This episode is brought to you by Zoetis.
When the trail shifts unexpectedly beneath your feet, it can lead you to a Hall of Fame career in the cutting horse industry, just ask Craig Morris.
In this episode, we discuss:
Before you listen…every eventer knows, a great dressage score requires the right balance of preparation, feel, and focus.
It also requires a happy, healthy horse. Zoetis (zoh-EH-tis) has been supporting horses, riders, and veterinarians for more than 70 years.
From regenerative medicine devices like Pro-Stride APS, to expert-recommended Quest Gel, Zoetis (zoh-EH-tis) is always by your side in the barn, down the centerline, and everywhere in between.
Visit ZoetisEquine.com or follow @Zoetis Equine on Facebook and Instagram to learn more.
🐴 This episode is brought to you by Pegasus, the first modern event management system that makes it easy to host and run equestrian events. Sign up for early access at www.thepegasus.app.
Be sure to follow Pegasus on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and subscribe to The Oxer, the #1 weekly newsletter for global equestrian industry happenings. 🗞️
This episode is brought to you by Zoetis.
When the trail shifts unexpectedly beneath your feet, it can lead you to a Hall of Fame career in the cutting horse industry, just ask Craig Morris.
In this episode, we discuss:
Before you listen…every eventer knows, a great dressage score requires the right balance of preparation, feel, and focus.
It also requires a happy, healthy horse. Zoetis (zoh-EH-tis) has been supporting horses, riders, and veterinarians for more than 70 years.
From regenerative medicine devices like Pro-Stride APS, to expert-recommended Quest Gel, Zoetis (zoh-EH-tis) is always by your side in the barn, down the centerline, and everywhere in between.
Visit ZoetisEquine.com or follow @Zoetis Equine on Facebook and Instagram to learn more.
🐴 This episode is brought to you by Pegasus, the first modern event management system that makes it easy to host and run equestrian events. Sign up for early access at www.thepegasus.app.
Be sure to follow Pegasus on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and subscribe to The Oxer, the #1 weekly newsletter for global equestrian industry happenings. 🗞️
All right, Craig. So for our listeners, do you just want to give them a quick intro about who you are and your background?
Speaker 2:So my name is Craig Morris. I grew up in the cutting horse industry. My dad, my stepdad, was a cutting horse trainer. Tremendous amount of nepotism in that industry because it's a very specialized, I think kind of unique part of the equestrian sports world. So I grew up in that, learned to train horses.
Speaker 2:I actually went to school, went to college for pre-law degree and was headed down that path and I guess, luckily or unluckily for me I had a professor, a British lip professor, who through my second semester in college, went in and we had a big show come up. A guy got hurt that was working for my dad. I needed to get off early to go to a big show that was in Oklahoma with him to help him, and went to all my professors and said look, I need to take my finals early. Is there any way I can do that or take them late? Whatever the case may be, I'll try and work it out whatever, but I've got to be gone next week.
Speaker 2:And everybody agreed except my British lip professor, and he said if you can't be here for the final then you fail the course. So I went home and told my mother. I said, look, I've got to make a decision here. I'd already done well in the industry as a non-professional and stuff like that, and I said I've got to make a decision here. I really want to train horses. I tried this and I think the decision was just made for me of what my path needs to be, and so, regretfully, she agreed and said OK, that sounds like you're headed down the right path. I guess it's pushed you that direction.
Speaker 1:Before you move on, ever reach out to that English lip professor and be like you were the fork in the road of my life. I could have been a lawyer, I was going down the path of becoming a lawyer and now I'm a career horse trainer and equine content professional.
Speaker 2:I wish I had probably should do that someday and look that fella up, but I haven't. So anyhow, as they say, like I said, the rest is history. I went on after that and did very well, turned in my non-professional card, became a professional trainer and I guess it was the second year. After that I took two horses to the semifinals of the Ferturity. The semifinals by half a point went on. That following year. That following January, the second biggest show we had a year in Oklahoma City, it's called Sunbelt Ferturity. I won it and had the highest combined scores of anybody who was showing it that want to pick up, and I figured at that point I was never going to see another poor day in my life.
Speaker 2:I went on to train and did like a lot of the guys, moved out and went on my own, starved to death for a while, a lot of pork and beans and macaroni and cheese and 2003. I was fortunate enough. I had some really great customers and really great horses. 2003, I was fortunate enough to win the Ferturity on an outstanding stallion it was actually the very first hybrid cat to win the Ferturity, who now is, you know, icon of our industry and once again, we'd never see another poor day. I bought half the horse from the owner in it and we partnered on him. He was a Crypt Orchid, a bilateral Crypt Orchid stallion. So we took him to CSU after we finished the show career to see if we could do some alterations on him to get him where he was a breeder. Unfortunately that didn't work, so my second retirement plan didn't pan out real good.
Speaker 1:Am I right in saying here that you're now in the cutting Hall of Fame as a result of that career?
Speaker 2:I am. Yeah, in 2004, I had won about a little over 900,000 before I won the Ferturity. I had some championship at the weekend level and, of course, been finalist at a lot of major events and different things, and my earnings at the Ferturity that year pushed me over the million dollar mark and so I was inducted into the Hall of Fame that following year as well for that, funny enough, I had a great year that year. That few months I won the Ferturity and then came back in that February they had a new cutting that was in Las Vegas called the Millionaire Classic it was the first year for it and went to it and actually won it behind. So I won 250,000 Ferturity, turned around, won 300,000 at the Millionaire Classic that early February and made the finals of several other events in between. So in a few short months we had a really great year and kind of jumpstarted the career.
Speaker 1:And before we jump into you know you're then pivot to the TV world, which is where we will spend most of the podcast. I just want to stick a quick pit in and something you said that there's a lot of nepotism in the cutting world. Is that when you said there's a lot of nepotism in the cutting world, do you mean specifically cutting or in the Western writing disciplines in general?
Speaker 2:Well, I would say in general, but it seems to be even more prevalent in the cutting horse world, I think, because it's so specialized.
Speaker 2:It's a unique event. I'm a little biased, but I still believe that the cutting horse is the ultimate equine athlete. I've said that all along. It has to combine the athletic ability of a jumper or a rope horse to be able to stop really hard. It has the body control of a dressage horse, the endurance of a distance horse, and then has to do all that, has to have the intelligence to be able to do all that on a slack reign. And to me it's the only equine athlete that actually requires conscious thought, because it watches the cow and it anticipates what the cow is about to do on its own. I can't think of any other question in sport that requires that. So to me it's a unique thing and it's something that if you grow up in other disciplines it's a little bit hard to make, that transference to cutting, because you have to train the horse to think on its own instead of be responsible and respond to cues. So it's a little different approach.
