 It's mid-March in Austin, Texas, and things are oddly quiet in the Red River Cultural District. In a normal year, this street will be completely taken over by Southwest activities, blocked off at either end with brand activations and events pouring out of each one of these music venues. This year, because of the pandemic, none of those in-person components are happening. It's all virtual. Our best moments at Southwest is a preview of the future. The marketers want to understand what the startups and innovators are doing. We occupy a, we think, kind of interesting place in the calendar and with these brands in South By has historically been a place for product launches and announcements and, you know, a lot of those types of buzzy, newsy events. Last year, the pandemic was just starting when South By was canceled on March 6. It was one of the first big events to fall victim to COVID-19. Since then, this whole area has struggled. Many of the businesses in this area rely on South By for nearly half their annual revenue. That's meant that some, like Barracuda, which is right across the street, have closed permanently because of the pandemic. For us, it's our chance to really stretch our legs and get bigger artists and get, you know, the types of things that we do all year and kind of amplify them. The best way to think about it is kind of like, you know, Mardi Gras meets Super Bowl environment, but for Rock and Roll in Austin, Texas, kind of taco beer sort of way. We don't get one physically this year. We do get what we're all curious about as a digital version. The 2021 event is very, very different than everything we've done for the last 30 years. The focus on creativity, the focus on innovation, the focus on inspiration, which obviously is extremely important in 2021, is completely in line with everything we've done since the event started in 1987. Instead of welcoming people back this year, the best these businesses can hope for is a cameo in the VR world that South By created for the festival. Fantastical versions of this street, Congress Avenue and Red River, a few streets over, will be available to attendees using a VR headset. But that doesn't do much to help businesses that have been on the brink of closure for a year already. Obviously, Austin is a humongous, incalculable part of South By Southwest. So we wanted to find a way to celebrate that, to celebrate some of the venues and bring some of that South By flavor to a digital event. Whatever weight our name has, we wanted to contribute that to them trying to figure this out and get going again because if they get going again, so does our community. If we're not having one physically and we have the chance to have one digitally, why not? So we'll be in a weird virtual reality world and the Mohawk will be there. VR has been the next big type of technology for the last 20 years. As with a lot of other things, the pandemic may have been the catalyst to finally pushing this thing. Beyond the conference itself, South By is known for its huge brand activations. Brands like HBO and Amazon Prime set up over-the-top experiences for festival goers around the city. South By has really become a showcase for experiential. It takes place all over the Austin core and so there's so many creative ways to integrate a brand or a product or an ideal or anything like that. I've been trying to explain this to my colleagues in New York like, you don't get it, the whole city is taking over every empty parking lot, everything. HBO Max has a rich history of activations at South By Southwest that goes all the way back to the interactive exhibit we did for Game of Thrones. We've done the South By Southwest world as well, which created a massive amount of conversation to the brand and program itself. I think that was one of the first places where we really saw the power of the consumer reaction conversation that we can create through these immersive experiences that blend technology and the in real life experiences as well. What's this year going to look like? How is this year going to be different? I really started with the question of how can we continue our legacy of creating these activations and our experiences, but in a safer, virtual way? And we obviously wanted to use technology to do that. So we created something called the HBO Max Orbit, which is an interactive experience through your web or mobile that allows you to engage with our content and be matched with our content and characters using a series of voice commands, facial expressions, and gestures. Do you foresee these kinds of VR experiences happening in future years, even when we're able to gather in person as a companion festival? The really cool thing about South By Southwest online is that it is kind of opening South By Southwest up to a lot of people who may not have been able to attend in the past. The hope is that 2022 will be a hybrid event where we'll have an in-person real world experience. You'll also supplement that or augment that with a more robust virtual offering than we'd offered before 2021. This marks the second year in a row that South By won't be happening in person. And while it'll be exciting to see how the virtual event turns out this week, an in-person 2022 will be a welcome return to normal for the live music capital of the world. I would just love a good, safe, fun South By Southwest that is where we're open every day, where we have a wide variety of bands again and we're injecting that kind of energy back into the city. We would just want to have it back.