports media, sports betting, and AI. So it covers those three areas. So let's start with sports media where you have a lot more expertise than I do. So I can start with a question. Do you also believe that the consumption of sports media in particular football is going through a transformation or has already been transformed in terms of where the big audiences are going from incumbent legacy platforms like Sky Sports, ESPN, Big Broadcast towards more the technology social platforms. And that's where the majority of engagement is now happening. Yes, is that a first statement? Yeah, I mean, it's just on a daily basis. There are micro news stories that build to that big thing about the audience is not where sport wants it to be to monetize it ideally. The YouTube conversation is throughout the whole thing, the social, you know, the platform conversation. Yes, it's the answer to your question. So do you agree? Yeah, and I think I could make a case that's life score is kind of a LC platform. You know, it's been around more than 25 years. We still reach you know, 100 million plus users, you know, throughout the year. But there's another pre billion or so football fans that we can't reach. And until now, the only way to reach them would have been, you know, premium content on broadcast. But now that's changed and that that's that whole football audience is fully engaged in conversations and content consumption on platforms like X and YouTube. So we have to find that we're ready to stay relevant in that in that conversation. We can't create a new social media platform, the rival X or YouTube or Instagram. So so part of the deal is how do we upgrade the life score experience and what that brand can do for its users through partnerships with one of those platforms. And we had this opportunity with X where we can leverage a lot of their content and curate it to our existing users and also have a direct organic link between life score and X. It's a joint R&D project, as opposed to a marketing project. So teams, you know, will get together and pursue new ways of how X is real-time content can be used to develop features and content experiences on life score media. So that's item number one. Yeah. A different level of paranoia exists on the sports betting gambling site. And that's the continuous pursuit of trying to find new business models because remaining operational with the same models with increased taxes and regulation is starting to become unviable. So then what kind of partnerships can you forge? The question is like what can we do as a fully regulated legal operator that our rivals who operate offshore with no restrictions, no taxes cannot do. And these are these types of partnerships and reach that we can achieve with X, you know, leveraging all the betting conversations around tips, there's an influencers and all the sentiment that's happening on X and create new products that's probably an offshore operator is never going to be able to access. Even though on the marketing side they've proven that they can bypass those those obstacles and still be able to work with the premium marketing assets of this world. In terms of this kind of deep strategic partnership I think we have an edge and I'm looking for ways to make sure that so we can maximize that. So a little bit of a convergence model like we've discussed before but not in an all-den-operated world but you know where the actual conversation around betting is happening. And then the third one is generally in the subject of AI. We are doing as best as we can using all our resources to try to integrate AI into our workflows, into our features and products but we felt like we can take it to the next level if we partnered with one of the leading companies in this space and accelerate that further. So arguably XAI and GROC is the best large language model out there or at least among the top three. So by partnering with them we're trying to gain an advantage and see if we can accelerate those efforts. And again all is with the objective of trying to remain relevant, trying to create a strategic edge for the business. Yeah okay right good so we've got those three buckets that we can sort of build around. One of it was interesting when I sort of saw it given our previous conversations and you mentioned the convergence word. I was thinking is this a sort of post-television convergence you know is it jumping a generation from that point of view? The idea I can still see the idea, the kernel of the idea there but actually its execution is not going to happen on television or in a traditional consumption of sport but this I can see working at a deeper level. Before we move on to other things what does XC in life score from their perspective? What are they looking at when they look back? I want to ask it without speculating so it's very difficult to know like why they would pursue the steels which in relative terms it's rather unimportant and small probably for them whereas it could be transformational for us. And there are a few things that I've understood that You know, X and X AI want to be a found. foundation and infrastructure for large industries. So they want to embed their technologies in a way that they become indispensable for certain industries. And they're targeting several in the case, in this case, in a similar case. And they've chosen this industry as one sports in general, one area where they feel like they can be part of other companies business models. I think we were interesting to them because we leverage XS APIs extensively and probably better than most media companies in terms of how we ingest their content and how