Speaker 1:Interesting. And then again as we're just going to just cover this quickly because we'll come back to it later in the podcast so when the retirement plan in the cutting world didn't work out, you then got into television in the equestrian industry. So just give us a couple of minutes summary of kind of that was and how that all happened.
Speaker 2:So early on in my career I had been tasked by NCHA and by some people involved in NCHA to do some interviews and some things on TV for some different projects that we had. So I was a little bit familiar with television. I had a guy come to me you had a show on RFD and he said look, we'd like to do a segment on cutting. We'd like for you to be the host of it for us or to be a guest actually on the show. And so we did that. After I won the Fertility course, we talked about the Fertility and showed about cutting.
Speaker 2:I've always been a huge advocate of the industry and wanted to promote the industry, not only cutting but all Western sports, equestrian in general. So that was my motivation behind that. And after that program that we did, that segment that we did, he came to me and he said wow. He said you seem to be fairly comfortable on camera. Have you done this before? And I said, well, a little bit.
Speaker 2:He said have you ever thought about having your own show? And I said, well, maybe, but I don't want to be a clinician. I would want to make it about the industry, not about myself. So if there's something that you're thinking on that lines, then maybe so and so that was where Road to the Winner circle was born. The first year we partnered on it unfortunately, a partnership didn't work out I ended up buying him out and took over all the production and everything ourselves. We went to the Apple store late at night and did the seminars and learn to edit, learn to do sound and the whole thing all on our own. And then for the next four years I operated that myself on RFD and that was really the genesis behind Ride.
Speaker 1:Fantastic and then, for our listeners, ride TV essentially turned. You know, if you aren't aware of it, it's kind of like a Western. It isn't specifically Western but it dominated by Western. But think of it as like Clip my Horse for the Western world essentially, and has been around longer and has a larger library and a bigger customer base and is American as opposed to European essentially. So you got into that.
Speaker 1:We'll come back to that and I do. We'll deep dive into Ride TV in a bit. But before I do one thing, I just want to zoom out a little bit and get your thoughts on the equestrian industry at large and the landscape of equestrian content. So Jen and I on this podcast we talk about regularly the fact that I have to admit we haven't been exposed a huge amount to the Western industries equestrian content I know they make a big deal out of, like Tenridge and the Ruby Buckle and the Race for a Million, all that sort of stuff. So there is content around that and we aren't as exposed to that as we probably should be, honestly.
Speaker 1:But as far as the English world goes, the English world seems to essentially film and stream, like the FEI level events. Or there are some YouTube channels which are essentially young women with horses just vlogging what they do on a daily base going to the barn. And the thing that blows my mind and I say this all the time is that when you consider that the equestrian industry is global, it is united by a love for horses that community is basically you know the disciplines are different but essentially the core tenants of what they do, which is caring for horse, taking care of a horse, competing with a horse, training a horse. They're relatively universal principles and it's a huge market. There are a lot of people. And then you take on top of that the fact that pretty much every single little girl grows up hardwired to be obsessed with horses.
Speaker 1:I find it quite amazing that there's not more content out there for the equestrian industry, that there's not more content out there for parents to put on YouTube to entertain their kids and scratch that itch which is an obsession with horses. There's no more content about the background of getting ready for competitions, competing, building a season that follows five riders over the course of a season and still in the story and the trials and tribulations of that stress and that lifestyle, etc. So since you've been in the industry for years and you've seen behind the velvet curtain and you've seen the business decisions being made, have you got any initial thoughts on why, with such a juicy market that has such a pent up demand for this content, why there isn't more content to feed that market?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and you touched on several things that were really the motivators behind creating ride TV. You know me growing up in the industry. I understand how fragmented the industry really is and unfortunately and I think it's gotten a little better now, but it's still been where rodeo, horse racing, cutting, raining, jumping polo all these different industries and pieces of the total equestrian world were willing to stand on their own and don't play well together, didn't communicate with each other. So that was something that we saw that needed to change and was one of the reasons that we created ride to us to try to bring all those industries together. But it's really a situation of where everybody believes that their own sandbox is the best and they really didn't want a lot of other people playing in it. I think initially which was a shame, but also I think a large part of this was we were all preaching to our own choir, so everybody was satisfied with promoting the industry and the industry were doing well, the economics of them were doing well, so they were satisfied with promoting their own industry to all their own members, instead of trying to reach out and bring new people into the fold, so to speak, which was one of our missions, and so that's really.
Speaker 2:I think what happened with this is everybody got so focused on their own world and living in their own little box and promoting within that, we forgot that we needed to reach out to that larger market and about larger world that used to be reached by shows like Gunsmoke and Bonanza on regular TV, with Black Beauty and their movies, national Velvet, things like that. That brought this outside world and let them really live part of that lifestyle of the equestrian and brought them in. And so we moved away from that. And then, on top of that, these industries were willing to go out and buy time on networks that put them on in terrible time slots and did no pre promotion for any of the deals, any of the events. And so then what happened was then, all of a sudden people said well, it gets no ratings, so they were their own worst enemy. The way they approached the industry, because they went in and allowed themselves to be put into a box that really said equestrian doesn't work on TV and it created a real problem.
Speaker 1:Right. So they created a really toxic feedback loop that then meant that they couldn't rationalize investing more cash in the product.
Speaker 2:Sure, and the people who weren't part of the industry, who didn't really understand what's going on the television executives, producers, things like that, and the people who owned the networks looked at it and said, wow, nobody watched this. We had the FEI five star three day event that went on CBS Sports Network at two o'clock in the afternoon on a Thursday and it got no ratings and we did not understanding that nobody did any pre-pro for it, nobody. There was nothing that drove people to that time slot and even was a terrible time slot, anyways. So it was really a monster that was self created by the industry as a whole. I know in the cutting world we bought time on ESPN and outdoor life network and some things like that way back, and it was the same problem. There wasn't enough promotion done around it. The people who were doing it really didn't understand how to create the buzz to draw that audience in, and so it got no ratings. So people said the question doesn't work on television, which I don't think is true.
