 Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage, Avis ReInvent 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We're here to get all the action wall-to-wall coverage, the keynotes with the new CEO Adam Sileski just happened. A lot of action, wall-to-wall covers four days. And we love cloud computing because it impacts business. We love all that. But when it impacts sports, we love it even more because it can relate to it. You can see we've got two great guests here from the NHL Formula One. We've got David Lahansky, EVP of Business Development and Innovation at the NHL. Rob Spedley, Director of Data Systems at Formula One. Gentlemen, thanks for joining us, me today in theCUBE. Thanks for having us. So, obviously Formula One, we know is very data-driven, pun intended. NHL has a lot of action going on as well with innovation streaming, et cetera. Let's get into it. You're both Amazon customers. Rob, we'll start with you. Formula One, big partnership with AWS. What's that about? How are you guys looking at this cloud as you guys go the next level? Because you're under a lot of pressure with the data from the cars and standards and all that good stuff. What's up? What's going on? It started probably four or five years ago with the acquisition of Liberty Media in Formula One. And there was a real drive towards data. There was a real drive towards unearth in all of the data that we've got. Formula One arguably probably generates the most data, the most sports data of any sport on the planet. We have car telemetry data, timing data, metadata, image data. We own all the video data and the audio data of driver radio, tire data, weather data, you put all that together, you got a real mass of data. And it was just about trying to unearth that and engage the fans more. And that's where the partnership with AWS come from. And the competitiveness in Formula One, I know is really high and you got a lot of smart people on these teams looking for an edge. And I know it's a whole new world of data as things get exposed. So I got to ask you, what is your job? Are you there to corral the data that kind of set standards? What's your role? Well, my role is essentially to use the data at central league level, if you want, for all the franchises. That's all 20 drivers within the 10 teams. To try to use that data in whatever way possible, whether it's the new car or whether it's the F1 Insights powered by AWS, to try to engage the fans more. We've understood that data is really important to tell the story of Formula One. And it's really important to reach different demographics as well, the younger demographics, the Gen Zers, you know, those type of guys. It's really important to get to them because you can condense a one hour 45 race down to five minutes, right? Which is what they want. So this has been a really important step for us and a really important part of that journey has been the enablement. And I can see the whole eSports thing. I can see after a race, okay, now the fans race amongst themselves as the technology simulation gets better. Only headroom there, so to speak. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's what, you know, that's probably the next generation of what we want to do with the data is we want to make it much more interactive. We're already giving, you know, through the insights and through, you know, the way that we're trying to tell stories with the different data assets. We're already trying to do that in a much more proactive way of telling the story. The next level of that is completely immersive, is interactive. And that's what we call the 21st driver. So there's 20 Formula One drivers, right? But we want to build systems using the data and gamification where you can embed yourself and immerse yourself in the race as the 21st driver and race against the other guys on a Sunday afternoon. Awesome, Dave, let's get to the NHL, National Hockey League. You guys are doing a lot of good stuff. You're the EVP of innovation. What's going on over there? How do you see the cloud helping you guys innovate? What's on your agenda and what's your role? Wow, I don't know if we have enough time, but at the highest level, you know, we're trying to expand and enhance the way we produce and present our game to the world. You know, our sport, we have some similarities, but there's a lot of differences based on the uniqueness of the sport. Statistics haven't really been a big part of the National Hockey League and the way people consume the game. I always say, you know, goaltenders have two statistics that have been used to evaluate them. And they were the same ones that were used to evaluate them back in 1917. So we're almost looking at 100 years where it hasn't really evolved that much, but we think there's so much there that can really enrich and transform the game. So we're trying to partner with AWS and the best technology companies in the world to figure out how we can start to capture that data and turn it into meaningful content and experiences that allow fans to go a little bit deeper and a little bit broader. Yeah, I can see the data being used for also, you've seen what the NFL's doing a lot with the safety. Hits are getting harder and faster in the NHL. I mean, the collisions are, the equipment, everyone's going faster. That's a big safety issue too, isn't it? Well, there's a safety component too. And look, that is one of the unique things about our sports. Both of ours are speed involved. The speed though, for us it's not just on the ice, it's also the pace of play, right? So when you have a stoppage, it's typically 10 or 15 seconds long. So there's not a lot of time to integrate data, to tell stories, to build in graphics and visualizations. So the first phase for us is to build a tracking system that could capture the positional, the positions of the puck and the players throughout the course of every game. And that's generating a massive amount of new data. Now we're trying to add video to that data so we can start