Jacob Navok: How MILEs Will Transform Entertainment

[Music] hold up [Music] hi everyone and welcome to the metacast by novik a podcast in which we explore the business and future of video games I'm Aaron Bush co-founder of novik and I am very excited to host today's conversation with Jacob novoke the co-founder and CEO of genvid Jacob we've had technical technical difficulties to get into this point but we made it how are you doing great thank you happy to be here how are you doing well and um yeah I just want to to put some preface behind this conversation I I first ran across um genvid and what you guys were up to a

couple years ago when your massive interactive live event rival Peak was getting off the ground and immediately my my brain went wild thinking about where all this could go so I'm really looking forward to digging into your vision today but also it's not every day that you run across a team that's legitimately pioneering a new form factor of entertainment so it's been inspiring to watch um evolve from a distance and all the progress your team has made but maybe the best place to start this conversation is just to define the key term here what is a massive interactive live event or mile for short so I'll I'll start with a little bit of history and then we'll go into how we got to miles so myself and my my founding Team all worked on cloud cloud gaming at Square Enix starting close to 15 years ago and we began to look at what kind of products could you build

that were Cloud native we're talking you know late aughts early 2010s when we were first investigating this so we began to build prototypes and platform Tech and streaming Tech and in fact we debuted a whole bunch of it in 2014-15 I built the entire subsidiary for Square Enix called Shinra Technologies named after the evil Corporation from Final Fantasy VII so I am the only person who can legitimately say he was senior vice president of Shinra um and we we thank you we spent many years trying to understand what could you do that was different than what you could do in a console um physics artificial intelligence if you had all of the power of the cloud at your disposal and you were rendering on the cloud why would content be built the same way um and so we were working on this for many years the seven years um and one thing happened that we didn't

expect which was the growth of the live speed streaming platforms so when we began working on cloud gaming twitch didn't exist YouTube didn't have live streaming Facebook didn't have live streaming and as we saw this kind of industry of people who like to watch games grow we had another very startling moment and that was Twitch Plays Pokemon here were a million people participating in a stream playing a game together and that product wasn't rendering on their local devices it was streaming from the cloud everywhere phones and PCs and what have you and they were all contributing and they developed memes an entire Community around it and I was really inspired and I turned to square neck CEO who's my bossan and I said Tim I think we might have cloud gaming all wrong so I left the company a couple years after that I started my company jenvid with my former team and we started to

think about what happens when you begin to build for cloud what happens when products are built to be streams and my earliest pitch decks for this company from 2016 um have a slide that say we believe that the future is epic interactive events and they were a mix of like epic which is to say big scale right interactive so that you're changing the fate of it and the form event is meant to replace the notion of a game this is a very important concept for us in a game you're the the player you're the protagonist it's your adventure in a final fantasy you're going through the story right even in an MMO you're you're a hero you're alongside hundreds of thousands of other Heroes but it's your hero's journey in an event you're a participant when you go to a sporting event when you you

know go to see a baseball game live you're not necessarily the pitcher throwing that strike that wins the game you're one of thousands of people in the audience but you're there to participate to create energy you're you're sole kind of um individuality may not be what decides the game but collectively you change the Fate of this content and so that's why we use the word event as opposed to game and so we had been thinking about this notion and building these products for a very long time and in 2018 when I first met Matthew ball we began looking at the way in which we were phrasing this and at some point either in 2019 or 2020 they said you should rename epic interactive event to massively interactive live event mile because it sounds a lot better but it's the same concept right it is

about what you can do with video streams that can't be done through local and that is massive scale and then allowing interactivity to change the fate of it as a community um in this word massive for me is actually really really important so in a traditional Battle Royale I play fortnite with Matthew all the time you've got 90 on other people alongside with you in an MMO you may have a hundred thousand people on a server but you're not in the same instance right there isn't a hundred thousand people fighting the dragon with you when you're going on a raid there's just a small group of eight because we play tricks right we don't we're not actually allowing for all of those people to impact it in fact the only game that really did allow for that was Eve online for years which was also a big inspiration for me but even Eve that the interactions slow down significantly the