we created in terms of highlights or personalized X feeds for our users. So that drew their attention. And the fact that we're a challenger brand and we have a lot more upside than the incumbent large portfolio companies, I'm guessing made it more attractive to them. I think we can be a success story if we are able to take our market share from X to Y which will be much bigger than what potentially a flutter or japhkins can do. So the sort of JV marketing model that bit of it, do you think that they're looking at other industries segments and saying, okay, where we need, we want to do this. This is a route out into other areas. It's not so much of a JV model. It's about how can we leverage what X can provide in terms of content and technology to improve our products and experiences. So whilst it is a joint development project, it's developing life score and life score bets. It's not developing anything on the X platforms. So you could argue they've done the similar deals with prediction markets or trading platforms, stock trading platforms where funds and operators can access the trading sentiment on the X platform. So it's integrating their content into our products more than a marketing or a JV like structure. So, and this is where my famous ignorance of betting market comes in, but it's quite useful to sometimes sit aside from it and ask silly questions. So let's just do that. What is the relationship between sentiment and odds? Just talk to me about what it is that you're seeing now that you wouldn't have seen in the past and is it there's a sort of industrialisation of sentiment and how you then use that information. But just talk to me about that because again, it's interesting. I like the idea. I think I get it, but just make join the dots for me. Of course. You nailed the sentiment part, less so on the odds. So we're not trying to get an edge on our trading. Trading and pricing is very efficient already. So it doesn't really need further sentiments coming from these social platforms to fine tune. Maybe a little bit you can anticipate those trends and adjust your prices, but you're usually far ahead of that already with your pricing algorithms that are based on very complex algorithms and formulas rather than supply and demand in some cases. But what sentiment allows you to do is personalise. So the amount of options for betting has increased exponentially over the years with the introduction of player props and bet builders and SGP. So one way to leverage such a partnership is to understand where the conversations are happening around what teams, what players and be able to surface the most relevant betting props and opportunities to your customers on the back of that. And again, that is one direction that we could take this partnership, but we've just started and we haven't even determined the first use case which we will pursue together. So it's very much in the early discussions around which concepts we can pursue, what kind of integrations are possible. There's a lot of talk around social sharing. How do you allow that slips to be shared or how do you introduce bifescore bets into journeys with tips, there's an influencers. And all the followers and all the engagement that's going on around the topic. And let's just take it down to a journey level. So it's interesting you mentioned tips, there's an influencers and how influential are the influencers. So the creators in this world, do they steer behaviour, just talk to me about that bit of the jungle because I'm starting to piece together what this starts to look like. And I'm trying to sort of see where the roots are. We've seen barstall in this game, but there's a question I've got about as we move forward, I'm looking at individual creators as their individual life score, what the barriers of that are going to be. In every market, it's not just betting, but it's interesting looking at betting because tips that are really, you know, is a key bit of it. What does that, just talk to me about that world, what does it look like? That world has transformed itself with social media. It used to be that it used to be dark shady worlds of tips, and it was based on absurd claims around their profitability, and I'll get you rich kind of claims and promises, whereas now it's become more content creators and providing just interesting opportunities to bet on, with pretty decent analysis and research behind their picks. So they're extremely influential. I would guess much more than what you imagine. You can have tips or influencers with thousands, tens of thousands in the US, hundreds of thousands of followers. And, you know, an SGP, a bet builder, released by these influencers are of bet thousands of times across various different bookmakers. There's a lot of friction in this process, obviously, X is its own platform, Instagram is its own platform, and they're obviously not direct integration. So there are certain steps, and one of the primary objectives of this partnership is can we remove some of that friction? Can we make it easier for followers to place that bet with a single click? I mean, there are even betting platforms that integrate these influencers directly, one of them launched in the UK recently, where tipsters can be followed within their platform. And you can instantly copy their bets and place their bet. So yes, is the quick answer. They're very important in the betting world these days. How much sport is on X? I mean, what proportion of, do you get in a sense of that? Because I have no idea whether it's, because obviously my feed is full of sport, but that's a complete distortion. And I don't know if it's 