Playback launches with MLB deal and Alexis Ohanian backing to become the Twitch for sports

always love having Alexis on the show. Uh he's got so much to talk about, so much history. Um, and he's always cooking. He's always cooking. He's a chef. And hey, how you doing, RJ? Hey guys, I wasn't sure if you could see me or not. Not going to lie, it was always easy. How you doing, guys? I'm good, guys. How are you?

We're good. Uh, can you start with just like a little bit intro yourself, your company, what you're working on? Yeah. Yeah. Really quickly, uh, I'm R. J. I'm the CEO and and co-founder of Playback. Um, I can go more detail on my background, but just really high level.

I actually have a little bit of a non-traditional background for a startup founder. I was a hedge fund analyst at an activist hedge fund based here in San Francisco called Value Act Capital. Um so kind of investing in large pack cap public companies. Um in terms of playback, look, the idea is pretty simple.

We're trying to create a better way to watch sports by integrating creators and communities directly into the content itself. Uh, in practice, what that looks like is it looks like a little bit of a combination of like a traditional NBA or MLB broadcast with a Twitch creator stream overlaid on top of it.

So creators can basically add their own voice, own commentary, and most importantly, they can actually interact with an audience while they watch these games. And what we found is that that's just like a way better way to watch sports.

Um, and then I'm sure we can get into more detail on this stuff, but we had a couple big announcements last week in terms of obviously adding Alexis and 776 uh to the team and and uh a new partnership with MLB. But yeah, that's the high level. Dude, I loved it uh right away for a few reasons.

One, uh we basically are doing for technology and business news what you're doing for sports in a way where we don't do any journalism. We're basically sort of providing sort of this like commentary and reactions, reactions to the news.

And I think what you tapped into is basically, you know, just an existing behavior which is so many people are sort of consuming sports content in this sort of bifurcated way where they're getting their commentary from YouTube or Twitch and then they're getting their the broadcasts, you know, through these sort of legacy providers.

and like sort of putting that in the same place just makes a lot of sense because I I don't I don't watch I don't watch a a ton of I don't watch a ton of sports but if I want to like get a recap on F1 I'm going to YouTube I'm not turning on the sort of like post race and a lot of those yeah I watch a lot of those like F1 reactions and they can barely even use photos they have to go to Getty Images license them they can never use the real footage and I'm just like as a viewer I want I want everyone to be able to use the footage in the right ways and it just requires figuring out all the licensing and stuff.

I remember seeing on Twitch someone was watching a boxing match that was clearly pay-per-view. You've probably seen this. And they're holding the controller and they're like, "I'm Don't worry, it's just a photoreal video game I'm playing. I'm just playing the photoreal video game dive into as if they're Yeah. Yeah.

Exactly. They're like getting really into it. " And it's like clearly they're just they're just like pirating the pay-per-view stream for their viewers and the viewers are just like ignoring that guy and just watching the the pay-per-view stream.

um talk about how talk about how the the licensing and the rights work for all this stuff. So just just first off totally agree with everything you guys are saying like it's one of those things where to me like one of the internal maxims we use is like you know can the next Stephen A.

Smith just be an independent creator on playback. Like they don't need to go work for ESPN. They don't need to go work for Fox or one of the big traditional media companies. And I think the only thing that's held back like independent uh sports creators is the lack of content and lack of rights.

like it's just been too hard to do it. So, one of our goals was to kind of mesh those two things together. The way we've done it is actually pretty interesting. So, essentially both this is true and I think you guys know this, but we have partnerships now with NBA and NBA League Pass and MLB and MLB TV.

And the way those partnerships actually work is MLB TV and NBA League Pass are just apps on playback.

So we kind of created this like bifurcated system where there's like an app layer where these like you know content companies and streaming services can put their content still deliver it the exact same way in a lot of ways still get all that user data still have the same subscriber relationship but then we can overlay on top of it this creator experience because sort of everyone agrees that this is a good idea.

It's just really hard to actually fit it into the existing rights ecosystem. And the way we've been able to do this with this app layer just makes it a lot easier. It was still a lot of work uh to get the partnerships over the line. Like you know, our MLB partnership went live on Thursday.

We first agreed to that partnership in July of 2024. Uh and then actually been negotiating it and talking about it for like nine months prior to that. So it's still a long process, but I think the like sort of structure we've set up here is pretty scalable and it can hopefully work with anyone basically. That's awesome.

Amazing. Well, natural fit to partner with Alexis given that he not only is a sports fan, but he's creating new leagues.

Obviously, I wanted to give you an opportunity to talk about Athlos, but maybe before we get into that, uh, I'd love I'd love to kind of get your take on it, Alexis, and and what kind of got you over the line to partner up in a big way.

Dude, I had a tweet from six years ago ranting about it only being a matter of time for someone to build the product because there is a lot of product that gets done. So, the syncing and everything works well and the partnerships and took a minute, but thankfully R. J. and the team did it.

