YouSaid · the spoken record

Matt Ball

lines on the record: 108
first: 2020-08-04
most recent: 2020-08-04
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“The core of epic games, as they would probably self-describe, is the unreal engine. And the way to think about the unreal engine is not that it helps people make games, but that it is today the world's most capable, diverse, realistic simulation software. Toolkit, and of course the terms become a little bit more complex. But the idea is if you want to simulate an environment, an experience, people, an event, Unreal is basically the most capable skill set there. And that came from video gaming. And that's because video gaming has actually been for decades now the most diverse tested and capable in terms of the range of hardware it can work on set of simulation technologies. For the past 25 years, Unreal was developed in the 90s. It was all very focus limited, but we are now”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But the metaverse future of 2050 can arrive in 2035. And all of that comes from taking as much of the technology that just enables today to work and rating down the margin so that those that are building for the future have the profits to reinvest in their business. And at least in my experience, I haven't seen an infrastructure play as deep, as broad, as potentially immediately lucrative that is taking that degree of an approach. Everyone else is saying, let's keep our margins down, let's grow our reach, let's build out better SaaS infrastructure to grow the market, yes, but secure our position. I've never seen one that is so focused on Tam Lift.”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The iOS store taking 15 to 30 percent in the comparison to an interchange fee or a banking fee and the distribution fee itself of an epic game store rather than just the commercial element. The only way you can actually match the value he's cannibalizing from the market with the economic constraint of the TAM today, which is to say he's zeroing out revenue in categories, and yet even if he had 100% market share in every layer of the stack, he'd be maxed out at 12 to 13 billion in revenue. The only explanation is that he single-handedly believes he can crank the TAM up. And we're not talking about cranking the TAM up by 10% a year, even compounded over a decade, but the idea that this can meaningfully pull forward not in the sense of COVID 2025 to 2022.”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pump from Fortnite, and this is really just a modern day version of Embrace, extend Extinguish that you saw from Microsoft. At least the way that Tim portrays this, and I think that this is consistent with the degree to which he isn't undercutting margins, he's zeroing them out altogether. He is publicly saying this business that we've entered or this business that we participate in should be zero revenue. It should be zero margin. It should be at cost. His belief is The metaverse is worth trillions. And the most important people in the metaverse or the metaverse coming to fruition is the creators of content and the consumers of content. Everything in the middle is an impediment. And by everything in the middle, he means the core infrastructure, the technology, unreal, the middleware that is live services, live operations that is transactions. We talk about”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Unreal exclusively Activision Blizzard used Unreal extensively. Every mobile division for every mobile gaming company did. They've been generating about $6 billion. If you assume that every single gaming company sold their games exclusively through the Epic Game Store, they would be getting another 12% of the total transaction. So you're looking at an excess of $12 billion in this instance. But in this case, Epic actually gives you a net back on your Unreal license. So you should be paying 12 plus 5%, but instead you're just going to pay 12% and you get unreal for free. Most people are surprised to understand how much Epic keeps giving away, how much they keep investing in new categories. And certainly you can take the skeptical view, which is to say they're cash rich. Cent is a shareholder. They've got a money.”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It also provided Amazon with an incredibly lucrative market, one that was very difficult for Amazon to lose market leadership of. And of course, grows in value. Tim is doing something that seems even more radical, which is he continues to build out technology, grow the capabilities, the breadth, the depth, the scope, and the quality of everything that EPIC is doing while simultaneously destroying value in all of those segments and giving away more and more of his value away for free. I'll give you a good way of thinking about this. Epic currently charges a 5% royalty on the Unreal engine. The gaming industry today is doing about $120 billion per year. So if you assumed that Epic had 100% penetration, Nintendo used”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tim is particularly fascinating because he very much seems like in some way a reversion to the early 1980s, 1970s ideals of a technologist, while also seeming like a more evolved version of the long-term thinkers of a Jeff Bezos. By that I mean he is a dead set on creating the underlying infrastructure that will allow for enormous enormous TAM creation or total addressable market. And I think when we take a look at those who have built for the long run, Bezos is a fascinating example of someone who takes a look at underlying infrastructure and says, I'm going to forge forward, I'm going to build scale, it's going to become a platform. It's going to drive the industry. AWS being an amazing example. Invested in the future that produced more value for the ecosystem.”