20% or 80% I have no idea. I wouldn't be able to put a number on it. I don't have a number, but I was told it is one of three, if not the top engagement topic. I'll try to get that to you. It's interesting that I think news and sports are, I think, the top two topics that create engagements in attacks. So just on that, pursuing the creator thing, because I think again, they seem to be disproportionately interesting in this sector. And one of the questions I've got, I guess, is from a, when you look at it, even from a marketing perspective, where you allocate your marketing budget, it's a sort of player versus team scenario in football, do we get in Bappé, or do we do PSG, or whatever? Those are a viable choice, terms of aligning, sponsoring, giving them money, trying to, is that part of the game that you want them to engage with live school? You want them to be, don't know, representative of live school? Or is that a different thing? No, it's very different angle. I don't think it plays any role in this. So it's not like you're not paying influences, creators. No, we're trying to make them more money, essentially. So a tipster today may have to give their followers a code, or may have to give them a link with a lot of issues with conversion. So we're trying to become the preferred betting partner for these tipsters, influencers, or what we really call them affiliates. So affiliates used to be primarily on Google. They used to create their own sites, top 10 bookies, dot com, those types of things. But a lot of them have become content creators on social platforms. In some cases, countries like Nigeria for example where we operate 100% of the affiliate world is on X and Instagram and they generate content which is primarily tips or match previews and then you know we want to just integrate into those user journeys with as less friction as possible. So is this a customer acquisition play and just talked about that bit of it because again I was looking at you can get misled by industry averages and you always look at what the industry averages are for you know customer acquisition costs and this is front of my I was talking to Garif Borts at two circles last week and he was talking about the you know the caggaire of sport in general being about 7% growth a year in betting I don't know you tell me is it what is it it's higher than that 20% is it? It's very difficult to measure because are we measuring legal regulated betting or are we measuring totals and the totals are you know vague. What is the proportion of legal to total? I think the size of the legal ones. Yeah they don't do accounts with the legal ones it's really a pain like that. Well some of them do actually you know they some of them publish their numbers on some platforms or at least self-state their numbers. I think it's around 50/50 I would say potentially around 60/70 billion each the regulator then unregulated and again you know even those definitions are quite vague. Now there's a new term called pre-regulated as if like any country that doesn't have regulation is a pre-regulated market as opposed to what we used to call them offshore black markets. I mean what would you call stake.com? I mean they operate in all gray on unregulated markets they take business from regulated markets in illegal ways but you know they're quite public very high profile you know you just want the ships everywhere. Well they're on ever too many. They're still on the. Yeah yeah exactly. I mean used to be that you know you used to have a you used to need to have a UK license UKGC license to be on Premier League shirts but now they've actually looked into the exact regulation and it just says you just cannot take customers from the UK and these operators don't take customers in the UK unless the UK customers use the VPN which then they wouldn't know that they're coming from the UK right so yeah it's a little bit of a. So that's the game being played there and it's essentially again it's a it's a customer acquisition game being played here isn't it is a marketing game or what you know one of the questions about efficiencies in the market you know in a in any market is how it then leads to brand and you know where the advantages are if everyone is doing a sort of you know you're early to this obviously when everyone or if everyone can do this type of relationship and as you say the sort of industrialized sentiment marketplace which is controlled by a few of the big major platforms this is one way in which they're sort of using that influence from your point of view where the differentiation points are I think is an interesting question because obviously you mentioned stake and they've gone a you know the Premier League shirt is a just an iteration or an execution of that question what do you see that how do you see that this is a broader one than life score but it's about the market and how what options are available to you yeah it's a user acquisition and also a retention engagement play so we can obviously try to be on X you know as visible as possible to try to get customers get those you know followers of tips there's or being degraded into the content but also use the content that is generated on X to supply our existing customers with more content and and you know more betting opportunities more reasons to stay on our platform by making available these types of features and you know to my earlier point I don't think a company like X can forge a partnership like this with an offshore operator yeah so these are the types of strategic advantages that's a regulated operator needs to surface and you know as far as I know we're the first