Speaker 1:I've been at many a meeting at an executive level where a consensus is made by the executives or by the board and they're like well, you know, it seems like this isn't working, so we really shouldn't put our money into it. Maybe we take the same money next year and instead we invested into our newsletter advertising business, or we've increased the expansion of our print business instead, it seems to be a better use of our money. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Speaker 1:And when that all consensus is being made, there's definitely one or two people in the room who know why it didn't work, who is like it's not that it didn't work, we just didn't do it right, it's not the world's fault, it's our fault. But they just keep their mouths shut because the general consensus is like oh, what's the point? Like the board's made his decision and is that kind of what you experienced back then? Like that, the people who pushed initially right, who took the risk and said let's buy some ESPN airtime. They believed in it, they knew that it was a bungled and were, even though they still believed in after the fact, they just kind of just count out to the board's, you know general decision to just move on. And then, basically that person was like well, I have to wait another five, 10 years probably before I can get the board to take the risk again.
Speaker 2:Yeah, to a large degree, and unfortunately both sides were right. That's the problem. Because of the dynamic of it being so fragmented. Like I said once again, this was a catalyst for ride. The only way we felt like we could bring the right audience to this and to grow it was to put the industry out there as a whole, because you know as well as I do, some people like baseball, some people like football, a lot of people like soccer. They don't all watch the same sports. So if you've got a place that they can come and see all these different sports, you're more likely to find something that they get interested in than if you're just the rodeo channel or if you're just the polo channel or if you're just the cutting channel.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Okay.
Speaker 1:So another conversation that we've had on this podcast a few times between the Pegasus team and we often debate it and we don't see eye to eye on the solution which comes to the question, right Of all equestrian content as well as all equestrian, you know, registrations for competitions etc.
Speaker 1:Which is is it better to try and convert riders from other disciplines to go across disciplines and register for disciplines they haven't been exposed, to watch content for disciplines they don't participate in, or is it better to invest in trying to expand the size of the market and get non-equestrians into the sport? And so, if I think about ride TV and the fact that it has all the disciplines and you basically pay one subscription, you can access content from all disciplines. And to your point about let's give them all the disciplines on a platter and they can choose which ones they want to watch, I could see that being valuable from converting riders from different disciplines to watch content from other disciplines. But you still have the challenge of well, how do we convince non-equestrians to spend 9.99 a month on this and not 99 a month on adding Hulu to their TV staff?
Speaker 1:So, is that a conversation you guys had within your team regularly and what was kind of the general consensus on that problem?
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. And what you have to remember is our main focus was linear distribution. So we wanted to come at this, not just an offering on the internet. We had real television distribution, so we had distribution into about 40 million home. At the height of ride we had international distribution in Dubai. We were in about eight or nine different countries on top of 40 main homes here in the US.
Speaker 2:That was where we were seeking to draw those new people in and it was really a situation of where we saw that a lot of things were moving to the internet.
Speaker 2:So we needed to have that internet offering and that ability to go in and access that audience. But we really felt that the internet side of things was more for the enthusiast, for the person who was already in the business. The linear television side of things were to draw that new person in who'd never seen it before, who's maybe channel surfing and says, wow, the Kentucky 3-Day looks like an interesting thing to watch. I've never seen anything like this before. Or the cutting feature to your whatever. So that was the multiple pronged approach to not only promote the industry, to possibly cross riders over from English to Western, western English, different things like that, but we also wanted to draw and I always said to me horses are like the mountains in the ocean People are drawn to them. There's an inherent love and inherent draw for people to be a part of that and we wanted to tap into that side of it and that was why we went at that with the lifestyle program.
Speaker 1:I don't know if this is a phone question to ask, but did it work.
Speaker 2:It did to a degree. Unfortunately, of course, we don't have ride now. We ended up selling rides, so we were in the process and once again this is a chicken and egg kind of thing. We had 40 million homes, but really you need 60 to 80 million homes to consider yourself a successful television channel and to draw enough advertising revenue in to support the kind of dollars that it took to do the original program.
Speaker 1:And so very quickly, before you continue when you save 40 million homes, how do they calculate that? That's not 40 million people switched on a wash, that is, you had distribution on networks that were like part of a cable plan. That 40 million homes subscribed to that cable plan and you were one in a bucket of those.
Speaker 2:Exactly so. If everybody who could get ride TV turn their TV on at the same time, we could have 40 million viewers. You need, like I said, 60 to 80 million viewers to consider yourself a real television network and a growing concern in the advertising world and to get ratings. So you were in the process, and had been in the process for a couple of years, of trying to buy multiple channels from discovery. The business was changing, television business was changing, and so we went in and looked at some underperforming channels that some of these big conglomerates have that had great distribution but maybe needed a change in programming or something that complemented the distribution that we already had. Maybe the channel that we were looking at was available on direct TV and we weren't. Maybe it had an AT&T footprint. We didn't. So there was things in there that we looked at and so we went for two years and negotiated with discovery networks to buy three different channels that narrowed down to two channels at one point and then to one channel. Gac at the last part of our conversations are actually GACs, where we started at balloon to buy three channels initially and then we went back to one, and so we finally brought some partners in at the end of this.
Speaker 2:We had some great, great people involved in RIDE TV and put a lot of money behind it and believed in the mission. But we needed those additional homes. We had a group come in at the last and said, look, we're willing to help you finish this transaction and get this done. And after we brought them in, had some discussions about it, they felt like they really wanted to change the format. The equestrian world wasn't necessarily where their focus was and some people that believed there was a different place that they could push this, and so we had to make it more decision at that point. We'd been operating the channel for 12 years.
Speaker 2:At that point We'd had some successes but hadn't gotten to that point of where we felt like we wanted to be for sure and we had to go to everybody and say, look, is it time to exit, fold up our tents and allow them to finish this out, or do we want to stick it out and see what happens? Unfortunately, we were about four or five years ahead of the curve. I wish we had been in the realm now, where you have Teton Rids that you mentioned, coming in, taylor Sheridan with the popularity of Yellowstone and what he's done to help the industry. There's been multiple people come in now who I think could have been an extremely perfect complement to where we were headed with Ride TV and get this done, and it would have been a platform that we could have promoted a whole other world.
Speaker 2:We had partnerships with the PBR. We looked at doing stuff with NFR in the rodeo world. We did a lot of things with them. We had horse racing involved. So we got right to that point of where we felt like we could really push the industry as a whole to the next level and unfortunately weren't able to over that last hurdle.
Speaker 1:If I just get back to this number of 80 million homes, right, that number is important because that number means OK, there's enough distribution here now. That means that we can now sell ads to make this time slot worthwhile. And then, when you also consider that a cable channel, it's not so much, are you making us money? Are you in that slot making us money? How much money you're making, whether you're not making it is what is the opportunity cost of putting you in that slot versus putting someone else in that slot who might be able to get more money and more advertising?