moment Denny sort of battle happens but what what's interesting about live stream video is you get to scale so as an example Twitch Plays Pokemon can have a million concurrents on it with no issues or slowdown you can be watching CS go tournaments you could be watching Games Done Quick and you'll see hundreds of thousands to millions of concurrent viewers and that is like the biggest scale we get to in entertainment these days you don't see games that have a million people interacting with the same piece of content even the people who are pushing the boundaries of this company is like improbable get to five thousand ten thousand concurrents I'm talking hundreds of thousands millions of people together at the same time shaping the same piece of content so that that word massive for me has a big kind of impact now I know that's a long-winded answer to your very simple question but I hope

I hit all the key points yeah no I love that background and also I'm jealous that you're playing fortnite with Matthew ball because when I was talking to him a month ago he he said that you know his KD ratio is something like 50 to 1 and that his Squad which I'm guessing you're on had hacked The Meta um so so anyways that's a total aside but I spent something like seven months being the person who fills gas and repairs his bus um as he ran people over but this is a very interesting kind of notion here because Matthew is a very lean in player he likes to drive he likes to lead he likes to run people over with his bus I like to support I like to chat I like to be helpful I'm not necessarily the best shooter um but I can assist pretty well and this kind of archetype is one of the reasons I created the company I created where

I'm not the protagonist of my games I'm watching characters in the story but I can help support and chat and I believe that there are a lot of people out there who don't have the time to be really good at games or don't have the time to get fully immersed in it but want to participate in content want to impact the things that they're watching and that's what I want to enable awesome no I love to hear that and before we we dig into like the exact projects that you've built and some of the interesting things there um could you just talk a little bit about what exactly genvid is and what exactly is it building so we started our company in 2016 primarily to build tools and services around interactive streaming if you if you were a developer Media Company publisher tech company and you needed interactivity for your streams we offered that platform neutral infrastructure neutral engine neutral so

we were used for interactivity for Counter-Strike Majors by twitch for years we did work with Verizon we did work with 18t we did work with um uh Intel with MTV you name it um and we worked with a lot of developers so you know games wanted twitch extensions or wanted some form of interactivity um they they uh they got tools from us um one of the big changes started when we began to work on Rival Peak um so we we had a development Studio pipeworks that had been working on a project they called project Galapagos which is meant to be a streamer focused game where the streamer would stream their play and audience members for the streamer could send items to help the streamer kind of hunger game style and I looked and I said what if that

wasn't a game but an interactive TV show and I brought that pitch to a bunch of places and Facebook was very interested in it um did it deal with me and I wanted to provide tech for it Solutions because I was in what my business did and the request from Facebook was we don't want to do a separate contract with you attack and with pipeworks for the game so you you know you produce it Jacob I was like I don't have a production office or anything of the sort I know how to do it I came from one of the world's biggest game Publishers I worked for their CEO for a decade but um it wasn't what the company was established to do so I went to the board and I said client wants us to be the end kind of publisher producer of this project are you guys okay with that and they said yes so I hired a producer and I mostly managed that alongside with the producer

myself and that went very very well and we can speak more about private peak in a little bit but going back to kind of the history of how we got to where we got they asked for more so I did Pac-Man and Walking Dead with them them being Facebook and in order to build up all these projects I had to actually build a real publishing unit so last year we raised our series C and we created gen bit entertainment for the purposes of building a formal publisher um and up until now we've been primarily producing on behalf of places like Facebook we still have that business so tech companies you know Publishers who who want us to help in those Services we do that but now we're also investing into financing our own projects gotcha that makes a lot of sense and there's several pieces of that I want to dig into more but maybe we we can go back to to rival Peak because um as you mentioned I think that was a big milestone for you all it was the aha