company both on sports media and betting to do a deal like this and we have a first mover advantage I don't know if X will do more of these deals I would hope not and I would expect not these for a while so you have an exclusivity relationship with them at the moment no no we just have a first mover advantage right okay so how much of it is real there's a bot question here obviously and and one of the questions everyone's got about X or all the you know all of the platforms is the sort of dead internet question in terms of well you know if there are bots on either side in whatever marketplace it is but this feels like it could be a significant factor and I again I have no idea about a number in terms of what the proportion of it is but one of the concerns we all have is that as sport and this is broader than betting but as sport then you know this arms race of engagement metrics there'll be serviced by just bots and and what's your sort of look on that do you how do you keep them honest from that perspective well I mean I would challenge that whether we need to keep them honest so let's take a typical tips to influencer content creator in the betting space if we rewind 10 years this person hopefully would do some research would look at past form would look at injuries and then we'll come out and say okay here's my pick for the weekend here are my picks for the weekend now the advanced version of that with today's tools is using ais and algorithms mostly algorithms in the past but now just directly using ai to do that research and create you know the picks to post so is that is that a bot now because ultimately he can automate that the whole process and even the posting and then just keep his account that has thousands of followers but it bot is doing all the work for that tips there I'm not sure there is anything wrong with that it's not too dissimilar to a hedge funds owner or a you know a stock analyst you know posting all the research but it's not done by humans now it's all done by ai so the actual human elements in this space is not relevant right like the authenticity of the real person it's actually the content which is not human that is driving the engagement so a lot of these content creators you know don't even have their own picture on on on xo you know it's just a logo or some you know some random picture because there's no human elements you know there's no association to the authenticity of being a human it's a bit different in other industries where you're looking for that's human brands even though like some you know a iinfluencers on instagram are challenging that now so it's a sort of commodity it's easier to commodify in that way in this way because it's all about just slight advantages which are very short term aren't they so there's a speed and a reaction yes how good is your content how good are your predictions and you know how can you consistently provide value to your followers so it's less about brand it's less about influence it's actually you know the quality of the contents and if a bot is producing something much better there's no allegiance to the authentic human that used to be producing it so it's a product over brand actually isn't in this space yes yeah yeah yeah and the regulators response to this trend what can we anticipate because it that you know they will look at this and say personalization AI and betting that's a cocktail that they'll want to don't know what they normally want to stop it so what do you think and that will be a territory by territory thing presumably but that just what's what's your anticipated sort of view of that question i have to react to this because i haven't really thought about it but most of the time it's making punters a lot smarter they're giving them the same let's say level of technology that's you know sportsbooks have to price you know events and proposition so it's a bit of a you know leveler in in terms of the playing field so i can't i'm not sure delivery more personalized you know products to the users while the users are able to access you know technology that makes them smarter in terms of their their betting choices is actually betting don't forget like as gambling companies and sportsbooks We'd rather have long-term customers that lose very little at a time and just continue their enjoyment of the experience for an extended period of time. We'd rather not have someone who has maybe 100 pounds of disposable income to spend on betting to lose it in one bet. We'd rather have 50 P of that at every bet for 200 bets or have them win for a while. It is an entertainment product after all and to make it sustainable, if we have smarter hunters that is not really a concern. We do have a built-in edge that comes into play and if that is being challenged by this kind of support technologically, it's not a concern on our end. How do you feel about the Elon Musk factor? There's an obvious question about how that played into your initial decision-making process. He's obviously a polarizing figure and he is representative of the brand and that will always be the case as long as he's involved. So how did you look at that question? Was that a consideration or was it just two good things to pass up? The canned response to that is we're doing a deal with one of the largest companies in the world and not with an individual. As much as the individual is tied to the brand of the company, again, this is a very large and potentially transformative deal for us with a, I don't know, there were more than, I think there were a few trillion. One of the largest companies in the world. So sure, it has been raised. Should we