Speaker 1:So two questions, and again because this is because I have absolutely no idea how cable TV deals and businesses work. But one, are they responsible for selling the advertising on the content that you create? Is it an internal discovery channel sales team that does that rather than you? And two, yes, you may need 60 to 80 to make that time slot revenue generating if you are a general product that appeals to the general public.
Speaker 1:But the thing about the equestrian industry that I always come back to is that it's very specific. It is built around horses, around a sport, which means that you don't need to hit 60 to 80 homes to get general appeal, because you can hit 40 million homes and you can sell that advertising to a very equestrian specific products and you can get the same ROI out of less distribution, because the advertisers don't really have that much of an option of where they can distribute their content because there's not that many equestrian specific distribution channels out there. So I would have thought and maybe that was your guys' hypothesis going into it I would have thought you could say, look, we don't need as much distribution, but trust me, you'll find it easier to sell the ad space because equestrian brands will love to advertise on equestrian content, because there isn't much option for them out there.
Speaker 2:So you're right in some aspects and really the cable television world, it's a very complex ecosystem for sure, and it's even gotten more so that way now because they all your providers is controlled by about eight or nine companies, and all the television channels that are available out there are controlled more or less by eight or nine companies, and so you've got companies who are content creators. They own the channels, they also now have their streaming options, so they control everything and a lot of them control the pipe to your home. They control access, so they either control your internet access or they control your satellite access. So really, their goal is is to be a gatekeeper. Their goal is not to bring you more content and all those kinds of things, it's a gatekeeper.
Speaker 2:It was not easy. It was a tremendously hard uphill battle to start from scratch, of having no home and to get content deals or to get distribution deals out there, to get the content out there, which was a definitely an uphill challenge. So Direct TV was the first major distributor, or a dish TV, rather, was the first major distributor. We never got on Direct and AT&T ended up going through a merger at that time and, real honestly, they were extremely hard to deal with. For us, to be very blunt about it, we never got on one of the major satellites out there that was critical to having enough mass make things really work. And then you have a situation where we didn't go in and sell airtime, so we didn't go out and parse out that airtime and sell to clinicians or sell to other events and things like that. We didn't charge for the airtime. We wanted to have good quality, what we considered real television productions. For that Now, not to say that some of our early programming wasn't very low budget, because it was, but some of it was good.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it happens that way. We really tried to program the channel to service the eyeballs that we had. So as the channel grew, our production budgets grew. But it's still a situation of where you need access to the consumer because the endemic products within the industry are pretty well tapped out right now as far as being able to charge them for more ad space more space in a magazine, more space banner ads on your websites. They have been bombarded by so many different associations, so many events, things like that. They're just pretty well tapped out on their advertising dollars. So we wanted to go at it. We wanted to bring in enough homes that we could tap into the Walmarts and the McDonald's and the big companies of the world who needed to touch those consumers and who had the advertising dollars to spend instead of going after all the endemics. That was our main goal.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that makes sense, so again. So if I can just sum that up and this is for my own learning so to my question, which was surely you could squeeze more juice out of the lemon by targeting equestrian companies to advertise in and around your equestrian content, what you found was that the equestrian companies one they didn't have as big of a budget in terms of advertising and they had basically allocated most of that budget already to printing in Chronicle of the Horse or the Platt Horse Magazine or the different equestrian magazines, as well as like newsletters or sponsoring events, et cetera. I mean, you guys ran it for what? 15 years on your own cable, 12 years.
Speaker 2:Yeah, a little over 12 years.
Speaker 1:That explains year one. What about year two, when they have the budget and it's free again? Did you find that? Obviously, it sounds like you obviously struggled to convince them to abandon their legacy distribution marketing channels and try something new. Do you have any hypothesis on why that was so difficult? Does it say more about the offering that you guys had, or does it say more about the mindset of the then executives in the equestrian space and how they thought about marketing and distribution?
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, I think it's twofold. One, it was stretching the dollars.
Speaker 1:You were more expensive were you?
Speaker 2:Well, not really so much more expensive Television advertising, surprisingly, is not that expensive. It costs to produce a good quality television commercial to have on that. So you know that's one of the things that a lot of people ran into with that was they didn't really have a good television commercial to put on that were gonna have to have the expensive of creating one.
Speaker 1:You mean, we've got to hire a videographer, we've got to write a script, you've got to act as and I kind of I'm on the board, I kind of do this part time anyway, and you want me to do it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, because advertising itself really isn't that expensive. What happened was it took a long time for us to get to 40 million homes. And so when you're available to 15 million homes, going to Lucacy Boot Company or something, and saying here's the audience we're reaching, they're saying, yeah, but we're reaching those same people at these five events that we're sponsoring and we have Boost Face there. We can touch them, we can. You know, that's the chicken and the egg kind of thing. You really needed that distribution.
Speaker 1:It cost the same amount to make the commercial, whether it's gonna go to 15 million homes or 40 million homes.
Speaker 2:40 million homes yeah, or 80 million homes, and so that was the other part of it, and you didn't have what I call the Yellowstone phenomenon right now of the resurgence of the Western sports world and the Western lifestyle, and so to me that was the part we were missing. We were hoping for that Yellowstone moment at some point, but we didn't have enough distribution to get to it. We had some shows that we thought, definitely not the quality of Yellowstone, but we had some programming on there that we thought was definitely compelling, and had we been able to reach that milestone of 60, 80 million homes or get it on just a bigger network, license it to a bigger network, then it may have been a way to do that as well. So we could see what was coming, but we couldn't quite get there. Like I said, we were a little ahead of the curve. We were four or five years ahead of the curve.
Speaker 1:So when you guys obviously it was a progression you went from building content on the distribution channels of cable TV, et cetera, At some point you then decide, okay, let's go direct to the consumer and create our own streaming platform. Once you built the streaming platform, did you notice the attitude of the advertisers change? Or was it kind of replicated? The same problem, which is well, how many subscribers do you have? We don't have subscribers yet. Therefore, we've still got to create the ad and that's going to take time and effort and blah, blah, blah, blah. Did you run into the same problem or did the change in distribution channel being streaming versus cable, did that change their mindset?
Speaker 2:No, to a degree and because of our contracts with the cable companies, we couldn't allow free access to the online version. So that's the other thing that happens with. You have a lot of constraints. It's one of the misnomers of the cable TV industry and it's funny because everybody talks about this but it really doesn't get out too much. Your best contract is your worst contract as well, because there's a MFN clause, a most favored nation clause, in every contract that you go to. So if you agree to do something with dish TV, then you have to give direct TV. Basically, those same exact terms are better terms if they're giving you the same or better distribution.
