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CHRIS HOOD: Welcome to this episode of "The Transformation
Debrief."
I'm Chris Hood, a digital strategist at Google Cloud
and your host.
In each episode, we aim to stir visionary thinking, share
unexpected insights on transformation initiatives,
and lessons learned along the way.
Major League Baseball started back in 1876
and over the course of the last 146 years
has seen a multitude of equipment and technology
advancements from the weight and size
of a baseball to artificial intelligence
and the storage of over a century of stats and video
clips.
Major League Baseball has seen a multitude
of forms of transformation, all to generate new experiences
for baseball fans.
Today, my cohost for this episode,
Anil Jain, Global Managing Director for Media
and Entertainment Industry Solutions at Google Cloud,
joins me along with our guest Truman Boyes,
Senior Vice President of Infrastructure
at Major League Baseball.
Let's get to know our guests a little better.
Anil, would you mind sharing a little bit about your role
here at Google?
ANIL JAIN: My name's Anil Jain.
Good to be here.
I lead the Media and Entertainment Industry
Solutions team at Google Cloud.
What that means is my team and I bring together
the entire Google ecosystem to define the strategy
and how we engage and deliver new products and new solutions
to support the transformation initiatives of all of our media
customers around the world.
TRUMAN BOYES: Hi.
I'm Truman Boyes.
I'm the SVP of technology infrastructure at Major League
Baseball.
I'm responsible for transforming how we use technology
at venues, our business, and supporting the 30
Clubs and our operations.
My focus is around Cloud networking security,
the venue technologies like tracking of baseball,
and replay operations.
CHRIS HOOD: So one of the things we like to do
is start all of our shows off with the same question.
And here it is.
Anil, you can start.
What was the most transformative role or decision
in your career to date?
And why?
ANIL JAIN: That's a great question.
I spent the first half of my career
in a variety of different roles from engineering to product
to marketing strategy, sales, and business development
at a number of different software startups,
eventually getting the opportunity to run my business
and then sell a company to a larger SaaS provider.
And for the last 12 years or so, my focus
has really been on bringing innovative technology
to media customers in the broader media and entertainment
landscape.
TRUMAN BOYES: I was given an opportunity to move overseas.
Initially it looked like a one-year trip
to go to New Zealand and start working with the telecoms
down there.
It turned into 10 years of traveling all
around Asia-Pacific.
I think being out of my comfort zone really
pushed me to try new things and to learn very quickly.
And I've seen this applied in different aspects of my life
even post that transformation.
And shifting a previous role, I was in market data delivery
and then shifted into media and entertainment
and knew very little about media and entertainment
and had to quickly learn.
ANIL JAIN: One of the things that came to mind
is the reason that years ago I moved into software
is because I really found that the speed of innovation
is so much faster in software than almost any other industry
just because you can take ideas and opportunities
and actually build very quickly applications and solutions.
And with Cloud, that has only been accelerated because now
you have global public infrastructure.
Everything is API-driven.
And a developer and a product owner can decide,
we need to solve this particular problem.
And they can very quickly architect that solution
without having to build all of the component
layers of that stack.
And I think that notion of time to value and speed
of innovation is actually really, really inherent
in Cloud.
CHRIS HOOD: What's interesting also,
and I'll add on top of that, is you're
talking about the development and speed to innovation
within an organization.
But what we're also seeing is that the fan base
has access directly to the same tools and data
to be able to create their own experiences to consume
the content in the way they want to consume it.
And Major League Baseball is directly
targeting that in some ways, right?
TRUMAN BOYES: We are.
Engaging with a broader view of baseball fans
that are not just the typical go to a game
or watch a three hour game in your living room--
they're looking for highlights.
They're looking for custom reels and content
that is personalized to them.
And we make it available.
And it's not just what we produce inside
of our editing facilities.
But we just open it up.
What do you want to see?
And then--
[DING]
--have this curated from each individual.
And they can build this content.
And then they can share it.
And so I think that's an area where we'd really love
to see this continue to grow.
We have over three million assets
on Film Room, which is hosted on GCP right now.
And those clips are automatically generated.
And then they're uploaded and available for anyone to view.
ANIL JAIN: Film Room is a great example
of enabling consumer audiences to self serve and personalize
the experience in an interactive way.
And at the heart of doing that, I mean, I think is something,
Truman, you spoke to earlier, which is data.
What are the chief concerns and challenges
you're facing in this regard?
And how are you addressing them?
TRUMAN BOYES: In terms of data, I
think the main challenge is that it's just never ending.
So if you start there, the content is always happening.
There's 162 games a year plus all
of the other ancillary content which is produced.
And you want to have this data and this content that's
relevant, it's contextually relevant to the fans.
On the first point of just data being never ending,
we're looking in our media archives of nearly 60 petabytes
of content.