And and the only reason this one was an easy one to spot even 6 years ago is is I think for anyone who spent time in gaming, we watched the ascent of Twitch, you know, shout out to Justin and EMTT who who found that one of the most popular things people would want to watch people watch was video games, esports, whether it was competitive or not.

And what are games other than, you know, whether it's sporting events or League of Legends? It's it's abstracted away. It's the same damn thing. But what gets you in the way is the rights deal. And that was obviously not going to be solved easily. But I first got into sports.

It was actually one of my first investments after leaving Reddit in 2020 and splitting initialized up was uh launching Angel City FC now the most valuable women's soccer team in the world or sorry women's professional team in the world.

Um, but what I found getting into sports was here was this world, especially in the emerging side, where folks didn't really have any of the media dollars at stake. So, they could move a lot faster with innovation because, you know, you weren't looking at billion-dollar rights deals.

Uh, you could just assess from first principles. And I think that's why we've had the success we've had in emerging sports. And then what it was going to take was really seeing the uptick of this new generation of sports fan. That's the reason Angel City has been so successful.

We're talking to a very different sports fan than the traditional one. It's a fan that lives here, right? That watches on their terms. It's a younger fan.

And so now, thanks to the success of emerging leagues, the big four can look and say, "Okay, like maybe we need to reach out to fans here and technology is the way to do it. " And it just took time, but the market's ready now. And R. J. delivered. Yeah.

and talk about kind of uh with with playback, you have an opportunity to truly sort of productize sports culture in a way that I feel like Twitch early on was just very much like video game culture. Like the entire thing was built around that.

How how are you approaching um kind of like bringing sports culture into the kind of the product layer? Yeah, it's a good it's a good question. Honestly, the easiest way we've kind of done this is I think a hallmark of sports culture is that people like to get their takes off.

Like they're very interactive and active in their fandom.

And it's honestly like the biggest dividing line between what a 24-year-old fan looks like versus a 48-year-old fan is like, you know, 48-year-old fan leans back, turns on the TV, and just like relaxes and probably still yells at the TV, but a 24-year-old fan actually wants to yell and be heard while they're yelling.

And so one of the first tweaks we made to the product is we actually built it originally in sort of the the Twitch style of like a one to many mini like it's just a creator basically talking. And what we did is we we switched that from a like a one to mini to actually a stage concept.

So creators can actually bring people from the audience up on stage to chat with them, debate with them, do whatever. And like our best users are like very frequent stage requesters or even joiners. Like they're always trying to kind of get their takes off.

And I think that's kind of a microcosm for how we think about why we're focused on sports is like if we can continue to tailor it to this user and this use case like we're going to have a much better chance of like carving out our niche and kind of winning the use case.

Uh but yeah, there's lots of other little things, but hopefully that gives you a good at least early signal. Yeah.

Do you see it, you know, maybe it's happening today already, but do you see former pro athletes sort of like retiring in the same way they do now, saying, "I'm going to start a podcast, you know, once once they're out of the league, you know, I'm going to get on playback and I'm going to just start being basically a super fan providing that commentary.

" Uh, is that is that part of the vision? Our our biggest creator is Gilbert Arenas. So, very classic example of that. And also been very successful as like an independent content creator. He has a show called Gills Arena. It's very similar honestly to what you guys are doing live on YouTube four times a week.

U been super successful in that venue. Uh and has transitioned into a playback creator too. He's live, you know, four times a week with us at night and will be basically seven times a week for the playoffs on.

And he's been super successful because I think he has like the right blend of like he has a content creator mindset like he can actually think uh like what's going to go viral, what's interesting to people, what do people want to talk about, like what's just basically fun.

Um, but he's also an ex player, so people sort of naturally want to hear what he has to say. Uh, but yeah, he's been super successful. I can even I can send you guys a clip. He had a really fun clip that went very very viral this uh past week when uh when Giddy hit the game winner basically for for Lakers versus Bulls.

That was really fun. Yeah, I can follow up with that. Can you talk a little bit about monetization on your end? Obviously, I'm paying the MLB through their app. You're sitting on top of that. It makes a lot of sense that if I'm uh following a creator and I'm tipping them, that money just flows through.

You take a cut of that. But on Twitch, they're actually running ads as well. I imagine that the MLB would be pretty upset if you just start running ads on top of their ads and kind of distance your media there. Is there some sort of partnership?

Like you obviously as a digital platform have even more information, you could target better. There's a lot of different things. How are you thinking about monetization over the long term? Yeah. So short term it's just focused on the creator monetization that you referenced.

Like I think we have a long runway and we have great investors to kind of build to the long term. But yeah, near-term it's all about basically these independent sports creators. Can we actually help them build a business? So obviously tipping is one category, but even just room subscriptions is what we call them.