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We've known that they were going to be very critical in the future. But Snapchat and TikTok exactly weren't envisioned. And even those who knew what TikTok would look like didn't quite understand the economics. They didn't understand the models. And they certainly didn't understand the mimetic nature of those services. And so I think we can look at these ideas of the metaverse and say it's persistent. a virtual reality that connects to the real world and like I don't really know what that means and the truth of the matter is like no one does that's why Snapchat didn't exist until it did and I think the most interesting way to think about that is actually to start with Facebook there is nothing Facebook developed in 2005 that you could not have made in 1999 no one did the mere fact that Facebook emerged when it did started to reshape consumer expectations around services around what was possible just as we will know the technologies exist long”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think a lot of investors, and this is where it's interesting to talk about the investment thesis. I think a lot of investors think about this and they're like, well, that's a crispy vision and I don't really know what that means and I can't invest in it. And there's the old Marcus Aurelius quote that is basically epitomized in the idea if you can't articulate it, you don't know it. And certainly I might know it. But to another extent, it's like predicting what the Internet of 2020 would be in 1990. We knew certain elements of the Internet in the 90s, in the 70s, the idea of hypertext was invented in the 50s. But while you can understand the certain technical requirements and capabilities of the metaverse, you're missing the soul. The way to think about that is Snapchat and TikTok. We've known about the internet, or we've known that the internet would include file sharing, UGC, messaging, people envisioned live chat and AR decades ago. And certainly...”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These are just some of the ideas, but I think one of the key elements here is actually this idea of is it just an App Store? Those that get over the idea that, well, maybe Minecraft or Roblox isn't the metaverse, but it's an interesting expression of it. Do we just mean it's a new way to access content? You go to Fortnite and you buy a ticket to a Travis Scott concert. You watch a movie screening of a Christopher Nolan movie, or you access a custom game that someone made is that just an app store. And I think Tim Sweeney is the most interesting response here, which is if all the metaverse is as a new app store, it's a failure and it's not the metaverse. It's not bringing anything richer or more magnetic. It has to unlock things that were previously not possible in commerce, in creation, and just the general idea of where people produce value in-house. And I think one of the funny things about this Patrick is to some extent.”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Centrally programmed. It is something where there's finite numbers of attraction, where there's a chief engineer, and that chief engineer decides the monetization, the constraints, the viability. This is really like talking about what if the world were UGC, which in some instances it is, where the economics of scarcity, of access, of investment, of brand, of scale all matters.”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think critical to that is, as I mentioned earlier, differentiating between all the atomic parts of the metaverse that are relevant but not the thing itself. And that can be, is the metaverse a virtual world? No, it's going to have a virtual world, but that's just going to be an element of it. Is it going to be virtual reality? Virtual reality may be a way in which you interact with it, but the metaverse will be invisible in some instances. That's where you're talking about integration into spatial and location-based equipment. You might go to a store and it exists in the metaverse and you're not seeing it altogether. And if you wanted to see it, you might not need to use VR. That's an access model. You might choose to use a browser on your smartphone. And similarly, people think of it from the perspective of it's a virtual theme park, which is an idea I'm fascinated with, but a virtual theme park is”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Physics break if you purchase something and then because of what God does, the platform or the consortium, breaks the market, you will have distrust in the market, you will have additional friction, nothing will be priced with the expectation of indefinite viability, it will be based with the implied discount of what if the world breaks. And as a result, both sellers and buyers will stop investing. You can imagine how that would work. And so that is honestly one of the biggest challenges. And as anyone who has participated in a consortium will tell you, coming to an agreement is one of the biggest challenges. Deploying that is another one. And as the metaverse becomes more valuable, more important, the consequences of breakage will be exponentially larger.”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This user's business model allowed other users to come to his house to purchase or subscribe or purchase a horse and then purchase a subscription to food for the horse. This is much like receiving in animal crossing. And yet Second Life didn't know this was happening. The whole premise is no one in the United States knows every commercial transaction that's happening. And so Second Life needs to upgrade its physics. When it does that, it doesn't know it. But there was a flaw in the code evolution that led the horses to sliding when they bent down to eat the food. As a result, the horse couldn't eat, the horse is, couldn't eat, and then they starve. Key to the metaverse and all of these standards processes is that you need to enable the content, the portability, and the business model, but you need to make sure that it also maintains the flexibility to evolve and grow without breaking.”