Speaker 1:That's what you're saying is, if in the cable industry it is very common place that every single contract has a most favored nation clause, so whichever cable channel negotiates you down, to, the worst terms for you then becomes the terms for all your existing contracts.
Speaker 2:Yes, if they're giving you similar distribution.
Speaker 1:How is that not considered cartel behavior?
Speaker 2:It's because there's about eight or nine companies that they control all of it and they put a lot of money into DC. So I mean, I walked the halls of Congress many, many times and met with a lot of congressional members, senators and congressional members to try and help change that and to get influence on that other side. It's a tough road. Like I said, it's one of those dirty little secrets of the cable industry and it was an uphill battle for us.
Speaker 1:How does that apply when it comes to building your own streaming?
Speaker 2:platform. So a lot of them had clauses in those contracts that would not allow you to offer the exact same content or similar content, even for free. You couldn't give it away, you had to charge for it and you had to charge a certain amount that was kind of in a percentage basis of what they were either paying you to be on the channel or if you gave it to them for free or did an offset in marketing things like that. I mean, you had a lot of different clauses in them that you had to go by that wouldn't allow you to just give it away to the consumer.
Speaker 1:Did you have to do a revenue share Like? If, like I said, for example, you had a distribution agreement with Dish and then you spin up your streaming platform and you're charging $10 a month, do you then have to give them like 20% of the revenue?
Speaker 2:No, didn't do any kind of rev shows, but there were some things in the contracts and at that time you're also under non-disclosure with those so there were some particulars in those contracts that you had to offer them, certain things that maybe you didn't offer on your streaming platform, or there's a lot of different nuances to each one that they're required Depending on where they were focused.
Speaker 1:So basically the real hamstringing that you faced when you launched the streaming channel was that you had this whole catalog of content that you couldn't show. So then you had to go out and did you say, once you launched RideTV, did you go out and invest in building your own content again, or did you try and crowdsource it and encourage other people to create content and put it on your platform and then give them like a per stream will give you X amount of revenue For us.
Speaker 2:It was always about creating our own content because really the high quality content that we were looking for in the lifestyle content and things like that didn't exist. There weren't any out there. You could go license some old movies or some old John Wayne shows or the Lone Ranger or Bonanza, things like that that we did offer at times on the television channel. But the real focus that we were looking for, like I said it, was building that broader base, bringing in that person who just had that innate love for horses instead of the actual competitor who was already involved in the industry. That content didn't exist. We were always looking for and creating our own content to bring in that broader audience.
Speaker 1:When you were talking before about the challenges of appealing to a wider audience. One of the big problems of the question in sports, as I'm sure you will readily admit, is that the barrier to entry to look at it in sport and understand what the hell is going on is hot, and as much as there are a lot of equestrians everywhere, there's not enough of them to make it. At least one in five people you bump into knows how this sport works and therefore they can explain it to you.
Speaker 1:I've been going to baseball games now for nine years. I still don't understand how baseball works, no matter how many times people have explained it to me, I still don't fully understand it. But every time I go to a baseball game I'm with a friend and they know it well enough to explain it to me. Right? Your question?
Speaker 1:Industry doesn't have that market domination across the general public yet, which means that it's really really hard for someone to sit down, turn on the TV, see a thing and really understand what's going on. So if just televising competitions doesn't work it draws the audience of the people who are already going to watch it regardless. It does not draw the audience of people who aren't going to watch it regardless Then the content you have to create is more storytelling. And that is why Yellowstone has been such a huge success is because they told a story and they just basically like slipped horses in underneath and people found themselves interested in Western horse disciplines subconsciously, by mistake, as opposed to it being like the whole point of the content. So when you create Riot TV and you said you want to get a more lifestyle and stuff, how did you think about what content you invested into make and what you thought the objective of that content was going to be in terms of getting mass appeal, etc.
Speaker 2:Yeah, sure, so that was something we had a lot of late night discussions about. But, real honestly, we took a very what I felt like was a pragmatic approach to it. We looked at content that was already working on other channels, that was already out there, and we tried to create similar shows that had an equestrian background. So we created Swamp Donkey, which was basically a spin off of ridiculousness. You know it was YouTube videos of animals and different things happening with horse people and stuff like that that we made fun of. It went over really good. It was a blow budget, easy deal to shoot. We could shoot a lot of episodes in one day on it and but a lot of people enjoyed it. We had a great host Anthony Lucia was our host for it originally and the super job, and so we do a lot of things like that.
Speaker 2:We created our girls, so we took a almost a reality show, which was we brought back women in bronc riding. Women were basically not allowed after a certain period of time in rodeo to compete in the rough stock events, and so we brought back women's bronc riding. Yeah, there was a woman that had gotten killed at an event, unfortunately, and so then they just felt like they were going to relegate them to barrel racing and to goat tying and things like that. And so the female aspect of that. We tried to look at this from empowering women's empowerment, again empowering the female sports. So we brought them back. We brought them back to the granddaddy of them all, the pioneer days.
Speaker 2:It's a chiam and had an actual performance, of multiple performances of women's ranch bronc riding and did the same thing in partnership with the PBR on their one of their tours. We had multiple events that incorporated women's bronc riding into. It was a way to bring the female athlete back in front of the public from the rodeo world. We had a lot of different programs like that that took things that we're working right now on television and just put an equestrian spin on it.
Speaker 1:And so what did you learn from that? Obviously, everything's nuanced, everything is time dependent what's happening in the world right now, and what does that mean? But if we had to make sweeping statements here like rules of thumb, what did you learn from that about the equestrian consumer? Did you learn that ultimately they do prefer just to watch events or ultimately they do prefer to watch just kind of mindless, immediately engaging content Like? What did you learn about the equestrian viewer that other people who are considering getting into the equestrian content creation game would be interested to know, to help them better understand from your wisdom what works and what doesn't?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think it's still a lot of trial and error and there's a place for it out there for sure, but unfortunately we didn't reach critical mass on distribution enough to know whether or not those shows really had broad appeal. That was the like I said. That was the chicken and the egg thing. We needed those other 20, 30 million homes 40 million homes added to the distribution that we had in order to really test that market, because you weren't getting to quite enough homes for people to be able to turn on that channel and access it and really say, yes, this worked or yes, this did With what we saw.