be concerned? Should his political ideologies come into play? But then that's a Pandora's box that you'd have to consider at every major partnership. Do you do a deal with newscorp and do a deal with any, are you against Bill Gates? So should we stop using teams? If we depersonalize it from mask and go to GROC, there are two questions. One is the picking a platform. You know, we have a, had a conversation with about Microsoft and the Premier League. Big leagues and big, you know, entities who want to take advantage of AI, you are then presented with that a range of, a small number of options, presumably in terms of which one to go to. Take me through that and how do you see, I'm not qualified enough by some margin to say, which is the best AI? It's constantly battered by all these people saying, you know, GROC has just won this test. Open AI has done this. There's a new product coming out. Everyone's talking about a bubble in AI. All of those questions. But just when you, when you were thinking about this and it's one of those way fascinated by the differences between them. And do they actually matter very much? But give me a sense of the difference between them for this conversation. There's only one distinction, one differentiation that that matters. GROC has access to real time X data. And in terms of like all the other metrics, you know, it's a race between open AI, GROC and Tropic, you know, very comparable, you know, one release gets them ahead, you know, another release, you know, catches up. But there is no AI model right now that can access real time information and sports and news remains very much a real time topic. You can go to GROC, you know, one minute after the end of a Premier League game and ask, you know, you know, how was this game, you know, who was the best player, you know, what happens. Can you analyze, you know, what happened in the Premier League today, you know, at 5 p.m. You know, with all the 3 p.m.s finished. It's incredible the depth of information and analysis that can GROC can provide and you can do that also with news like I used it right after like there's a landscape Trump, you know, you could call fiasco. And, and you know, I was asking you to calculate probabilities of the war ending and Ukraine winning and it would go so much into depth about what just happened and all the content that has been generated on X. And if you're operating in our space, you need to have that kind of real time information to surface, you know, relevant outputs and that's the big differentiator for us. And the prediction markets, again, it's a sort of interesting area, which feels like it's part of the thing, but it's an offshoot of it. What is there, how do you view that, that area? I mean, it's it's hit the industry like an asteroid. And by the way, X has a very similar deal with which polymarkets. So, yeah, I mean, there's there's a lot of similarities. And, you know, those markets, those those products rely on on real time sentiment and on the regulatory sides, they've just opened, you know, sports betting to the entire United States. So it's there's a lot of conversation going on around, you know, what the future of that is for for our, you know, British audience, you know, prediction markets are nothing different than what bet fair has been for a while. There is certainly an over estimation of, you know, how popular they can become if there is regular sports betting in those markets. And in terms of non sports, you know, prediction markets, those are very small, really like to be to be significance that they make a lot of noise when it comes to like politics and elections. And they're rather accurate sort of say more accurate than maybe polling, but in our space in sports betting, it's just an unexpected development that's been going on for maybe half a year to a year. And it's probably going to push towards more regulation because currently it's completely unregulated and available in states that explicitly banned sports betting. Is it, is there a skew of sports terms of by sport, does it, you know, on Groc, what is it that it's showing up because football here is dominant and is it a global deal you've got. So you've got the heart is it is not categorized by a territory is it? It is on sports video, it's global. And on sports betting, it's limited to UK Ireland and Nigeria. Right. Okay. So football is presumably is dominant in those those market, I'm soccer, I'm talking about. So how does that what else is in there? Because I'm my head always going goes to soccer, but where are the reason I'm interested in this is that we had a conversation with Peter Hartman about cricket in America and cricket. And Peter obviously was a meta for a period of time and he'd seen that cricket in America is oddly popular and it's well I say oddly popular but it's a huge d asked Indian diaspora. And therefore skews the data to a degree that actually was quite interesting for them. And I'm wondering what else lurks around soccer is dominant culturally and I'm assuming within the betting marketplace. And wondering what else there is and the other there's a sort of follow on question about if you were at the CEO of a sports governing body or a league or what you would do with this information. Those are tough questions for our business football soccer is everything so our entire focus is on that. When we're talking about AI, I think our relationship with X AI is a technology relationship. It's not directly linked to sports or sports betting. It's really what we make of it. At the baseline could be that we just have access to X AI tokens so that's just usage. And we use it for