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have advancements in technology for simulation. A video game is a simulation. Simulation, and that means that over time it has to be continuous, but we also wanted to evolve. We want to be able to do more things. But imagine a world, this world, where every now and then the physics were upgraded. Imagine what would happen to a building where all of a sudden we decided we had to reoptimize gravity from 1 to 1.1. That's a huge challenge. Now, your response would be don't change gravity. But the truth is with code design is you will find out new standards are needed that there are inefficiencies that preclude data transmission, and yet you have to inherit it. I'll tell you a really great example from Eba Altberg at Second Life or Linden Lab that I think is unbelievably cool. He told me this story of in Second Life, a user created a business model or a business. It has a fully functioning economy that's been around for 25 years.”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Messy. Anyone who has significance will drive their own processes, their prioritizations, their roadmaps. And so you actually need to get common language. Think about how messy the internet is just from images. Most people can't tell you why we use.jif versus.jpeg,.ping,.bmp. All of these exist and they're flawed. They're not perfect. It's the reason why one thing doesn't port to another. The rise of API standardization is part of that. But again, the technology for concurrency can be there. The desire for interoperability can be there. But if you don't actually have the right commonalities for that to work, you're not going to get there anyway. The last one that I think is really interesting is actually just this technical question of what we call forward compatible code evolution. One of the things that's amazing about virtual worlds is you have”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Million people participating in individual versions of that concert capped to 50 participants each, not all of which were even running in identical synchronicity. And so imagine what that would be like in a world today, right? You can all be in the mall, but you can't be there together and they're not really in sync, something else is happening. Obviously the metaphor breaks down. The technology required to do that is very far away and the business case to realize it isn't quite there yet either. Imagine Patrick, if you and I could go to the 1980s and say, let's lay the entire country down with fiber optic cable. Cost $400 billion. Obviously that would have enormous value in 2020, but it would have taken us 20 years to actually commercialize that and the capital required to get there wouldn't work. The second element is actually to think about the standards protocols and agreements that are required. Standards processes, as I think Mark and Dreesen has spoken a lot,”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's allow you to take your shopping list from Amazon and export it to Walmart. You can bring your contact list out of Facebook and bring it to Snapchat. And that would be a very small part of bringing the metaverse forward. I think there are three core elements. The first is actual mass concurrency. By concurrency, we're talking about the number of people who can participate in a shared experience. To the extent you're talking about existence moving online or the economy moving online, and by online, I mean into a virtual world of labor. You need lots of people to be there. When Fortnite managed its enormous concert with Travis Scott earlier this year, they boasted about the fact that there were 12.5 million participants. They had to A, cap that participant list at 12.5 million the technology could not take more reliably. B, there actually weren't 12.5 million people participating together.”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The world are virtually guaranteed some participation. EPIC is clear that unity, their primary competitor for the game engine business, basically will have to be a foundational founder of the metaverse by the nature of the fact that most of the world runs on it. Most of the world's mobile games run on the metaverse. And if games are the starting point, then there's no way to back them out. And so we have multiple different parties that are coming here. There will be device owners. There will be ecosystems. There will be rendering engines. There will be elements of data portability, of commerce. I think a lot of people believe that the blockchain is going to be an essential component of this. But I think ultimately when we take a look at the time horizon, it's important to understand the enormity of the technical challenges. And to some extent, actually interoperability is one of the easier ones. In theory, Facebook and Amazon and others could say, let's do data portability.”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, and certainly it's going to be much like the internet or mobility overall, which is to say there will never be this point where all of a sudden we say this was before and this is post metaverse. It will slowly emerge. And Tim Sweeney, the founder and CEO of Epic Games, will tell you that we're still decades away. There are a number of different companies that will bring it to fruition. And in fact, the mere premise of interoperability means that you will not actually see a single participant realize it. Apple could have most of the innovations, but that would be like setting the standards for credit cards and fees and access in a mall that no one else participates in. Of course, the metaphor becomes a little bit strained, but the whole idea is everything that exists today has to integrate and build in a collaborative or semi-collaborative fashion for that to work. And so what that means is the following. Today's existing players that are so deeply rooted into”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Observer will understand that as the use cases proliferate, as the number of applications grows, as the number of places to sell grow, the amount of investment, creation, economy, value will all grow too. And the metaverse is basically encapsulated as an evolved version of the internet that brings all of the technological revolutions of the past 40 years, much like mobile did, into a far more interoperable version of the world.”