 Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at Oracle Park in San Francisco on the shores of McCovey Cove. I just love saying that. We haven't been here since 2014. We're excited to be back for a really interesting event. It's called Sports Tech Tokyo World Demo Day. This next guest has been at it for a number of years. A really cool technology. We're excited for the conversation and to welcome Mark Phillip. He's the founder and CEO of, are you watching this? Mark, great to see you. Good to see you too. Absolutely. So first off, you've been to the park before here? I have, it's been way too long. There are a few iconic stadiums in the world and this has got to be one of them. Yeah, absolutely. So let's get into it. So what is, are you watching this all about? We are the best friend that is giving you the digital tap on the shoulder when it's time to run to the couch. We monitor pitch by pitch, shot by shot data to figure out when a game gets exciting. I love my Yankees till death, but the Yankees Red Sox occasionally tend to take over my entire night when they play each other. So being able to get that tap on the shoulder and saying, hey, it's time to tune in or stop breaking the leaves. There's a no hitter through eight. That's what we try to do. Okay, so let's break it down before we get some of the applications into what you're actually doing. So you guys are, you're actively watching these games. You've got some type of an algorithm based on scoring plays, pitch count. What are some of the things that drive whether this is an exciting game or not? It's a great question. The easiest way to think about it is if you imagine what a win probability graph looks like. So game probably starts off in the middle, might go up or down based on who's winning. The more violently that graph goes up and down, generally the more exciting the game is. So win probability is a big factor, but also you think about rarity. Whether it's we had a no hitter last night, we had the Astros with a four-pitcher no hitter a few weeks ago, those sort of things that you don't see often, even if the game's not nothing, even if the win probability isn't changing, if that's a no hitter, that's something you want to tune into, right? And so are you tapping into just some of the feeds that are out there in terms of what's happening in the game or are you actually watching and using AI in terms of actually looking at a screen and making judgments? Sure, thankfully I'm not watching or else I would never leave the house. But for us it's about getting that real-time live data. So I can see balls and strikes on my servers faster than I can see it on live TV which is a little bit mind-bending at times. So we work with the official data sources so whether it's a company like SportRadar or Stats or Opsa or Abelson, pretty much anyone around the globe, we pull in that real-time data so we can give people that tap on the show that says, hey, run to the couch, run to the bar, tune in, something interesting's about to happen. Right, but what's interesting, you're a B2B play so your customers are not me, Jeff, go to the couch. You're working through other people that might be motivated to have me run to the couch. So how does your business model work? Who are some of your customers and what are some of the ways that they use your service? Yeah, I'm the guy behind the guy. Behind the red curtain pulling the strings. You know, for us, not to paint with an overly broad brush but we're based in Austin, Texas and one of the big things about a city like ours versus a city like this is that our companies tend to skew very B2B versus the Bay Area which generally skews a lot more B2C. So pitching to the cable companies, the sports providers, I'd probably say CVS Sports is our oldest customer right now. We work with small startups, more established folks and everyone uses this differently. But the goal is, the vision is that whether it's your DVR recording automatically when the game gets good or just making sure that maybe you want to place a bet on the Giants or if you're a glutton for punishment, my lowly nicks, if the spread's good enough. Getting that nudge when games get exciting is an accelerant, not just for watching in but I think for fandom. Yeah, well when Kevin Durant comes back it'll get a little bit more exciting. Nets, not nicks. I'm going to give you one free one there. Excuse me. Sorry. So we had an interesting conversation before we turned the cameras on about kind of this never ending attention span competition and the never ending shrinking of consumable media and how you guys really play an interesting role in that evolution. I wonder if you can give us a little bit deeper background. I think it's fascinating. You look at the NBA that really any league, if you rewind five years ago, you have to pay 250, 300 bucks to get access to anything digitally and then you got access to everything and then the NBA said, well maybe you just want to buy one team so we'll let you pay, I think it was around 80 bucks and then if you just want to watch one game we'll sell it to you for eight. If you just want one quarter, we'll sell it to you for $1.99 or if you just want a few minutes we'll sell it to you for 99 cents and now they've done that really, really quietly but I think it's seismic because I think all leagues are going to have to follow and do this. So if you look at these snack passes and especially as these NFL writes are coming up I could easily imagine someone like a YouTube or I should say a Google if they were to grab these rights how easy it would be to go to YouTube and get a game for a few bucks and how well their entire infrastructure would work but rewind to today when you have 10 to 20 states that are online as far as gambling goes, you take gambling, you take excitement analytics and you take these snack passes and you kind of mix them up in a pot and you get this vision of I can send you a text that says hey, LeBron has 60 points to three quarters do you want to pay 99 cents to watch the finish or do you want to let's say place a wager on if he's going to beat Kobe's 81 point Lakers record and then we'll let you watch for free and so getting both sides of that equation whether you're a die-hard or casual fan it's hard to say no to both those options. Right and do you see within your customer base the drive to these smaller segmentations, these snack packs is that driven by customer demand or are they trying to get ahead of it a little bit and offer kind of different sizes of consumption I guess would be the right bucket? Sure, I think the horse is out of the barn. I mean, imagine if we were still buying complete albums of course we're buying tracks when we just want to track the idea that we have to buy an entire season about 2,430 games in an MLB season why won't you let me buy just one game? I say MLB leaves a million dollars on the table every single time there's a no hit bid because there's tons of people who have cut the cord don't want to run to the bar but would happily pay 99 cents to stream the last inning of a game on their phone on their commute. So I think it is a combination of digital maturing in that we're able to do these single tracks sort of purchases but also as people continue to cut the cord and rethink about how they spend their media dollars, it makes sense. Really interesting. So we're here at Sports Tech World Demo Day what do you hope to get out of today, why are you here? Gosh, at least to pay homage to the reason why I went to Tokyo for the first time and had life changing ramen I feel like I need to sort of complete the cycle. Sports Tech Tokyo is an amazing program there's lots of different events that have shaped different ways but there's something really unique about this and when we all landed in Tokyo I think it was something like 80 different entrepreneurs that came in to meet with all of the Japanese sponsors. Everyone had the same vibe of just really happy to be there. They didn't take a percentage of these startups coming in so you really saw different sizes not just early stage but late stage as well and everyone was there to connect and innovate and do interesting things together and so many of us were there for the first time that there's just a vibe to this event that I haven't seen in my 10 plus years in Sports Tech. Interesting. Mark, great to sit down with you, really cool story and I guess I'll be watching for your app as the man behind the man. I'll come and do my phone real soon. Sounds great. All right, he's Mark. I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE World Tech Demo Day here at Oracle Park. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.