moment of what you're working on um for me because you maybe just um Talk a bit more um about that experience what was it what were you really innovating on at the time and what did you learn that set the foundation for the projects that would be coming next sure great question so we started it thinking about how can we create an interactive version of big brother actually its code name was Project Truman right after The Truman Show and so similar to big brother we've got our kind of weekly TV shows and Big Brothers like Julie Chen and she was hosting a half hour hour-long summary of what happened that week inside of the Big Brother house and of course the Big Brother house of 24 7 live streams but most of the time those streams were pretty boring when people were just sleeping or working at their computer or something else so you really you primarily watch the TV show um so similar big brother we had our TV show uh in our case starring Wil Wheaton from from Star Trek it was amazing actor

to work with um and we also had our 24 7 live streams of our characters but unlike Big Brother they weren't people uh they weren't players and this was a very important point for me that I'll speak to in a moment they were characters they were AI um and these AI were streaming 24 7 and they had objectives they had goals they have needs and the audience was able to fulfill those needs and as they watch those characters and help them solve puzzles or help them craft items they generated score for those characters um that score was cut off on Friday evening Saturday and Sunday we adjusted scripts and animation and voice acting Monday we filmed with Will Tuesday we did post Wednesday the episode goes live summarizing the last week's event in all the meantime the streams are not offline they just keep going the storyline keeps going and the things that the audience do the things that they say in chat the adjustments that they make are all reflected and will show so will show is actually being based off of what the audience did similar to a traditional

reality show we boot off a character each week but that character that we boot off is not based on voting they're not based off of what we The Producers want to do it is literally what the audience was choosing the decisions that they made the engagement that they did so the characters with the lowest score were the ones that were cut off every week and so we produced the thing we created but we didn't know who would reach the top of the mountain we'd find the underground city how they would do it when like that was all completely organic done up by the audience themselves and we were not in control of how that happened yeah that that's so cool um and so let's play it forward I know you've done different events and projects since then like Pac-Man which you mentioned behind which is on the the screen behind you yeah but your your latest event I think is your biggest which is The Walking Dead Last Mile um and having spent some time in that I could instantly tell um how much leveled up and different it

was compared to a bunch of the other projects that you've done in the past so I'd love for you to talk about um this this latest project which I know I mean you mentioned before we we started it was also the first time you've been to Comic Con you've been going on tour um talking about it but um from you know an entrepreneur and Builder standpoint um what what was leveled up about this project and similarly just like where is the Innovation here what did you learn how did this change how you're thinking about the the future of what's next here when we did rival Peak we didn't really know what we were doing in terms of how the audience would engage with it and we didn't know for example what the breakdown between PC and mobile users would be in fact it was 96 mobile with audience members in India Mexico and Brazil how do you get to low-end Android

devices in India well this is very very interesting many of these kind of older OnePlus Android devices don't render 3D games particularly well but what's the number one thing they're doing on their phones around the world is video consumption Tick Tock YouTube what have you and we're literally the same video feed it's not like stadia where it's like it's just like YouTube but you need a really good internet connection and 30 Mbps like it's literally a Facebook video feed it's the exact same video feed that any streamer or anybody like any mom pressing the live button to show their kids birthday to their friends or using and so it works everywhere on any device that Facebook is on and we discovered it's incredibly heavily mobile and Incredibly heavily global um we also discovered that some of the mechanics that we originally expecting like voting we're not the thing that people were most excited about so only 12

percent of interactions were with votes and this made sense so like when when Aaron you and I are participating and we both vote I have 50 agency and you have 50 agency and then we add a third person now we have 33 agency when we have a thousand people we get one one thousandth agency and when we start to get millions of users we get one one millionth agency at that point we feel meaningless so we realized that we had to to come up with a different mechanic and one of the things that the audience loved 40 percent of the engagement in rival people with our mini games we had match three and Memory Match and a bunch of simple puzzles just to you know allow people to idle their time away so in Last Mile we took those learnings and we said what if um you can participate in these minigames and generate points and the more points you generate the more that you can use those to bid so it's not

