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. Can you start with just like a little bit intro yourself, your company, what you're working on?
Yeah. Really quickly, I'm RJ. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Playback. I can go more detail in 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. So kind of investing in large cap public companies. 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. 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. 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 to the team and a new partnership with MLB, but yeah, that's the high level.
Dude, I loved it right away for a few reasons. One, 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 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 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 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 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. And it's like clearly they're just pirating the pay-per-view stream for their viewers and the viewers are just like ignoring that guy and just watching the pay-per-view stream. Talk about how the licensing and the rights work for all this stuff.
So 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 sports creators is the lack of content and lack of rights. It's 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 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 to get the partnerships over the line. Like our MLB partnership went live on Thursday. We first agreed to that partnership in July of 2024. And 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 Athos, but maybe before we get into that, I'd love to kind of get your take on it, Alexis, 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 RJ and the team did it. And the only reason this one was an easy one to spot even six years ago is I think for anyone who spent time in gaming, we watched the ascent of Twitch, you know, shout out to Justin and Emmett 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 abstracted away. It's the same damn thing. But what gets 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 launching Angel City FC now the most valuable women's professional team in the world. 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. 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's 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 RJ delivered.
Yeah. And talk about kind of 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 are you approaching kind of like bringing sports culture into the kind of the product layer?
Yeah, 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 Twitch style of like a one-to-many like it's just a creator basically talking. And what we did is we switched that from a one-to-many 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. 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 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. Is that part of the vision?
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 Gil's Arena. It's very similar honestly to what you guys are doing live on YouTube four times a week. Been super successful in that venue. 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. 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 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. But he's also an ex-player, so people sort of naturally want to hear what he has to say. But yeah, he's been super successful. I can even send you guys a clip. He had a really fun clip that went very very viral this past week when Giddey hit the game winner basically for Lakers versus Bulls. That was really fun.