Speaker 2:Initially, we did a partnership with the PBR and aired their entire tour events for the year, for multiple years, and we saw really, really good numbers with that. We created some background shows around that and did some things with life on the road a little bit with those guys and saw that was going to work well. We really took the approach. We utilized our social media presence and our ability to have our online presence accessed and tried some shorts. We would take some concepts that we had and create shorts that we could run through our social media channels and online and test those and then if they tested well with that, we could then create that for television. So there was a lot of things that we had in place that we were really being able to build off of, that were coming together, that, unfortunately, even after 12 years, it wasn't quite enough time, didn't have quite enough distribution to say, yes, it was a success or no, it was a failure.
Speaker 1:Okay, interesting, okay. So one thing I want to dive into is kind of like how you're making these business decisions on to do this. So like, if I think about creating, I think about this regularly when I look like Apple TV and Netflix and all that sort of stuff like the amount of effort and money you have to spend to create a TV show or a movie, just to become like one tile on a screen in a streaming service that you hope somebody watches, right, and you've got to fill out the whole media library to make the monthly dues worthwhile. If there are listeners listening to this who are thinking about creating content and they're going through this process of like, well, how do I decide what's worth investing that time, money and effort in to actually create it? How do you assess the financial viability of making your own content? And did you guys ever consider, like crowdsourcing the content?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and we actually did talk about that with some of the other stuff that we were doing. The problem that you run into with that is you get too many cooks in the kitchen and it can spoil what you're trying to bake as well, so that can be a tricky slope. You have to have a long term vision, and this is what we had with RIDE. You know, we really had a long term vision, a long term goal of how we got there.
Speaker 1:Did you have investors to bankroll? Absolutely yeah okay. I was gonna say, because long term vision takes short term capital.
Speaker 2:Exactly, yeah, takes long term capital too. Yeah, no, we had some fantastic people behind it that, like I said, believed in the mission, put a lot of money behind it and unfortunately didn't cash out as big as what we hoped. You know forever.
Speaker 2:It was a situation of where they were passionate enough about the industry. And I think this is going back to a little bit of what you were talking about the advertisers. A lot of the advertisers who advertise with these different disciplines and different events and things like that, they're not getting the ROI that they hoped for. On a lot of that, it's a passion play and it's the reason that you see a lot of turnover and the advertising and the sponsorships. So that was something that we were trying to help alleviate as well by creating a larger audience. For that we need new people in the industry. We need to have a grassroots effort and an effort on all different types of media whether it's social media, television, radio, whatever the case may be to promote people to come and join our industries and unfortunately there is that barrier of entry to all of them that has to be overcome and the little bit of aloofness or a clickish type deal that goes into that, that a lot of people feel like that if you're not in the know, if you didn't grow up in the industry, that it's hard to become a part of it. That's something that we think as an equine professionals and an equine industry as a whole, we all need to do a better job of being more inclusive for people and inviting people in and figuring out ways to bring those people to our sport and to the business. Because what I do know is in one way you make a lifelong horseman horsewomen, whatever out of somebody is for them to be able to touch that horse. They can reach out and touch that horse. If they ever actually make physical contact with it, can get on top of one pet one, whatever the case may be. That's where that inherent love and that connection is really made. So I was focused for a long, long time and still am a huge believer in we have to do a better job as an industry of making it available for people to touch those horses.
Speaker 2:I went to multiple equestrian events in Europe to where they had pony. I don't even know what you'd call it. It was almost like a circus act where they had little rings and they had several ponies in a ring and all the kids would line up and they would allow them to get on the ponies and take a ride and they would teach them how to jump off and roll and do different things, you know, to keep them from getting hurt if they fell off a horse and what have you. But it was that way of bringing those kids into the fold who had never, ever been able to touch a horse before, and they gave them that riding experience and to me that was a light bolt moment and a watershed moment for me to see that and say, wow, this is one thing that we're missing at our events over here is that access and the ability to get people involved and to actually get them on a horse.
Speaker 1:And so right. So basically, as far as you guys creating your own content and making that decision, if I can sum it up, so essentially, you guys had a long term vision in your bones of what this. You know what we could achieve, what content was going to work, by looking at what content was already working and think let's just do it better, let's make it cheaper, let's make it more at scale. You raise private capital to basically fund that, the long term vision. Okay, that makes sense. How did you then decide on? You said it was 9.99 a month, wasn't it? You charged.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we did different specials. I think at one time we sold it for $5 a month. It's like everything you buy six months and get one month free, and there was a lot of different ways that we approached it.
Speaker 1:All right and that no, nine a month. I'm asking this question about did you find that price worked? And the reason I'm asking is that the equestrian industry is a relatively perplexing industry, right In the sense of some things. A question will spend a fortune on and not bat an eyelid and not make a single complaint. Other part of the industry same person, will complain if there's a price change by a dollar and scream bloody murder, despite the fact they spent $1,500 last week on something without think, batting an eyelid. So it is a relatively unforgiving customer base If you sell the wrong thing at the wrong price. It's a very forgiving customer base If you sell the right thing at the right price. So that 99 a month, how did you guys find the market responded to that as a price point at?
Speaker 2:that time Streaming was just getting started and a lot of these companies didn't have there. There weren't a hundred different offerings like there are out there now, and so I would say that it kind of worked for us originally on it, like in that price point was contractually dictated a lot of times depending on what our restrictions were within our cable contracts, so there was certain things that we couldn't go below, and so that had a factor in that as well. But I think the industry as a whole is changing now. You're even seeing within the television industry itself, and big guns of the world are now realizing that you can't have people aren't going to pay 20 different subscriptions every month for content, and so it's going to require the same way that cable TV. It's going the exact same direction that cable TV did, and all that You're going to have consolidation, and so consolidation is going to happen.
Speaker 2:You're going to have to have more offerings, more ability to access different types of programming on one service instead of having to subscribe to 15 different services. To get that which I think is you know, I helped negotiate the sale of ride TV. Ride TV go to the equine network, and the equine network has multiple different services out there right now, multiple different disciplines that they service with those, and I think that could be part of where their head it is, you know, consolidating all that into one platform. So I think they're headed in the right direction with that, but it's going to be that way in the overall scope of things now, too.
Speaker 2:You're looking at Disney with Hulu and Discovery Networks, now with HBO, and there's all these places that are starting to come together and people are also realizing that you can't make enough money on a streaming platform constitute the big budgets that they used to do for the regular television platform or television programming as well. So once again, you're going to have the chicken in the egg. You need content to drive subscriptions, but yet can you spend enough on content, on good quality content, to make enough money off the subscriptions to constitute that spend? So there's a flexing situation that's coming with that and going to be real curious to see where it all goes.