about voting anymore it's not about we each have one vote it's the more I cheer the more I play the more I play the more I have points to bid right and now I'm allowing the more engaged users to have more agency over their story and that's how we solve that puzzle Loop now in between rival Peak and Walking Dead we did Pac-Man and Pac-Man um allows for you to create mazes and then have those mazes be rendered in uh 3D through the engine that's streaming over the video and we took that core Tech of creating an item in 2D through the Gen bit overlay and then rendering it in 3D in an engine for the video stream and we created the Avatar and Cameo systems in Walking Dead so in Walking Dead you create your own character and you can spend your points to make story decisions or to Cameo inside of the streams inside of the story lines there

are many different types of cameos but one of them is to appear inside of 3D sequences to appear inside of CG story sequences to appear inside the live game streams and fend off Walkers don't recommend doing that because 50 chance you're gonna die and you can recreate your character um but that same Tech now is used to actually have you kind of marry Sue into the show itself but importantly in the case of Walking Dead it's all Canada right it's not Jacob's game or Aaron's game we're all part of a single or story that has no reset button and so as a result when I Cameo when I'm part of it when I create a character inside of it I am part of the lore of The Walking Dead and this is a big deal because the people writing Story the people are writing the characters are Sky bet the creators of the comic book this is Robert kirkman's team and he has said very clearly that this story is Canon to his Comics so when you create a character when you appear inside the world of The Walking Dead Last Mile you

were part of the universe of the comic books of The Walking Dead yeah I thought that was one of the coolest things how um you were able to take a an extremely loved IP like The Walking Dead um and create a Canon story out of it without even knowing what that story is ultimately going to be yeah I'd love for you to talk about like how that came together why you know the the creators of The Walking Dead were willing to make a bet on a mile and um like just how you see interactions with IP like this going in the future is this the first of many like it the answer to your last question is very much yes um let's talk about how we we got to where we where we were after we finished rival Peak Facebook was interested in doing more and wanted to explore how we bring large intellectual properties into this format and so I went and I approached a number of Ip holders and one of the ones that

was the most Keen to explore this was skybound who had been looking in this area for a long time and was searching for a kind of tech-in and production partner to help bring some of their existing Vision to life so it's not like we went to skybound and they went that's a cool idea it was we went to skybound they said we've had ideas for what we want to do here for years and in fact the more I I approached companies in this ecosystem the more I heard that same common refrain in fact companies have been looking at this concept of transmedia which is a word that is out of Vogue now for close to two decades where do games and traditional linear media meet where do they intertwine the original pitches and I remember this back from the mid-2000s when I started in the game industry was hey you could start playing a game and then see it continue in you know a TV show and then

there'll be comic books and you'll be able to buy toys and we're only just starting to get to that now so if you look at what riots done with arcane or would you look at you know the cyberpunk anime that's airing on uh on Netflix these days and you're seeing how that drives engagement back into the game we're finally 20 years later starting to realize that that is a thing that will actually work and that the audiences around it are mature enough to be interested but I look at the opportunity as significantly bigger than just creating an extension sing to your game product and so what I mean by this is the following when you create a video game you create a product for a player you don't move forward in Call of Duty unless you push the joystick you don't fire a gun unless you pull the trigger if you do nothing in Spider-Man for the PlayStation 4 Spider-Man will kind of

idle like that but he's not going to swing around the city on his own right you can't Crush Candy in Candy Crush unless you're tapping on your phone and the reason I say these incredibly redundant Things Are games require you to interact with them for the story to move forward right they demand your time they demand your skill and they demand your immersion and there is nothing wrong with that but I'm really busy I've got a five-year-old I'm running a company I love games I grew up with games but I'm super busy and so I don't have the time to go and spend 15 hours focused on a thing remembering all the button combinations and getting better at it but I do love interactivity it's my five-year-old he grew up with phones and iPads right he touches he interacts with them he adjusts them when he was two or three he went up to the television and he tried to tap that and he was surprised