everything that we're doing in the business it could be accelerating workflows in the legal team to review contracts. Today we use Gemini and Google so it could be that we move you know our work to their platform because we have a better deal. Or it could be you know creating a a GROC lead predictor advisor analyst on our products that you know advises you on. You know what the outcome of the event is going to be or it could be just content generation we currently. At any top league match when you go to our product it will immediately give you an AI summary of what's been happening up until that point. So if you go a minute 27, it will give you a summary of what's happened, what's been the XG, who's got attacking momentum, what have been the big mischances. So it's summary of everything that you've missed until that point, at the minute that you go to our page. That's again, that's based on OpenAI, ChatGPT right now. It could be that we do that with GROC. And then when we attempt to integrate some X content that drives that summary. So again, it's exploratory at this moment, how we will use their technology. And this is beyond broader than that question about how, if you were in sport shoes, when you're-- and this is broader than your deal with GROC and AI. But when you're looking at this market, again, in my head is there is a leakage question. That's quite often comes back when the money generated by the IP-- I'm using two circles because I've just come out of there summit. So their numbers are in my head. But their number was that for every dollar sports IP generates that is captured, another 95% or 95% is a leakage. And one question for every CEO is, what's your leakage number? And can you do anything about that? Betting is always in the bucket of leakage, unless you're the Hong Kong jockey club, which captures a lot of it. But not everyone's in that game. But as you can see, the big question of as the media rights market and the bundle disintegrates and the audiences are on TikTok and X, how do you monetize them? Betting moves into frame in terms of, well, what is our relationship? Fantasy is one iteration of that. But just-- what do you think about that? I know it's a broad question. But just to be interested in what you know that they would be interested in. Leakage defined by revenue sets are not-- Yeah. They're not earning. Yeah. Someone like the Premier League game, when Skye has paid TV rights, money, sponsorship, all of that is captured. But then there's a betting market. There is a fantasy market. There is a whole piracy-- Everything that's happening on social media as well. All of that stuff. But you've created the fame. You've done the work. You've built a league that has resonance with enormous numbers of people. And yet, other people are taking money from that relationship. That's how leaky-- that's how-- that's the definition. This is not going to be the answer you expect. If I were the owner-- It never is, Sam. It never is. That's why I like talking to you. I would want that number to be as big as possible. So if I am making one, and if my IP is generating 10, that means there's tremendous engagement around my products on various different platforms. So if Premier League fantasy today has 11 million users, and in my view, is not really doing a good job in delivering value to those users. It's using its brand, Premier League, and Reach. And then if I come in as a live score, and next year launch a much better fantasy game, based on the Premier League, that it has a lot more rewards, a lot more engagements, a much more advanced game. And I distributed across the world. And I get maybe 50 million users on that game. Hasn't the Premier League benefited from that? Currently, how much money does Premier League make of Francisco Paul? Nothing, probably, they may have some advertising and sponsors to it. But if live score gets 50 million users playing Premier League fantasy, obviously we wouldn't be able to brand it that way, but let's say fantasy game based on Premier League. And let's say we make 50 million bounce out of that. That would go into that leakage bucket, right? But we've just created an enormous amount of engagements around the IPO Premier League. So those people are watching Premier League more. They're going to consume highlights more. They may pay for subscription in the future. They may subscribe to Premier League. So like I said, I think you're doing them all. I think-- I think-- I think IP owners and sports renovations try to understand what really their purpose is and what they want to be good at. They all want it to be and still want to be media companies. In some cases, they want to be social media platforms. If they want to be sure, are they able to create the next YouTube, the next Instagram, the next live score? It's not that easy. They have to really invest and hire the best people and have a long-term vision. And you have to do a much, much better job than we do. So that's one direction they can. And they can take a long-term view. And American sports leagues do that much better than anyone else. Or they can be, hey, we are the sports. We are the content on the pitch. And we partner with external companies who amplify so that our audience remains engaged and continues to grow. Yeah, that's a great answer. It's a really interesting answer, because-- and it's a really good counter to the very right's holder-focused look at what sport is and what its audience is. And there's always going to be a sort of-- there's an official one official-- there always was, wasn't there? There's that, even from the early days of websites. People were