Speaker 1:So when you had the customers that did sign up and pay the $9.99 a month back to our question from earlier about getting people to explore other disciplines on the back end, when you looked at the viewing data on your platform, we were able to see whether people did go outside their discipline very much Like when they signed up. Did you like ask them what their discipline was so you could track without watching things outside of the discipline?
Speaker 2:Yeah, we really didn't do that. I think you could tell somewhat where their focus was. No that I think we felt like that would have been a little intrusive to do that and, like I said, that was an early stage of the internet streaming access and different things and it was really just starting to grow right then. So anything you did, you know everybody was wondering what kind of information you're collecting off of it and how you're going to serve ads back to them and things. So the more questions you asked, the more worry I think the consumer would be on that.
Speaker 1:I guess the ultimate question I'm asking is like you achieved the thing you wanted to achieve. You basically represented the entire question industry in one spot. You gave viewers the ability to cross disciplines and watch content to the heart's content. Did they actually do it when you gave it to them? Did they cross the cleanse?
Speaker 2:Yeah, because we could see the amount of hours that each program was viewed, and so, yeah, we definitely had several programs that were highly, highly popular?
Speaker 1:I'm, certain programs are popular, but were you able to tell it or whether your viewers were watching content from different disciplines as opposed to coming in and being like I only want to see Drosage discipline content, I only want to see road experiment.
Speaker 2:I didn't mean to be a little vague about that but yeah, through our social media side and people commenting on, we had a pretty robust social media that they were very active and so we could see through comments who people were, maybe in the English world that had crossed over and watched some of the rodeo or watched some of the cutting or watched horse racing. You know a lot of people hadn't watched quarter horse racing. We actually brought quarter horse racing back to television. It had basically kind of disappeared for a long, long time and so we brought back the triple crown of quarter horse racing, made a view and expect a flat of it for sure.
Speaker 1:That's a really important point, right Like that's like ultimately, I mean, I know you got into this to create a vision and you had investors. You had to give them return on their investment. But just from the perspective of a social experiment, like you validated, the point that give a question is the ability to easily cross disciplines and create and watch content. And watching content is the gateway drug into trying the sport and then buying the horses and buying the products and entering the events and all that sort of stuff. Given the opportunity, your questions will. They will experiment, they will cross disciplines, which comes to the point of we we initially started this podcast, which is that the question industry.
Speaker 1:For so long it lives in its silos and it doesn't invest outside of its silos very much. In fact, it goes quite far to build up walls around its silos and it is very much a lie. Well, let's just make ourselves succeed. As opposed to rising tides, rise all boats, and you've kind of proven that, if the industry is able to get itself together and adopt a rising tides, rise all boats mentality, then the equestrians themselves will support that effort because they are open to going across disciplines, across silos and trying to do things which just creates more activity in the market, which is ultimately better for the market commercially overall. And without that commercial success then, like equestrian is expensive, a lot of shit's going to stop.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and even from myself I had never. Until we started ride, I had never been exposed to the very dust of the jumping world or the you know high gold, polo, things like that. I grew to love those sport and was very, very intrigued with it, even inventing and things you know, the athletic. I think that the true horse person, the person who has that passion for the equestrian, for any type of equestrian, you can appreciate when a horse gives it at all and you can appreciate when that rider has that ability to sync up with that horse and get the most out of it and to see it go the extra mile to win an event or just to have a great performance. Whatever the case may be, you can appreciate the athleticism and the heart and the drive and all those things that are there to create a winner.
Speaker 2:It doesn't matter what sport it is. To me that's the parts you have to tap into and you have to tap into that passion. But for the industry to survive and for the industry to be viable and for the industry to be healthy and continue to grow into the future, we have to remember that we've got to bring those people in who aren't already involved. We have to have new people into the business and we have to create that environment that is inviting for them and that gives them the ability to reach out and touch that horse and create their own experience.
Speaker 1:The last question I've gotten before I get to my final question. So we're almost done. The one thing we haven't touched on all this so far with building your own content or that sort of stuff, and this is something that we hear off because we work a lot of show managers who run horse shows and one of the biggest pain points is how do I stream my horse show so that people can watch it? And that's the logistical problem. Like it's bloody expensive to get semi permanent cameras out to your property to film an event, for a single event. It takes manpower, it takes connectivity, lots of stuff, but then there's the litigious part of that. But also I'm unable to stream it because different governing bodies have different rights over different light classes within an event and blah, blah, blah, blah blah.
Speaker 1:And so I understand why it is that way and I understand how it happened. But if you take a step back and think about it, it's also quite a crazy reality, which is, as a show manager, you put on a show that you own but you're not allowed to film it and show it to anyone because someone else has told you you can't, which is like the most anti-American thing. I can think so in your experience, as you've built content and distributed and you've probably filmed events, and those events have some commercial licenses that owned by certain governing bodies, etc. How does all that affect the business and is it a good thing, is it a bad thing, like what's your opinion on it?
Speaker 2:Yeah, we dealt with rights issues all the time and that's some multiple sided issue Because, for one thing, it's expensive to film and to broadcast and do the things that you do, so you want to have those exclusive rights in order to drive that audience to your platform, to offset the expense that's necessary to provide a good product, but yet you also want to be inclusive enough that you can go out and allow people to access it a lot of different places as well. So it's a real quandary. It's something that I think all sports have issues with. Anything that's filmed, I think, has issues with it's not just the equestrian world. So it's the rights issue is always something that's going to be a problem, and finding ways once again, this was why we went at this with the terrestrial television side of things and trying to really push it that way.
Speaker 2:Finding outside money, bringing able to bring in those big budget outside advertisers to help fund all these things, is where this has to go. We can't play poker together all the time and create our own pots and reach into our pockets and our customers pockets to create the purse. We have to be able to bring in outside money to create these purses and to make it viable and to grow and be able to really put the equestrian sports world in a place where it should be. And television rights, most of the time, are where that money comes from. You look at the NFL, you look at Major League Baseball, hockey, whatever the case may be soccer those television rights are where that money is coming from.
Speaker 1:Do you think it's a sustainable model?
Speaker 2:If approached in the right manner, I do. I still firmly believe that a place where you can bring the horse world together this was something that figured out and that we promoted ride on the equestrian world as a whole has more participants and more money involved and has a larger economic impact than golf or tennis, but it's not promoted that way.