Like the ability to offer an actual subscription to their audience for either like limited interact interactivity or even like premium streams. That's the primary focus right now. Long term though, I think there's sort of two options.

One is like there is already a proven model around like advertising sponsorships in partnership with the leagues, right? So the leagues do have these partnerships with Amazon and YouTube and other like obviously fully scaled platforms to deliver ads for them and then a healthy cut goes to the partner basically.

So that's one category. The other category is like I kind of think once we're big enough there's going to be a really big opportunity for what we call like platform revenue which is basically like some percent of our of the subscribers we drive obviously to these partners.

We should earn a percent of that but also there's going to be new services that we can kind of offer. So the two obvious ones that come to mind are e-commerce and and sports betting, right? Like being able to bet from within this experience, being able to buy a ticket from within this experience.

Like all of these are going to be sort of like high quality opportunities and we expect to both enable that and make money from that if that makes sense. Yeah.

For me, it's kind of silly right now that you have a creator who's providing reactions and commentary to sports on one platform and saying, "Use my code and go to prize picks or go to, you know, underdog or uh Joey and and Jake's, you know, platform like better uh like it's very silly that these are just happening in one place where a sports fan wants to like post up.

they're just like fully immersed in the game, the commentary, and whatever sort of activity they're doing on top of that. So, I mean, maybe merge in a social network and an LLM, foundation model company as well. Yeah. Just merge it all. Yeah. Yeah. LBO, a big trillion. I I see a quarter trillion dollar here. Yeah.

Let's throw it all together. Um, you got uh we got a minute left. Alexis, tell us I I wanted the the update on Alo uh since like there was some stuff going on over the weekend. Yeah, the greatest show in track. Uh we started this women's track league last year. Three million people tuned in for it.

Was the biggest purse in the history of the sport. Fastest ladies in the world. And it was a blast. Uh we're doing it again October 10th in New York. And of course, we're going to be streaming it on playback. Yeah, I was going to say, are you going to have a are you going to be providing commentary?

I you don't want to hear my commentary. But there is to your point though, right?

This is why I love the idea of building in a new in this case building a brand new league but even in emerging sports is is you can rewrite everything from first principles right we can say because we don't have a billion dollar streaming deal media deal yet we can say okay what's the best thing for fans and what's wild is there is a long long long tale of creators who love this sport or even just mildly curious about this sport who are going to be able to bring their audience to watch it and I really believe if you haven't watched John boy.

Like, I'm not an MLB guy. I'm not a baseball guy, but I fell in love with this sport through this random creator. Happens to be a Nick, not a Knicks fan, a Yankees fan. Nobody's perfect, but he's a big Yankees fan and does these voiceovers of baseball that delight even a non-fan. Like, it's just so engaging.

And to me, that that is the future of sports. And it just seems kind of silly that we've had all this talent emerge from streamers talking about video games, but we've never seen the new John Madden or the next Pat McAfee. And it's it's going to happen here imminently in these next years. Love it, guys.

Thank you for jumping on. Uh very excited. I'm going to hit the size gong for you and uh we look forward to tuning in to some playbacks in the near future and uh hope you guys crush the rest of your Monday. Yeah. Good luck. Talk cheers. Very cool. It's crazy that that do people bet on running a lot yet?

Horse betting is huge. Why is betting on, you know, people like these personalities, these track stars? Why is this not You should be able to do a whole track day. Just you head to the track, get some get some. I mean, it's way I mean, I respect horses. We love horses. I went to the Kentucky Derby.

Uh, why can't I just go to, you know, the human derby? The the derb. The derby. The derb. Uh, how we doing? Do we have our next guest? Not yet. Hopefully coming in soon. Um, I think that's very cool. It's interesting. I mean, you have to wonder if Twitch is thinking about that. They're so big.

Amazon has the rights to a bunch of stuff. It seems so logical, but man, I mean, it's been a decade and they haven't done it. So, I mean, part of it is it's great for it's great for business if your competitor is owned by am uh Amazon. Yeah, exactly.

And not that they can't innovate at all, but I mean for a long time Emma Sheir was the CEO of Twitch and was running essentially an independent organization from Amazon, but of course he stepped down and now Twitch has been much more absorbed in the Amazon ecosystem. Uh it is a fascinating model.

Have you have you seen on Twitch how uh the Twitch Prime model, how if you have Amazon Prime, you get one free subscription to a creator. And so most people who use Twitch, they really have one favorite person that they tune into every time.

It's not really like YouTube where you're bouncing around watching 25 different creators. And so you you go in and you get a free one. And so they would give $5 a month and then the Twitch Prime I think delivered maybe $2. Only like the margin went through, right?

But still you would have these uh these creators with like huge organizations. Uh what are you looking for? Water. I was looking for a year. I thought you had two. We got Aaron in the