this is Megan from gambling Insider and I'll let you introduce yourself uh Max Wright Chief commercial officer of IMG Arena perfect thank you so much we'll start off strong uh you guys are at the Forefront of golf betting I think you guys you know take quite a lot of uh pride in it um how important are the visual insights in golf betting because I think that's quite a big thing isn't it uh yeah it's really really important so when we when we first looked at building a golf product that we thought would really change the landscape the first thing we really um landed on was that we needed to communicate what was happening on the golf course so if you think about how complicated golf is you have um up to 70 golfers at a time all playing on various different uh holes on the course um there's 7 to8 kilometers worth of real estate that they're covering it's very very complicated it's not like a basketball court it's not like a a football pitch where you can point a single video camera at the venue and the consumer can understand everything that's going on from that one shot or that range of different shots so the challenge that we had to um to solve was if you're going to be offering live shop by shop betting how do you then key the consumer into what's happening uh on each hole for each player and so that's where the idea of um plotting the location of the golf ball on each golf hole um came in and we've already seen um within uh golf broadcast the idea of a shot Tracer or shot view was something that has been um reasonably Common Place uh throughout golf broadcasting for a number of years and we we really built on that idea so our golf Event Center and the immersive visualization takes um uh metadata mapping of every single hole so we're replicating um individual trees in some instant some instances um from from the look and feel and then we're plotting over the top of that where each player is at each particular time and we're giving information about the shot that they've got coming up so if a player's in the middle of the Fairway we'll be giving uh information about the distance to the green um the the LIE conditions of where the ball's sitting so whether it's in the Fairway whether it's in the rough and then we're also providing alongside an intuitive betting UI which is delivering contextual markets which are based upon the information that the visualization is showing so as a as a product the visualization element is is key key it's key to understanding what's happening and in lie of having um a a live broadcast which gives you the ability to judge that for yourself uh it's a you know it's a a very worthy surrogate um for us the challenge there is really trying to um bridge the gap between first and second screen I think we traditionally think about broadcast as being first screen but in this instance really you could argue that um the golf Event Center becomes almost like a first screen experience itself individual treat that's intense that is a it's a labor of love to design each Golf Course uh down to that level but um yeah it can be done and it and it replicates really well actually and then you can toggle through and you can search so you can effectively adopt any camera angle within um a 360 View and you can zoom in and out from your mobile phone you can pinch in and out so it's really um user friendly oh my God that's incredible uh you know what and that's leading on to the next question you've spoken about AI a couple of times um how do you think that's going to change the industry and how do you think IMG is going to use it well we're already using it uh in a number of different products um I think where we're using at the moment is to uh help enhance things that would be otherwise quite quite manual to do so I'll give you an example of that again uh to do with our golf product but um I mentioned um when talking about the um the immersive uh visual experience that we have information on every every shot now um if a shot is let's say for example Rory mroy has a 79 in his hands and he has 170 yards to go to the green um the AI um commentary tool that we have that that powers all of our AI commentary for our golf product can then give some qualitative judgment as to how that shot ranks against other um shots that other players have have made in this in in this uh particular round on this particular day or in the tournament as a whole or indeed going back over the course of history so um the text commentary can can pull out Snippets of information say Rory is on the 15th with a 7 ey in his hand he's got 170 yards over water um only 30% of the players today with this shot have made the carry over water uh but Rory's made this shot 99% of the times he's had this throughout the course of his playing career now that's that's something that a statistician could very very quickly look up but in real time Rory's already taken the shot before they've actually got that information input the data so that's where we're leaning on the AI because it can quickly pull all of the information that we've got and then pull out Snippets of information and then add that contextual bridging information to to hang it together as a piece of narrative which the consumer can understand so we're dropping in little elements of AI to help us um tell the story in the moment because we can't possibly do things that quickly no that's fascinating I love that that makes it a very like cohesive like customer experience don't you think yeah precisely well it it adds it adds I mean it seems silly to say when we're talking about AI but it actually adds a sort of human quality if you're narrating the information rather than just presenting it it feels more authentic and that's all driven by AI wonderful uh let's see it's been a year since you acquired leap gaming how did leap gaming integrate into your portfolio uh well it's been a year since we acquired leap but um actually we've been working with leap under a commercial strategic partnership for about 5 years now so um really leap is has been a a a vital part of our business for a long