to use it to create entirely new experiences. What are you guys thinking about from a fan experience? Look at the analytics. Are they interested in more like where the puck is, how fast people are going? What are some of the analytics sharing? It depends, right? So from a fan standpoint, avid fans really want to, they want to go deep and they want to understand controlled zone entries and things that are really inherent to the core factors for determining outcome. Casual fans, they like just unknowing speed, right? How fast is the puck moving? How fast is the players moving? Before we had the system, we weren't able to produce it. Before we had AWS, we weren't be able to produce that in real time and overlay it onto a game. So we could go even deeper when it comes to players and coaches and media partners, but the ability to build a solution that works in real time, to give them the data and the video that they can use to tell those stories is born from AWS. That brings up a great point. I'd love to ask both of you if you could answer this question about the fan expectations. One of the big trends coming out of this reinvent this year is, cloud is creating more capabilities, but the users and the consumers have new expectations. They want it unmobilized, they want the highlights, they want everything, they want the data. They're data junkies, they want everything because they're immersing into the experience with multiple touch points. TV, app, whatever. I think that's right and I think that it's up to, as Dave was just saying, the two sports here with a lot of similarities and you can see that we're both on the same journey and that's because it's been driven in the end by the consumers, it's been driven by our customers. And I think that now we're on what I would call the data flywheel where there's a lot of inertia and it's just getting stronger and stronger and stronger. And this was, if we go back say three, four years when we started the partnership with AWS and we started to get really deep into the data and understand what the objectives of this whole exercise were, we always knew that there'd be a point where it started to build a lot of momentum and have a lot of inertia. And that's what's happening now. There's a real thirst for it, right? And it's not just, even the naysayers, even the people that kind of looked at it and went, well, why are you filling my screen with data? Exactly the same as what Dave says, since the gold tender since 1917, you've used the same two stats to evaluate that particular player. In Formula One, it's been exactly the same. So we started to introduce stuff which had been the same status quo for 70 years and they say, well, what's all this about? Now, those people can't live without that, right? It's become a key part of the broadcast. And it creates new products like things like Netflix. Who would've thought a series would be on Formula One with a soap opera for Formula One? In behind the scenes, driving to survive has been quite an acceleration for a fan base. I mean, techies in Silicon Valley and all around the world have told us like, hey, you know what? That exposes the nerdies of Formula One, kind of cool. Opens up, so who would've thought? I mean, there's going to be shows on this, so a whole other level. I think another point to add, it is about increasing your distribution points and getting your content out to as many people as possible through as many platforms as possible. But I think in addition to that, it's really about, and Rob started to touch on this, personalization and customization. What can you do within those platforms to give fans the ability to sort of create their own experience, right? So data highlights huge, huge, huge level of importance I think community's going to be a big part of this too, as you start to see the data creates more interactions and more progression, if you will. Community, I'm a Bruins fan, I'm in California. There's not a lot of Bruins fans, mostly Sharks fans, but I got to get online. Where's my tribe? I want to hang on such as on Twitter. So there's a whole other level coming. How do you guys see community developing in your sports? I think the community is the biggest factory in all of this, right? And it's kind of bringing together, it's a global sports community, first and foremost, but then you've got these pockets. So you've got NHL, NFL, you've got Formula One, and they're all gaining popularity. But it's all through really, everybody being on this same journey. Everybody's on this same journey of involving tech in the sport of revolutionizing their particular sport. And it's building this global community. I mean, in Formula One, we've got a billion fans worldwide. But that's growing. It's growing every single year, but it's only growing because we're starting now to get to that younger demographic. Formula One could never get to the demographic. You know, Formula One fans look like us, but now it's starting to really- The virtualization of this hybrid world we're living in opens up the doors for more access. Absolutely, yeah. And I think that's the key point here. And again, Dave's touched on it. It's the personalization. It's using data and platforms and packages to personalize somebody's engagement with their particular sport. I got a couple of questions from the fan base that was, I knew you guys were coming on. I want to get to you. First Rob, how has F1 been using Amazon and the cloud to develop the new 2022 race car? Well, I mean, I would say it's no exaggeration to say Amazon technology enabled was a key enabler and has been able to design that 2022 car. You know, we designed it in a virtual environment called computational fluid dynamics. You know, the simulations when we were first running design iterations were taking something like 40 hours with when we started running it on the EC2, you know, spinning up 7,000 cores, something like that, we go that down to seven hours. Manageable, we designed a whole new car. Awesome. On the NHL, a