Speaker 1:I agree with that. But when it comes back to the rights thing, when I say is it a sustainable model, I mean that in the sense of the different governing bodies that govern the different disciplines, they are a crucial part of the ecosystem. They're the merchant of record that makes sure that, if you think of horses as an asset, they maintain their value. They maintain who owns who they are. They maintain their horses, scores and reporting so that the horses maintain their value as an asset, crucial part of it. And that's not cheap. You've got staff, you've got drug testing, everything they need to make their money. People can bitch and win joy you want, but they're a crucial part of the ecosystem and they need to make money. A large part of the way they make money is those television rights, but it does come at the cost that the different show managers, who are also a crucial part of the ecosystem that make the sport a reality. They are hamstrung in how they can monetize their events because they don't own the rights to their own shows, of which they are personally taking a huge financial risk of investing in to run those shows without which the sport wouldn't continue and then, honestly, if the sports collapse in many respects, the rest of the economy collapses because it is the event that drives all the interest, that inspires people to get into the sport, that makes them buy the horse, buy the tack and buy the truck and the trailer and all that sort of stuff.
Speaker 1:I guess my thought process is we have to figure out how we can help the regulatory governing bodies make money elsewhere, because I think in order for the show managers to be financially incentivized to keep throwing these shows and running them, they've got to make more money. And I also think the fact that they don't have full control over who sees their event that they've invested all the risk in to run, I think is a pretty crazy concept, and that's why I ask is it sustainable? Is the whole rights thing sustainable, or does the industry collectively need to decide? Okay, we need to figure out another way to help these governing bodies make enough money to sustain their operations so that we can give the freedom of the rights back to the show managers so they can run their businesses effectively and efficiently.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but I think what you'll see happen with that is is just what you said If the economics force the show producers to quit producing shows, which in turn quits promoting the industry, which in turn quits promoting those particular entities that you're talking about, then something will change. So it's all based on economics and the economics will force the change.
Speaker 1:All right, one last question for you and then call it a day. So everything we've been talking about, even streaming, is in many ways, the legacy form of content, right? So let's talk about the future. If you look at the future, what is the current standard, especially amongst the younger generation, of engagement? Most people haven't got the attention span for TV. They turn on the TV, then they get on their phones and they scroll reels, right? And so equestrian reels are getting a lot of views. And then there's YouTube. A lot of the younger generation. They watch YouTube more than they watch Netflix or anything like that, right?
Speaker 1:And then you add on top of this the fact that, like these regulatory bodies have these rights to a horse show. You go to a horse show. You say, hey, we're here filming, can we film the ring? And they'll say, no, you're not currently at the real. But then they readily admit they won't do anything to stop a spectator filming the ring and uploading it to their Instagram because, like you, can't take on the world. So what do you think the future looks like in the equine content space, considering that you know everyone's going to short of form content not through commercial distribution channels such as streaming platforms, et cetera, and what does that mean for the future?
Speaker 2:It's a great question. If I for sure knew the answer, then I can bottle it and sell it and make a lot of money. But it's going to really depend on the consumer and, just like what you talked about, a lot of people now have really gotten engaged with the short form content, the YouTube content, things like that. The consumer themselves have gotten accustomed to watching a much lower budgeted and less produced form of content than what a lot of people who are in the television world and even in the streaming world are comfortable putting out there, which in turn creates a more expensive piece of content. So I think you're going to have to have a coming together of what people are willing to watch and sacrifice on the content side, on the quality side, but yet it's still going to be engaging content.
Speaker 2:And how do you monetize that? Is there a way to take those that short form content and drive them to your platform to see the longer form content and something that maybe they subscribe to have to pay for, have to watch a pre-roll ad or something you know to get access to it? So that's going to be. The big question is what are they willing to give up in quality to get access to it for free, and then how do you take that and drive them to some way that you can actually monetize it? That's the million dollar question, or $20 million question, or $100 million question, for sure.
Speaker 1:Does it appeal to you? Can you see yourself dipping your toe back in the waters, now that, I mean, cost of production has gone down, cost of distribution has gone down and you can do it all for free with the device in your pocket, without having to have deals?
Speaker 2:I mean exactly, look at this, you and I are doing this on our phones, so back before you had to been in a studio for this and either taped it and then produced it and sent it to somebody to have it edited and gotten ready to production.
Speaker 2:So the world is changing so fast right now and I think that's part of the problem that we've got with the television industry as a whole, the movie industry, whatever the case may be, technology is changing that world so fast and so rapidly and your consumer is adapting to that so quickly that it's hard to see what's coming next and what's going to happen. We all going to have a VR headset on and be able to see what it's like to be right on the back of that world class jumping horse as he wins the biggest event out there with it and is going over six meter jumps or something. I'm curious to see, and to me it's exciting to see where this goes next and what happens. But it's still all about engaging that consumer and figuring out how to make that connection. What are you going to make those people feel and how do you get them to want to be you on the back of that horse?
Speaker 1:Yeah, totally. My opinion on it, too, is that I just think there's a huge amount of opportunity for all the questions of all ages, but if you're a young equestrian, you don't yet have a career to just go out there and create YouTube channels and create Instagram accounts and TikTok accounts. That just fills the void because, compared to other industries, youtube just doesn't have any good equestrian content. It's not good. It is like the most half-assed effort ever to create YouTube content for the equestrian industry and you got such a passionate customer base that is increasingly looking to YouTube for content. I just think it's such a low hanging fruit that people have to go do because it'll be worth it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, I don't disagree with that, and I'm actually working on something right now that I think could change the equestrian world as a whole for sure Again, that we're looking to develop and bring to the marketplace here fairly soon. That'll be something really unique.
Speaker 1:You'll have to come back home once you launch it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely, we'll sign an NDA and I'll tell you.
Speaker 1:Well, thanks very much for joining us today, Craig.
Speaker 2:we really appreciate it Absolutely Enjoyed it and wish you guys all the best success and we'll talk again sometime.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, For those people who want to find you. Do you have any channels? How can they contact you?
Speaker 2:Yeah, of course I have a website, craig Morris Cutting Horses on all different kinds of social media stuff. I have a couple of different businesses that I'm involved in now. I actually got there in the pandemic. I got involved in the food business, so I own Antean's mobile franchise. We've got a pretzel franchise out there now, and when we got out of the TV stuff.
Speaker 1:So what was your website?
Speaker 2:Yeah, Craig Morris, Cutting Horses.
Speaker 1:Craig Morris, cutting Horsescom. Okay, fantastic, all right. Well, thanks very much, and we'll speak to you next time.
Speaker 2:Thanks, Sam Enjoyed it.