and frustrated and disappointed that it didn't react to him yeah right the ages growing up these days with Roblox and Minecraft expect interactivity demand interactivity and so the notion that you had have content that you can't be a part of that there isn't a community around is not things that are going to be acceptable and then we go back to this notion of cloud gaming so stadia launches in 2019 talking about the next 2 billion Gamers x-cloud Luna Etc all of these platforms who are working on game streaming have been saying that the opportunity is to move Beyond console ownership right cost of console is very expensive 400 500 600 and then you can't even find them and then you have to go and pay for individual pieces of content then these same platforms went and put gpus in North America and Europe and

with the same sixty dollar package disk products that were available on the console so you didn't actually move past the console you just had a slightly more inferior experience because if you're internet hiccups that was the end of your play and if you think about that phrasing of the next two billion Gamers which is a thing that we heard commonly when many of these cloud gaming platforms were being launched they could mean one of two things they could mean audiences around the rest of the world that may not buy consoles India Mexico Brazil um but then you have to go and put really expensive gpus like three thousand dollar GTX 380s in data centers in India and the revenue return that you can get on that doesn't match which is why none of these Cloud platforms stream there but I do so I'm not doing one-to-one streaming I'm just broadcasting so if

you can watch YouTube or Facebook in India you're watching rival Peak or Walking Dead last month we've got a huge Indian player base for all of our titles because some of the prettiest looking stuff that you can get streaming to those phones and so the next two billion Gamers aren't there the other argument that you can make your people in Western countries who don't own consoles and that's how many of these platforms launch right they've launched in North America and Europe and so you don't have to buy a console anymore just pay us 120 a year or whatever their monthly fee was for it and we'll put aside that argument but here's the problem for somebody who likes and plays games and finds that type of content appealing Red Dead Redemption all of the launch titles for most of this stuff the issue has never been access to the console or the cost of the console because they're not really that expensive relative to the cost of individual titles if you look at my parents as an example of an audience

that may be appealing well they've actually owned a console for 20 years they've been they've put my you know last gen Xboxes in their house because I live in a small apartment in New York City did I play Red Dead Redemption because they don't have access to a console they're not playing it because it's complicated and has a lot of buttons and that's not a thing that they would ever do and so if you actually want to get to those next two billion people out there you have to do two things one you have to be available worldwide and accessible on low end devices without latency problems and you have to create content that isn't complex and that is core to The Walking Dead Last Mile all of the puzzles in the mini games we've got there this first aid and match three and all sorts of other stuff are very common popular casual experiences why because you're playing those to generate points and you're using those points to influence the story and if it was play

this battle royale and be really good at it and you'll get all the points to then influence the story the only people who'd be able to influence are the people who have a lot of skill and that's a very niche market to be focused on so we wanted to create an experience that didn't require you to be skilled at it didn't require you to be the number one person you just needed to be engaged right you just needed to be able to play a little bit lean back and watch the results and you don't have to do anything you just want to watch The Walking Dead go ahead you want to chat and be part of the community go ahead you want to cheer for people your cheers now we we added this last week when people are stabbing Walkers or shooting them your cheers help heal the players who are inside of the thing uh and if in fact if you don't share they're probably going to die so that 50 death rate now becomes a lot lower if the audience is helping you but if you really want to go and solve every puzzle shoot every walk

or defend the village you can do that wherever you want to participate on that Spectrum you have the ability to engage with and that's very different than a traditional video game so those are all the lessons that we imparted into Walking Dead yeah that's fascinating and I'm curious obviously you're you're still even though you're pioneering something new in a lot of ways you're still taking from the best of what has been figured out so far such as with mini games and you know leveraging a lot of these platforms and such but I'm curious um when it comes to to user engagement obviously you're pioneering something that's new so the best practices aren't entirely figured out yet what are some of the unique challenges that you're that you're thinking about and iterating on to improve engagement to improve involvement um because uh you know for example this isn't you know a one-time event it's not you know a session that you know you can