question here for you is that, okay, how was the young generation coming into the game? What's changed with the innovation that's impacting how the game's played and how the young guns are coming up? Is there any technology enabling that? Sure. You know, so we're looking at the type of content that younger fans are gravitating to, obviously highlights and condensed games. But we talked about it before, the ability to see what they want to see with regard to that. So, you know, where we're trying to get to is where you could watch a game and ultimately decide whether or not you want to turn on a right rail of real-time statistics for your favorite player, for your favorite team, for a specific event, whether or not you want to turn on the ability to network with your friends across social platforms, whether or not you want to turn on a betting functionality, whether or not you want to turn on a gaming functionality, right? So, this is how the younger generation really wants to consume the data. It's sort of, they want to see what they want to see, when and how they want to see it. So we're working on that. And then there's everything that goes beyond that. The world of NFTs and VR and AR and alternate forms of content distribution. None of that would be capable or available, if not for the ability to capture, process, and distribute data and video in an aggregate in real-time. You know, I really think we're onto something so new here. And you guys are really kind of illustrating the whole point of how being in-person, the old model of physical, how to go into arena to watch hockey, or go watch Formula One and hopefully it's on TV, maybe it's got coverage here and there. But now with hybrid, you can integrate the experiences from the physical in-person, where the asset is. And to virtual and just open up completely new hybrid use cases. I mean, this is brand new, there's no standards. No, exactly. And that's something that we're really starting to look at, which is the event of the future. You know, so how do you bring, how do you mismatch, how do you bring that whole data experience and that whole broadcast experience to the actual event, the live event, and how do you bring the live event to somebody's front room? It's the hybrid model, right? And this is definitely next generation of how we're using the data. We're working with AWS, we're calling it event of the future. It's really, really exciting. I mean, you can imagine going there to a Formula One race, you're setting the stands, you're no longer, you know, watching a car pass every few seconds and wondering what's going on. You've now got AR, VR that you can kind of put up and lay up across what's going on on the track. Well, a lot of people love to get you guys' reaction to this comment, I want to, because this is a big, I see a lot of naysayers out there, because they're so locked into the business model of the physical location. There's a lot of investment, events like this, when people buy tickets and show up, so they call it a one-way door here in the industry. They don't want to go through that one-way door, but I'm saying that door's already been passed. It's like, you're in. This hybrid world is here. If you don't get out in front of it, you're going to be toast. So the question is, how do you guys think about this when you talk about the business model of experience? Because you have to get in there. I mean, it's not super great right now on virtual. It can be better. It has to get better. So it's a balance. How do you guys talk about that in your respective fields to educate the potential, I won't say naysayers, but maybe you are. Yeah, no, no, no. So we believe it wholeheartedly. You know, when you think about the in arena experience, there's a lot of infrastructure. It needs to be in place to be able to deliver those types of experiences to fans while they're in the building. We wholeheartedly believe that the people who are paying the most to see our games should get the best possible experience. So there should be no replay they don't get. There should be no game that they can't access, no application that they couldn't have on their phone. But you need to have fairly advanced wireless in arena infrastructures in place. You need to have a lot of cloud infrastructure and services there. So that's why we're leveraging Kinesis and SageMaker and AWS elemental services to get all of it condensed, operating in the cloud and distributed. So if you're a fan of the game, there are 18,000 other people like you trying to access a mobile phone to place a bet on a real-time event that just happened, you can actually do it. But a lot needs to go into that. Dave, that's really good insight because what you're pointing out is is that the physical of location is the first-party asset. That's the key. You build on that, invest in that, and then feed it out into the next world, and then figure that out. Do you agree with that? Absolutely, 100% correct. 100% agree with everything that Dave just said, and we've got probably an even bigger challenge because we've got these 20 sites where we lift and shift, 20, 23 races all around the world where we lift and shift every couple of weeks, and they're not arenas either. These are huge sites. These are five, six kilometer by five, six kilometer square sites. So trying to do everything that Dave just said in that space in the open air. We just turned the lights off and it's over. He's got to pack it all up. The private 5G is going to totally help. You can run drones and have full blanket coverage over the location. That's good stuff. Final question for you guys on data because I think this is something that we've been kind of talking about on theCUBE over the past year. We see open source software as become a huge success. Do you guys see opening up the data to your fan base? And seeing eSports, for instance, in Formula One, is just going crazy. Everyone loves it. It's not there yet with the equipment, having your own car in your living room, but it's