period of time um you know we've worked with them on Distributing uh the leap portfolio to our uh customers um and really where we see the the the value in in the leap acquisition is in bringing um rights holder content to the virtual and vintage Sports product offering um with as many different rights holders as we can so I'll give you an example of that a couple of years ago prior to the acquisition we launched with leap gaming uh product called Euro league Legends uh and that takes the Euro league basketball's um uh broadcast footage historical BR broadcast footage from their archives and then we splice that together to create a a vintage Sports product that offers a betting component so you can bet on which team is going going to um score the next basket and then you will be fed a uh a um broadcast clip of one of the famous teams uh in question uh hitting a basket um from some period in time over the over the the Euro league um over the Euro league back catalog over the EUR league history and that product has resonated really well with fans so we saw about two and a half times um the turnover on that um uh on that product versus similar um uh virtual basketball product so um we know that the um we know that the method of bringing in rights holder uh IP and having that official tie up with the rights holder and if you can present the product in a really neat and Innovative way that really does resonate with with virtual sports fans and so we're always talking with any rights holder partner if we're talking with them about potentially um Distributing their data rights or working with them on aspects of of their content portfolio in the betting space we're always talking about whether whether there's a tie up there using a a a vintage or a uh virtual Sports um IP relationship as well wonderful you know what that leads us into the next question kind of it's the uh the event centers the event hubs um did they come about because the Sports themselves lead themselves to the event hubs or was it more that the customers kind of fed themselves to the event hubs like which kind of direction did you approach it from um I think it's a mixture of both really I mean when I mentioned the the golf Event Center I think the direction of travel that we always try and think about is how can we Elevate the experience and enhance the experience from being a simply a second screen experience to be something that is equivalent to a first screen experience and so when you're trying to do that for any sport or any competition within a sport you're really trying to evaluate um uh what the broadcast experience is like and what would work well as a companion digital experience you're also then evaluating the range of different um assets that you can potentially use to bring the product to life so are there things like uh player and ball tracking data um we you know we have a computer vision solution with our signality business and we're collecting um player and board tracking data all the time um so th those are things that we can draw upon within our own solution to then create um more immersive uh data sets which can then be visualized um but you do I think need to have a real understanding of what the consumer is looking to gain in terms of additional information is there any additional context that you can provide them that they can't get from the broadcast and then in lie of a broadcast if there isn't um an audio audio visual offering available let's say for example um a uh a rights holder doesn't offer any of their content for for streaming purposes in a particular territory can you offer an uh an event center experience that provides them with that surrogate for the live event so that's something that we're always trying to think about and we've done that really successfully in Gulf we've done it really well with the UFC which obviously is a brand that uh is within uh within the Endeavor uh with within the Endeavor family and um uh we're always looking to do it with other sports and competitions and we've Rec recently launched one with with the MLS in in North America as well fascinating uh my final question is a bit of a curveball so I hope you don't mind uh on your website you spoke about the women's sports and how they have a kind of chance for better monetization going forward uh can you talk to me about that uh well I mean I'm G consider ourselves world leaders in the distribution of women's uh Sports content within the the sports betting sector um we work with 34 different federations who we license women sports content from um and in many ways we don't see it as any any different from any of the men's sports competitions that we license it's high quality uh professional sport it times really well consumers want to bet on it and um it's just part of the professional sports portfolio that we offer so um you know I'll give you an example of that when we first started working with the PGA Tour and the DP World Tour um the very next call that we made was to the LPGA to see if we could work with them on licensing their rights as well so when we thought about the golf product that we were launching it was a product for the whole of golf not just for for for the men's competitions and this is the same right the way through all of our soccer portfolio all of our tennis portfolio within tennis we've always licensed men's and women's competitions together uh in soccer we've recently done deals with um with with the uh APL and with football Australia both of those deals contain men's and women's uh competitions as as part of the core offering so there really is no difference for us and obviously the benefit then from a rights holder point of view is there are revenues flowing back to the rights holder which can be distrib distributed to all of the the different competitions be it men's or women's within their uh within their control perfect I really love to hear it I really like that answer is there anything else you would like to say before we uh finish off uh no um perfect thank you so much this is b mean from gambling Insider