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Economy would not function as well. The investment that would come from the suppliers who would say, we are a shirt manufacturer, we need different labeling, we need different size convention, we need different sewing equipment. All of that has friction. That doesn't exist today. And so the core idea of the metaverse is elements of more people in a virtual space where you interact, where you participate in an economy, and we can unlock all of those individual ideas. But the core idea is extensive interoperability in virtual immersion and digital connectivity of the real world to that. The things that you build in one place go somewhere else. That idea of data portability matters, but so too does the idea that you might buy an outfit or an emote in Fortnite and bring that into Minecraft. And any market”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Different sites. It's how you discover new writers, new ideas. You might have actually met me because of a hyperlink that was on another site that went to another site. That's because the internet was designed to share files from public universities and nonprofits. Today's virtual existence does not work that way. The analogy that I use is like going to a mall. There are a number of different shops you can go to, but in today's virtual world, especially when you talk about interactive, immersive worlds like Call of Duty or Fortnite or Minecraft or Facebook Horizon. It's a version of a mall where J Crew requires a different identity card to let you into the store, where J Crew uses small, medium, large, size 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, but Banana Republic uses an entirely different schema where they have proprietary currencies, where they require different credit card vendors. The consequence of that, imagine if you went to a mall, people would not go.”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“idea that the internet itself is a series of tubes in the ground, standards, protocols, technology, and ideas that were formalized into infrastructure. And so the best way to answer this metaverse answer is to go back to the internet. The brilliant thing about the internet is in the name. It's interconnected networks. And the internet works, and by works, I really mean it thrives, it scales, it's a delight, it's a source of enormous value because of its commonalities. The wide range of standards and protocols that allow for extensive communications, sharing, creation, discovery that takes place on myriad devices through any networks, modalities, resolutions, and so forth. That idea of why the internet is so brilliant is encapsulated in the idea of the hyperlink. The hyperlink is why you can start reading in the New York Times, end up following a rabbit hole that takes you to nine other”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Certainly, I think under COVID, this topic of the metaverse has certainly accelerated, and there are a lot of conflations. I think a lot of people think of the metaverse as virtual worlds, those certainly have existed for decades. They think of it as UGC content creation platform, such as Minecraft. That's basically an interactive or immersive version of a YouTube. Others think about this from an avatar perspective. You have a virtual version of you that exists somewhere else that you have control of. All of those are interesting elements, even AR glasses come into the conversation about the metaverse. But if you're talking about the metaverse, that's basically like saying Google is the internet or iPhone is the internet or the Yahoo directory was the internet. It's not entirely wrong. It's certainly an important element of the consumer experience of it or what they might describe it. But it completely misses the”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That allows you to actually immerse as deeply, as scalably, as richly, and with deeper audience ownership of the characters. And for the most part, that seems like games.”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Might actually like Batman more than Tony Stark, but they just spent 13 years and 15 films and dozens of hours bonding to Robert Downey Jr.'s performance. Fifteen years is the amount of time in which a child goes from pre-puberty through puberty into adulthood and actually trying to compete just with the volume, with the quality, with the reach, with the potency of the Disney flywheel, and then needing to somehow accelerate that emotional attachment is profoundly challenging. And I think this dovetails nicely into why gaming IP is starting to become a primary contender. And it's because it is the only content category that can actually scale. If you want to compete from the Power Rangers, which tried to launch a cinematic universe, you'd say, okay, the most we can do is three films over the next five years. During that time, Marvel's going to put out 40 hours. How do you compete? The only ways to find a medium, a property?”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Imagine saying you could grow your output two and a half times while simultaneously increasing your revenue by 50% while decreasing your cost in a creative product. That's incredible. No one has ever seen this and it absolutely disabuses that old adage that in Hollywood nobody knows anything. To bring this back, if you say, how do we compete with the Marvel Cinematic Universe, understand you're not just competing against something that is starving the market of oxygen from its volume? And in 2022, they're planning to go from three films a year to four films per year plus two to three television series, which means the Marvel Cinematic Universe will itself be a service. You will have 40 weeks a year with new Marvel television content. And so ultimately you need to compete to steal oxygen from that. You somehow need to find a way to substitute for 50 years of emotional attachment.”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Out of the competitive landscape. Think about the impact of the Mandalorian. Try launching a space opera television show based on new IP in a post-Mandalorian world. You used to have television off from Star Wars. You used to have television off from Marvel. You don't anymore. And that big lesson basically means that these positive feedback loops are getting stronger. And I'll tell you the last way that I think about this is let's think about how you would want to contend with a Marvel Cinematic Universe. You say that franchise continues to increase its output volume and to put this in perspective, the Marvel Cinematic Universe launched with 1.2 films per year, it finished with three films per year. And during that time, the average cost went down because they now contract in for more films, but the talent cost go down. And the unit average haul has gone up 50%.”