hit pause and then as a player and then come back to and you're left exactly where you left off you have to catch up on what's happened in the world how are you thinking about um just solving some of the engagement challenges that are out there and what are those challenges well we've been actually doing it live day by day over The Walking Dead so as an example we we found that it wasn't clear why your story choices mattered or why your points mattered so in the prologue you just had choices up there but you didn't have context and so when we launched act one in late August we launched it with a new bidding screen that told you whether it was a major Choice a minor Choice a life or death choice and it gave you a context link so you could go see the setup to that storyline moment um we're finding that people don't understand their impact their individual impacts so very soon we're launching a feature called my impact that will actually tell you how you impacted the story uh we're launching a feature called timeline soon that's going to allow for you to see the chronological

order and the story decisions and the choices that the audience have made because joining the story a hundred days into it which we're getting close to now is intimidating because a lot of things have happened so how do you catch the audience up um how do you create meaningful choices how do you build mini games that don't feel exhausting to participate in how do you make that survival feel like it's like it matters to you and how do you rally the community around it these are questions that we're asking ourselves and we literally will look at the thing say we don't think that this is working or the audience isn't interacting with it write up a ticket for it have our UI ux team mock a thing within a week or two and then start implementing it hey we're not looking at things in month timeline or your timeline but it's literally day by day how can we improve this product in every lesson and every piece of data that we're getting from Walking Dead is going to the next title the next title

after that as you pointed out we have a little bit of a problem in so far as we had to build these products without knowing how the audience would do it so the only content I could build off of for Walking Dead was my lessons from rival Peak right um and I'm building many other projects right now and most of those were started before Walking Dead was live before we had thought about a lot of the designs and so August we'd been live with Walking Dead's beta for a month and we looked at we looked at the data from the users and the designs of what was working what wasn't we made sweeping changes across all of the titles and developments saying Walking Dead is showing us that this is or is not working we'll lean more into this and we'll adjust more into that and when walking dead finishes we'll do a postmortem we'll look at all that data and that design that will impact the next title the next

title that we release um will have the benefit of that and then the title after that will have the benefit of that and so inside of the company we're not just building this content but we're building data as well as design know-how and kind of how you produce these things more so than any company in the world right now there is more knowledge on how to build miles more technology and how to build miles more data on how to build miles than anywhere else in the world and inside of our company and I can say that with full confidence yeah and that's really cool and obviously it props to your team for being on the the front lines figuring that out as you go um you know building the plane as you fly in in some ways um I I want to talk about um more future elements how you think about this evolving in the future but before we do that really quickly could you just explain what the business model is of Miles

um with some conversations with other other people that are more you know firmly in traditional gaming I think sometimes they struggle to understand because it's so different um you know what is similar in terms of the business model what is different so um you know how does genvid make money how do the developers make money how does that all work this answer has to be tied also to your next question which is about where we're taking things so remember that we began as a tech and services company server genvid we make our money off of providing Tech and services up until now Pac-Man Walking Dead rival Peak all of our projects like CS go for twitch or we license our software and we sell Solutions as any Unity or Unreal Engine provider does and so we we make money we make margin off of the packaging of those products to the platform

developers who use us will sell items it will sell interactions or we'll use it from marketing purposes and we'll pay us licensing fees for that but that is not where the company is seeing its opportunity for the future because I raised my series C last year I started my entertainment company I mentioned I'm financing my own products and so those products will live on candidate right so up until now it's been somebody else's content going forward it's going to be mine and there will be battle passes and item-based transactions and all the things that you'd commonly see in free to play video games that would be inside of these products and you can see where it goes very easily right you play mini games you get points you use those points to bid for cameos and use those points to bid on storyline decisions and it's working really well we actually had to introduce a point cap two weeks ago because we had