And these are historical archives that go back
into the 1940s and 1950s--
beautiful games that largely are left in dusty archive rooms.
And we have the opportunity to take this
and to make it available to fans in new ways.
Not just old 16 millimeter film, which
has been digitized and now available to look out
for a video on demand, but actually highlight reels that
are generated, would contain metadata
so you can search across it and have this content newly
presented to the fans of today.
CHRIS HOOD: You talked about personalization.
And we're talking right now about film clips.
But really, this is going beyond just the game and the film
clips themselves.
We're seeing that personalization from the moment
they buy a ticket and get to the stadium
and sit in a seat and order food and what
they're doing during the game and what
they do after the game.
All of this is part of your data strategy, correct?
TRUMAN BOYES: It is.
It's just trying to transform what
it is to experience the game physically and even virtually
from one of our streaming services.
So as you've learned more about the fan,
you're able to curate what the target either advertising
or the way to engage with them.
And I think we care more about the engagement
than pushing emails.
We learn more about what their viewing habits are,
what they care about.
CHRIS HOOD: The fans themselves have transformed
over, say, the last 100 years.
What have you seen in terms of just their expectations
and how those have shifted over the last couple of years?
TRUMAN BOYES: I'll call out two things that
have shifted pretty recently.
The experience at the park has changed.
Parks are being built in a different way.
So it used to be there's a bunch of seats.
You get into your bleacher seats.
And you watch the game.
Now there's more things to do at the parks.
It's an experience.
You go.
You watch a game.
Hopefully you catch most of the innings.
But you're also going around.
You're having a dining experience.
You're eating.
You're meeting up with friends.
And then I think the second part is really
around what it is like to have a digital experience at a venue,
which is this hybrid world.
I want to see content.
I want to take a look at the last play.
I have my phone.
But I'm also in the venue.
And so how do you make that a low latency experience
so that you're not looking at two to three minutes
after play, and it's just no longer contextually relevant?
CHRIS HOOD: Truman, another quote
that you had on Twitter just yesterday actually was,
"We are only seeing the beginning of Cloud computing."
I would tend to agree with you on this.
But I'm curious from your perspective,
especially in the context of transformation,
how is Cloud at the beginning?
And how is it helping us transform
as we look towards the future?
TRUMAN BOYES: I think it's a great question.
I'm looking at it historically.
I have seen trends in technology where initially it
looks like they're developed and that they're maturing.
But there's so much more that's about to be unlocked.
And when I see where Cloud is today,
there's still so many choices.
And so I think we're going to see some consolidation
across technologies.
We're also going to see maturing of technologies.
And we're going to see that the capabilities are going to 10X
from where they are today.
ANIL JAIN: First of all, I completely
agree that there is so much yet to come.
And I think that's what keeps us all
engaged and excited about the work that we do.
Where I see it most is when we talk about transformation
in media, we really often talk about the transformation
of audience experiences, which gets back
to that personalization that's been mentioned a few times.
And I think if you look at a journey of a media company
in terms of its digital and Cloud maturity,
the ultimate point at which you arrive
is when you are truly a data-driven organization where
what content you create, how you engage your audiences,
how you personalize their experiences,
how you turn that into high engagement, retention,
and monetization.
Everything is data-driven.
And there will be a lot more automation and learning
that happens based on Cloud.
CHRIS HOOD: We've talked a lot about data.
And if we say that data is our number one priority, what's
Major League Baseball's number two technology priority?
TRUMAN BOYES: Growing the game.
Over the last 100 years, this sport
has been in the top three sports for the country.
And we are looking to see baseball grow internationally.
We're looking to see the presence of baseball
throughout our country have a larger growth
rate and engagement.
And being able to engage with the youth
is really important as we continue
to see this sport evolve and connecting technology
to the game to enable us to get that engagement to happen.
CHRIS HOOD: This has been an awesome conversation.
Thank you, Anil, for joining.
ANIL JAIN: Yeah, Chris.
Thank you for hosting.
It's been a lot of fun.
Digital transformation is at the heart
of what we're doing at Cloud.
And of course, specifically in our strategic industries
like media and entertainment, there's
a lot of excitement, a lot of momentum.
Truman, thank you for being a great partner of ours.
It's been fun talking with you today.
TRUMAN BOYES: Thanks for having me.
CHRIS HOOD: Yes, thank you also, Truman.
Appreciate all of your insights.
It's been a wonderful conversation.
If you would like to learn more about Major League Baseball,
we have two channels for you to explore.
At cloud.google.com/transform, we dive deeper into this
transformation journey.
And you can tune into "That Digital Show"
to hear the extended podcast version of this conversation.
And don't forget to hit Subscribe and join us again
for more visionary thinking and lessons
learned on the next episode of "The Transformation Debrief."
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