close, pretty close. It's there. Opening up the data. How do you see that potential? Because there are people who want to maybe code on top of it. How do you guys view that? Well, I think that's, it has to, I mean, that Dave again touched on this earlier when he talked about the difference between the casual and the avid. The avid, you'll never ever satisfy the avid's thirst for data, right? They want to do what I did and sit on a pit wall and manage a Grand Prix team. And that's great. We shouldn't just be for a privileged 10, 20 people in the world to do that. We should be able to give everybody that experience because we have the technology and the ability and the know how to be able to do that. And that's where, again, partnership with AWS where we're talking about something called the virtual pit wall. So you know that the pit stands where it's kind of like the mission control. We want to be able to bring that to the avids. And it's just getting deeper and deeper layers where you can set up your bespoke environment. You can set it up just as if you're a race engineer or a team strategist, one of those guys. And you can just get deeper and deeper and then you start to lay over that. You start to build your own models. We bring in simulation into that whole area. And it just gets, it's exactly the same as what you have in the teams. You just go deeper and deeper and deeper. What's it like to be on the pit wall there? Manage a team. What's it scary sometimes? Nerve-wracking? Nerve-wracking. I mean, I talked about the Gen Zers who want a two hour race to pass in five minutes. It passes in five minutes because there's so much going on. It's kind of like being the coach or the football manager. You're under a lot of pressure. You've got to make the right decisions. You've got to make decisions in split seconds. Everybody's an expert 10 seconds after decisions being made, it's that type of thing. But it's great fun. I can see the virtual Formula One being a total hit because with all the data and now autonomous vehicles, you can almost have a collective kind of team approach like swapping out AI in the cars in real time from the virtual pit. Yeah, and again, I'm just going to name check DeepRacer because AWS DeepRacer, Formula One and AWS DeepRacer, we did an activation about a year back in the first lockdown, in the first COVID lockdown. So we took a couple of Formula One drivers, Daniel Ricciardo being one of them, and then we built out this DeepRacer platform. And we're trying to look at how we can bring that more together. So you've got this virtual, sorry, this AI car, this autonomous car, and you've got Formula One, and how do we merge those two worlds together? And again, that's just trying to immerse people more in the experience. All right, final question. What's the coolest thing you got going on in each of your respective innovation fields with AWS? What would you highlight, your favorite innovation or coolest thing you're doing? Well, I can't tell you about the coolest, right? That's for sure. Look, I just think what we're doing with AWS with regard to AIML around data and statistics and analytics. Based on what I said earlier, the evolution of statistics and analytics in hockey really hasn't taken hold. We're there now. The ability to really take a game that has so much volatility and we're the only professional sports team sport that has personnel changes occurring in live play. So you never really know who's on the ice. And the ability now to deliver real-time graphics and visualizations in the broadcast based on movements that had just played within milliseconds. And we're starting to do that today with shot and save analytics with AWS. So where that can go in the future is really what's probably the most exciting because it'll totally transform the way fans consume our game. NHL has always been on the cutting edge on the tech. Been following you guys for years. Congratulations. Rob, the coolest thing you're working on, from Amazon, that's cool. And in Formula One, that's in your plate right now. Do you know what? I mean, there's so much going on at the minute. It's really difficult to choose any one thing. I think the whole partnership, it's everything that we wanted it to be, that there's the whole way that we're moving data forward and we're revolutionizing the sport in a lot of ways. Sport has sat still for a long time and to go through that digital transformation with Amazon and in all the various areas that we're working on, I just think it's all really, really cool. I mean, it's moving forward at such a pace now. If you don't mind me asking why I got you here on the whole data thing. I'm just thinking about if I was on a team, I'd be like, okay, it's a whole new Wild West. Let's just arbitrage the data. We'll get over on the other team. Do you have to watch out? Do you guys talk about watching teams actually? I mean, it's actually innovative that they can get an edge, but an unfair advantage if they actually use the data. Is there discussion around who can use the data, which teams? Of course. I mean, when you get down to the franchises, that each team can only use its individual data. That's where we have key insight up at the league level because we've got a subset of all of the team's data. So we can kind of see everything that's going on. Watch out for the hackers coming in and get that data. No, we're all right. We've got pretty good security. Guys, thanks for coming on. I love the sports angle on this. It's really awesome. I think this is a great example of how cloud and digital lifestyle is coming together. The tech integration with the fan experience and the business models are super compelling. And I think that's the illustration to just every other business. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate it. Thank you. Okay, it's theCUBE's coverage here. Just reinvent, I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. You're watching the leader in invent tech covers theCUBE. Thanks for watching.