some very addicted players in Walking Dead spending 12 hours a day grinding the thing just to win every contest well you'll be able to buy Point packs the same way you buy gems or what have you and free to play titles like there's no need to actually reinvent the wheel on the business model fortnite Roblox um Diablo Immortal Etc of all kind of paved the way for what we're going to pick and choose for our business models going forward but importantly we're going to be streaming everywhere so we'll be we're on Facebook now we'll continue to stream to Facebook it's a great platform but we can also stream to app store Google play Xbox PlayStation switch Apple TV Fire TV Roku epic game store steam I mean anywhere that the Netflix app can live my streams can live because it's the exact same stream and so you should be able to access genvid content everywhere and they're all going to be very large intellectual properties it's all being built going forward and

on on unreal so rival Peak and Walking Dead where built in unity and the unreal pipeline the Fidelity on is just mind-blowing like looks gorgeous full voice acting real-time streaming Etc and so you can imagine being able to get access to agenda battle pass and access to all of our content right unlocked through that process but we are planning for all of our streams and all of our content to be available for free um and then the audience who want to purchase a battle pass create characters get Avatar items all the things that we're doing in Walking Dead fully for free will be capable of being monetized so I kind of had to answer both of your questions at once to tell the right story got a little bit ahead of it sorry no that's good that makes a lot of sense um and so let's look into the future a little bit more and I have um

I guess I have a few questions here I might compress a couple in our our final 10 minutes but um genvid has been building for for six years now so I'm curious if we were to to zoom forward another six years so so the year is 2028 um what is the state of genvid at that time what is the state of Miles like um you know what what is that um any bold predictions about what that that world looks like but but also connected to that um I'm curious um because I've seen elsewhere you've genvide uh give examples of miles that aren't even necessarily kind of around games so I'm just curious where where do you see this going over the next few years bigger picture I think there are three points I want to make here one if up until now we've been primarily at technology Brands going forward we're going to be a consumer brand and so back in may we announced two fairly

significant hires one Andy Schneider he was the SVP of Disney streaming services that launched Disney Plus he's now our CMO there's a reason right he's building up a consumer-facing brand around us so people will think of genvid when they think of miles and have a similar brand at Netflix or HBO Max or Telltale or what have you um and we brought on Jerry Hines to be our evpo platform Jerry I first met him close to 13 or 14 years ago when he built the first GPU instances at AWS all of the gpus that I used today were originally created by Him I was one of their first beta testers at Square next for the g1s uh after that he built the Enterprise Cloud for NVIDIA under under Jensen and he's building out our account systems our wallet so you'll be able to single sign on just like you do with fortnite and have access to that stream on any device everywhere worldwide with the

same wallet with the same entitlements and this leads to point number two which is a wide swath of intellectual properties uh under our Banner so we've got one announcement coming very soon for a major IP uh we've got another announcement coming one to two quarters later and we've got another announcement coming one to two quarters after that and so every few months you're going to see very very big intellectual properties where we're building miles and they're part of that gendered brand and we're going to continue to do that in fact we continuously speak with IP holders we want to create this and you'll look at and you'll go how'd they get that IP or how do they get this opportunity or that Hollywood director to sign up for it it's everybody's been thinking that this is the future for a very long time very few places both have the technology and the war chest as well as the dead as I know how

to build it and we are doing so that's Point number two you're gonna think of our brand as being a place where a lot of your favorite intellectual properties are kind of located and then you're going to start doing this is point number three not just think of us as kind of light-hearted interactive television but we have long known because again I started in cloud gaming right 15 years ago that more immersion more capability for the audience member can come so today you're all watching the same streams today you've got a 2d overlay as Cloud side GPU gets cheaper AI gets cheaper physics gets cheaper it's going to be cheaper and cheaper for me to start to allow people to have individual cameras and controls inside of these shared Worlds the tech will catch up the pricing will catch up it's never been a question of being able