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“pre-cast the next five movies. Javier Bardem, Johnny Depp, Angelina Jolie, Tom Cruise, they're all in a shot together. And the very first movie literally positioned Russell Crowe in the Samuel L. Jackson role as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde partnering up with Tom Cruise, who's a zombie. And we forget these because they had such a little social net. But what's so fascinating to me about the Marvel Cinematic Universe is its success is so unprecedented and no one has become close to it. Power law differential actually downplays how much bigger and more successful that franchise is. And I think that gets into that core ideas of as these franchises become more unbound, more expansive, more immersive, as customers can own more details and grow their relationships, it is squeezing ever more air.”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say the most interesting element of that is actually everyone who tried to copy it after. We actually forget how many other companies tried to emulate the Marvel Cinematic Universe model, in part because most of them never even got off the ground, half were canceled in pre-production. We look at the struggles of the DC Cinematic Universe as the primary counterpoint. But every studio tried this. I'll use one example in 2014 Universal Reshot, half of the movie Dracula Untold to try and turn it into a universal monsters universe. That was going to be Wolfman. It was going to be the invisible man. It was going to be zombies and so forth. The movie barely hit the black. Three years later, they decided they were going to reboot it again. This is the mummy, if you can remember it. And not only did they launch it with the explicit goals of being a cinematic universe, they did spreads in Vanity Fair where they...”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How it interacts in the Marvel Cinematic Universe into the Disney flywheel, but it's pretty similar. If you have taken the past three years, five years, certainly 15 years off in gaming, you are talking about enormous, enormous gaps in every element, what you can do, how it looks, how you monetize, and why people play in the first place. I like to tell people that I think the primary problem when it comes to why Hollywood misunderstands gaming today and has missed the opportunity for years comes from the fact that most of the CEOs, their primary exposure was in the PlayStation 2 generation. They remember their sons or daughters when they were 14 playing a Lara Croft and their perception is of an overly bosomed, pixelated woman shooting people. And the degree to which that medium has evolved over the past 15 years is just hard to encapsulate in a single line.”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Happening. That means that each generation is adopting gaming more significantly and as they age up their media appetites grow. The last and I think most important element, and this gets back to our earlier conversation about the evolution of BDA formats, is the cost of being a little behind in gaming when you're an investor, when you're in media is huge. Let's take a 15-year view. 15 years ago, cinema was not as sophisticated as it is today. Choreography has advanced enormously. Think about what a stun that John Wick film was when it came out in, I think, 2014. Universe models, epic fantasy have emerged tremendously. But 13 years ago, the first Iron Man came out. The first Iron Man in the most recent Avengers movie or Spider-Man, which came out in July of 2019, not that different. It's evolved from a narrative perspective. The graphics are better. It's a little bit more sophisticated in terms of...”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“2.1 billion hours per day of leisure time that's deduplicated, which is to say let's not double count playing Candy Crush while you're watching television. There's 2.1 billion hours. 75% of that is television and 50% of television is 50 plus and about 30% is 65 plus. You don't need to get into precise survey paneling to know that the most consumptive demographic of television, the most leisure inclined demographic is the one that plays the least video games. And on the reverse, we know that Gen X and Gen Z games more than Gen Y does. By some reports, and I always find this hard to believe, but it seems to be continually proven 50% of 9 to 12 year olds in the United States and Canada, New Zealand, Australia play Roblox or Minecraft alone. And so that tells you that there's this enormous demographic shift that...”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The age element is certainly there, and I will tell you that one of the biggest bull theses for me is actually not necessarily just the monetization gap to do another reference. Gavin Baker's been on your podcast before, and he's a good friend, and he talks about the fact that on an hourly basis, video games are still monetizing at fractions of what even standard cable television is on an hourly basis, which makes very little sense when you actually compare the degree of immersion and focus and distractability of the audience. And so there's a big argument for bullishness just on monetization lift. I actually see the biggest potential in exactly what you've just mentioned too, and it's interesting to quantify that. The generational divide is enormous. It's not as bad as people think, but as much as there's decreased penetration of gaming as you go up the age pyramid, there's an even more distorted gap of time. And here's how I think about it. In the United States, there's about”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Undermine the integrity of the game competitively, but is additive that enhances, can you, can your parents, can your friends, can your followers on Twitch actually be helping in the gameplay? And so I think funnily enough, if you were to say the bull theory for Spotify, which is a company I deeply admire and am very bullish on, that intimacy element that on the go is actually something that gaming is very interested in.”