saying, well, why do I go to the official Spurs website when the unofficial ones are much more interesting? And there's a Wild West out there, which is fun to engage with. So it's a fascinating balance. Just to finish off then, with a question about the future. What does this tell us, this deal, about the relationship with AI? What are you, as part of the process? You've obviously-- a lot of this is-- and the difficulty of AI is future-proofing it, or just being relevant whilst the Silicon Valley and China were away with new things. And trying to pick winners is one question we've talked about. But just give me a sense of where you think that's their market's going to go. And there's always a-- you're in there now with Grocken and X. I'm fascinated to know how you see what the risk profile is, maybe, or sort of the opportunities are that you want to develop. What's the utopian view? I think I'll stick to the answer I gave you last time with this question about this. Is that anybody who tries to predict? No, you're a fool. If you think you can predict where AI is going to take the world, and in particular, any business, you have to play defense at this stage. So you have to increase the literacy of your company on the technology, look at what it's capable of doing today, and see how you can become more efficient as a business while maintaining the same business model that you have. And also how you can leverage the technology to bring value to your customers. The race that everyone is talking about, that's the underlying technology. And we're not part of that race. That is about building-- to go about data centers and trying to have the best foundational model on top of which companies like ourselves will deliver products to the end user. We just need to be active in that space. And try to stay relevant, try to make sure that our brand is not just a destination that is today-- so the LifeScore app or the LifeScore bed app-- but it's just a brand that people trust to deliver them sports-related content. Whether that happens, whether they're different interface in the future, I think it's going to be more and more important in terms of authenticity and reliability from whom the information is coming from, rather than what platform it is coming from. For the moment, it's the same. But again, paranoia and you know has to be in every business right now in terms of whether AI can disrupt their business or whether their rivals are going to be able to deliver better user experiences leveraging AI. What does this do for the, it's a question I've probably asked you before but I'm the sort of as the sports relationship to the betting markets is evolved you've got the sort of the plumbing of things like sport radar and genius and you know these deals that were done and have been done over the last decade or so. What does AI do you think do to that framing of the the relationship? That's a good question again it has the you know potential to be very disruptive to their data collection but they're very aware of that and they're investing heavily so it could make data scouts you know people who sit at stadiums obsolete maybe all the data collection gets automated but also you know the the variety of data that is being collected will probably grow exponentially and that's going to allow companies like radars and geniuses of this world to deliver much more content to their clients and but what is it what is an official data feed at this point because if you're getting all that data sentiment of GROC why does someone what just give me a second because I'm trying to work out what what is being sold? What is happening on the pitch in real time so a pass that throw in how you know the players movements you know shots on goals you know more and more and that stats being available. Exponentially more valuable over time rather than less because if you if there's a war garden around the match then live better you know the the live there's a legal war garden around it and then it is quite well protected right now with the official data deals and the and these companies are investing heavily to make their product more and more valuable or at least indispensable to not just our industry but to media industry but also to to broadcasters you will have seen like the advances in in broadcast technology that especially NFL and you know Amazon is doing but it's not Amazon it's actually genius behind you know they're I think it's called vision something so they you know there could be another company that comes in and has much better technology to deliver much better value to the betting industry or the media industry or to the rights holders and in the next cycle you know of of these you know rights auctions they may come in and be able to bid a lot more because they've figured out a way to do it either much cheaper in terms of data collection or delivery or in a much richer way that we on the other side of media and betting are would be willing to to pay more so it's a very fluid fluid in industry but I'd say those are quite formidable companies and they've been doing this and adapting to the changing technologies for a while so it's not an easy space for a newcomer to crack but again with AI it is possible fascinating listen we got there in the end because you know it's always on a technology you know related podcasts that the technology creates was a bit embarrassing but listen thank you as ever Sam really interesting I always I always say this but I always find it like a you're a interpreter for me in terms of this market and that world so thank you very much really enjoyed that glad to be useful thank you