to do it I did it 15 years ago it's been a question of latency GPU and bandwidth cost five to eight years from now we're going to be at a place where that is manageable for a company like ours and which company is going to succeed in this actual kind of cloud-based future is it going to be the ones that are just purely porting console games or is it going to be the company that's been designing these products from day one from the ground up has the data has the IP and has the kind of design know-how on how to build the products absolutely because the better I make Walking Dead the better my next product gets and it is like building a game engine Tim Sweeney had this great quote a few years ago where he said anybody wants to catch up to Unreal needs to invest billions and probably a decade of time and by the time they get there we're a decade ahead of them yeah it's gonna be the same here I am six years ahead of any company that's starting today on these products and I've got the people the data and the know-how and I've signed the deals for

the franchises and I've been locking those down right so you know the the IP holders trust us they know that we deliver on quality they know that we're capable of doing what we say and they're excited to work on these products and we're working with great creators we're working with amazing creative teams and that's only going to build up an even stronger opportunity for us and if you look at it from the game Publishers or the comic book holders or the movie producers who work with us all of them understand that this is the future they just don't know how to build it and the great thing for us as a company is not just that we're able to build this and build that consumer brand but similar to Unreal Engine and to Epic for people who don't want to be having a genvid produced project where gendered licenses and they want to build it on their own guess what I've got the tech for that and the services for that and mine is working and stable and I'm very very

happy for people to build their own Miles because I know my software is the best at it in the world and they won't have to do it from scratch which is why everybody's building an unreal these days right is the same opportunity to have your own content publishing business which is what they do with fortnite to have your own platform which is what they do with epic game store and to also provide the tech and the services through the engine that has an entire ecosystem of people building it that makes your own products stronger that's what we have agenda today we have our SDK we have our services division we're building up our publishing we're building up our platform right and so just to be very clear on that we have a lot of Founders entrepreneurs game developers that that listen to this podcast if they want to go and build a mile right now using genvid's technology they'll be able to do so everything is available on our website all of our products use the public SDK I'm not joking all of the studios that we work with even our internal staff go to genvidtech.com and download the SDK that's available on the website Walking

Dead is running off of it Pac-Man is running off of it titles that will announce very soon are all running off of it we eat our own dog food which is why the SDK works awesome um so we got just a couple minutes left but I wanted to ask you one last question Jacob I gotta ask the uh the the king of Miles um what is your dream mile what would that be I really like to do Star Wars one day that sounds like a lot of fun Star Wars and Pokemon I think would be really really good fits um for us obviously if I'm saying this I'm not working on them actively at this point in time right so otherwise I'd be under NDA not be but like those two would be dream projects for me I think that the audience being able to collectively kind of influence a Star Wars story or being able to participate in just massive boss battles and Pokemon like imagine a boss with a billion hpe and millions of viewers who are watching have to throw their own Pokemon at it like that's my dream for where this content goes well I'll be there day one

for both of those once you once you find a way to pull that off um I guess I'm here at Disney just reach out I guess I lied about last question really the last question is for those who are interested in following along with all that genvid is up to and why what you're up to yourself how can they best do that we just launched genvid.com which is different than our tech company it's our consumer facing portal so all the upcoming news are going to be there we've got our socials so at genvatech um on on Twitter and on LinkedIn and kind of everywhere else is good you can also follow me on Twitter at Jane evoke that's the letter J then my last name evoke and AV okay a lot of people say Novak it's AV okay not OV okay but you're you're gonna see our announcements pretty soon and I think anybody following the industry is going to see it because it's going to be hard to miss yeah well I'm really excited for that

and Jacob again thank you so much for joining me today this has been a lot of fun I'm super bullish on what you guys are building and I can't wait for more people to to catch on um and for your your new projects to come to life um so thanks again thank you much appreciated awesome and so all of our listeners out there if you enjoyed this episode please make sure to give it a like subscribe five stars it would mean a lot also share it if you think anybody would find the topic of Miles interesting we'll put the links to all things Jacob and jenvid in the description below and of course if you want to check out anything novik related from our free newsletter to premium research the the links for that will be in the description as well so thanks for listening and we'll catch you next time [Music] hold up

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