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do with that audience beyond just gaming about a year and a half ago, Fortnite launched a mode called Just Chatting. Just chatting is an extension of their social hangout feature. It's the idea that if Patrick, you and I are already playing Fortnite to hang out, what happens when you actually can't play? Your device can, but you can't play for one reason or another. You might actually be driving, you might be on the bus, you might have a poor signal. Just chatting allows you to listen into the game. So there might be five of us playing or four of us playing in the case of Fortnite, but Patrick, you're still participating. You're part of it. There's a huge investment right now of the major developers on the mobile and the console side to say, let's build more features like this where we can reach mobile players on the go out of context and perhaps beyond just connecting their audio. Let's immerse them in the experience. What can Patrick actually be doing that does?”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ecosystems and platforms such as Sony and Microsoft, but also putting full versions of their games on mobile devices so that irrespective of whether or not you can play the richest, most immersive version of Fortnite, you can participate on the go on your iPhone. That has driven enormous category growth that reflects the ability to tap into some light mobile behaviors and mobile device capabilities from the traditional high-end gaming capability. If you look into the East or what's happening in Asia, in Vietnam, Japan, we are seeing that the sophistication of those mobile games is growing frequently as the users become more adept at complex gaming, they become more immersed in gaming culture. And so both of those sides of the industry are kind of converging. To bring this back to Spotify, the biggest new innovation to me, and this is perhaps a bigger theme for the rest of today, is this idea of what you”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What I'll tell you is particularly interesting about the on the go element is I recall your interview with Daniel Ack from a few months ago and he's talking about the intimacy of spoken word and music to your point on the go in your ear. There's something very close to it. What's really interesting to me about the video game space now is we're seeing a progressive expansion into what you might actually consider Spotify's time. 15 years in gaming has seen most of the growth come from mobile since 2007. The gaming industry globally excluding China has doubled. 80% of that growth has been in mobile. In more recent years, we have seen most of the traditionally defined gaming category AAA games, PC, console, what we would currently define as the Fortnite cadre, have seen enormous growth from being cross-platform. That's connecting not just competing”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Day that is instructive as to the value it provides, the significance of that relationship overall, and I mean that separately. One is economic, the other is investment from the user. And then thirdly, the big lesson is that you can do that to build out many, many other products and services. The value of that attention is enormous. And as I mentioned earlier, if consumers are indeed sticky to the platforms in which they're already engaged, that tells you that Spotify 2 will have outsized”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Spotify is an incredible example because we have to take a look at the equivalent reach penetration and significance of that medium. We are talking again about an industry that I think last year reached 285 million Americans and for an average of two and a half hours per day. I think irrespective of whether you want to speculate as to the monetization potential, the ability for alternate monetization through talent services or microtransaction or whether or not there are other things that Spotify can do to gamify that platform or perhaps just the role of podcasts, it's clear that that is a profoundly important medium. Any history of consumer digital platforms will say that when you have a platform that is reaching tens, if not hundreds of millions ultimately, or potentially a billion customers, most of whom are last I saw, listening to Spotify for an average of 130 minutes per se.”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A fortnight. And so just like TV, I'm the last person to tell you as bullish as I am on interactivity and gaming that television's going away. What I'm fairly convicted on is the idea that there are 300 million Americans who are spending five and a half hours per day watching traditionally defined television long form. I don't think that in 2030, 2035, that's five and a half hours a day. I think it's probably three and a half to four hours. And most of that substitution is going to go to interactive gaming and social.”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Movie theater is 40 to 70 times per year. There was about one fifth of the population that would go more than 100 times per year. And that's because the role of the theater was video. It was news. You went during the war to see whether or not the effort was going well and what was happening in which theater. You went there for education, for laughter, for all narrative. And of course, over time, the role of the theatrical window, the theater itself changed. And then over time, what it moved to, television, became its own more dominant model. It's, of course, a little bit flawed to think that that format is going away as long as audiences are interested in two-hour narratives. But again, we are now starting to see this idea that perhaps for an entire new generation, television is giving way to other formats, and that can be as memetic as TikTok, as short form as TikTok, or as immersive as and experiential.”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of extending that into longer runtimes or more expansive narratives with more detail is always additive. And so as a format, I remain very convicted. And yet at a broader level, we have to look at the overall transition of what the dominant cultural ideal or narrative is. And I think that it's important to actually put that in context of what we've seen from the theater. We look right now at two different transitions in the theatrical window. One is the more recent collapse of its viability that relates to actually whether you can be in a theater, that's COVID. And we look prior to that as to whether or not the underlying economics of the film industry can survive blockbusterification, declining attendance, increasing competition from SVOD and Disney Plus and direct-to-platform releases. This has happened, of course, to the theaters before. In the 1930s and the 1940s, the average American was going to the”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think in general, when you take a look at analysis of the streaming wars and why it makes sense for Netflix to spend $200 million on the Irishman or for Apple to spend $200 million on Greyhound, which is their new Spielberg and Tom Hanks release from this past weekend, it's surprising because people look at the economics of a $60 to $100 million television series that could become a franchise in comparison to a one-off that has one-eighth the runtime and twice the cost. And I think ultimately you have to understand that this is a durable model. People love this content. They will forever watch films. They will value those films. And irrespective of what happens to the box office or whether theatrical consumption moves from, well, frankly, the theaters to all at-home releases, I don't think that that format is going to go away. People still like the two-hour narrative. And it's not clear that the trade-off”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A new competitor needs to get more than Netflix in subscribers, but Netflix is going to seed some of its customers. The truth of the matter is in most media subscription services, consumers aren't rigorously price or leisure optimizing. Think about what the rational user behavior would be. All of us each month should log into each of our subscriptions and terminate the subscription at the end of the month. Every month, we could then renew that decision and say, I have $40, where do I want to spend it? In most instances, we might renew that old subscription, but we might even just have three or four days where Netflix elapsed. And we didn't need it, so we didn't use it. And guess what? We just saved more than 10% of that month's fee. No one does this, of course. And to some extent, even for utilities like Spotify, it would be rational to do that just to maximize your paying days to your using days. Consumers don't do this. The truth of the matter is most of us”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“predominantly US only with its direct to consumer there's simply no way to imagine another company that by 2023 or 2024 has so significantly outscript their own leaked ambitions that they would have 2x and enough to achieve even Netflix today versus Netflix tomorrow but what's interesting about that scale element is two things one is to understand consumer behavior in leisure and the other is to understand the impact for creating intellectual property and hits The first is where we get back to that classic idea of the homo economicus or the rational economic man. And I think there's this general perspective that has proliferated in Hollywood and in the analyst community that Netflix's content isn't good enough, that it's getting worse, that competitors are coming out with more content, better content, the same content on a new platform. And the expectation has been that that would lead to attrition. So not necessarily does”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there were two really interesting ways to think about that on a preliminary basis. It's obvious that the time it would take for anyone to achieve comparable scale for Netflix is really outside of anyone's realistic time horizon. And in fact, most of the media companies will admit that themselves. Disney has clearly blown through its original estimates, but its five-year goal was to have 60 to 90 million subscribers. Netflix at the time Disney Plus launched had 90 million just outside of the United States and 165 million globally. HBO has leaked its plans are to reach 50 million subscribers by 2022 or 2023. Netflix, of course, had more. Peacock is targeting 35 to 50 million paid plus nonpaid users. And of course, Sky just has no practical path to achieving comparable scale. So by the admission of all of their competitors, Hulu also being a domestic only company, Vicom being”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Said they were going to continue to produce comics. They are going to continue to grow the ancillary elements of Miller World. But the goal was to use the Netflix platform to launch these new titles and then to use that company as a source for intellectual property creation.”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The greatest competition to be Fortnite as opposed to a Disney and even still he sees YouTube as more competitive than an HBO. And so certainly these ideas of asymmetrical competition or orthogonal alternate competition for Mindshare for time is of the utmost importance to that company. I think we can clearly say their success in building out big new IP has been relatively lackluster. But to some extent assessing Netflix based on the productivity of its intellectual property to date is also to say that a brand new pharmaceutical company that's spending more than the established giants should be producing more hit drugs. This takes time. You need to build a pipeline. You need the operations, the processes, the options, frankly, on up-and-coming novels. A few years ago, they bought a company called Miller World, which is coming from Mark Millar, who's one of the most successful comic book writers of the past decade. And the goal there was very explicit.”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source