Bringing the Realtime Mentor to your Yoga Session
by Peter Tippett — CoFounder of BodyMindLife Online
We see in the future where your yoga teacher can come to you.
Imagine being able to have a yoga teacher in your ear giving you advice during your yoga session? Or even better, be able to see them in your lounge with you, and they see 3D images of all their students around the world.
With that sort of technology, there would be no need for expensive yoga studios, hours of travel, parking pain, or in a group of heavy breathing strangers. You could log on and do it whenever you want, or with a group of friends or what works for your selected teacher.
This is where we see the world going, not just in Yoga, but with all forms of fitness and wellness. Covid has accelerated this acceptance of video as a crucial part of our lives and opened our eyes to doing stuff from home.
Yes, we lose that touchy, feely relationship of meeting people in the class, but now you are dealing with people all over the world who are interested as well in the same thing. The world will become a much smaller place, but our face-to-face interactions will become more valuable and more social with a whole different level of interaction outside this world.
But let’s get back to the technology shift that is happening right now.
We are starting to see AR glasses like your normal sunglasses, 5G networks that allow super-fast connections with QoS. Computers jumping in power, liDAR becoming normal, and video abilities have stepped to the next level. I saw this ten years ago when Cloud computing, 3G, iPhone style mobile phones, and social networks became common. This allowed me to create a real-time TV engagement platform that went on to be used by Disney, CNN, NBC and many others, and a copy of this is seen today on Facebook live as we do hearts to change the story.
So the question is, where will this be in three years or even five years? No more bulky VR headsets, heavy computers need to be tied to, have to be in your house on your local network. Behind the scenes, the other significant change will be the new web3 network. Access will be done by smart contracts, so you only pay for what you use using NFT’s models instead of being a subscription paying for what you don’t use. This is already here but is in the early stages with heavy tech users and gamers.
BUT as it moves mainstream, a network that can use all of this needs to exist linked to the real world. We need to build up this network of teachers who make real value from this connection and are ready to support this change. This will also create a network of students who are also prepared to take this step.
So what we are doing right now is building the network that fits today’s technology and sets the foundation for use in this new future world.
So, why did we start this? At the start of Covid, Phil Goodwin (my Co-Founder), who owns physical studios, needed to go online. Then, only 10% of teachers did anything online and even less with the studio setups. Once we went online, we saw a massive change in video acceptance, and the restrictions reinforced this. Even when Sydney came out of lockdown, people still did online classes. We saw a shift from appointment watching (turn up at a set time) to doing it when convenient, something that happen when TV moved to video revorders and then to today’s streaming. Another common complaint we saw with live classes was the poor quality of the video conferencing (720p and 15 fps), which has the name now of “zoom fatigue”. The other side is teachers struggling to handle video, trying to teach and watch students simultaneously without the same depth of view and the distractions that came with this.
We did much research and deep dives to understand the teaching problems. We saw the complete fragmentation of tools trying to make this work which kept forgetting about teachers and focused on the students and the now. We decided to build a teacher first platform that delivered quality, grow to a new revenue stream for teachers, and created a new way to connect to students.
We first started with getting teachers to create quality content and put it up on a new platform that allows them to share their content with anyone beyond their small personal networks. Attached to this, we created a full payment model (collect from students and pay teachers wherever they are for what is consumed). A management engine that allowed the teacher to focus on what they do. We also made a crucial decision that the teachers own the IP as the video is an asset in its own right, which fits our future view with NFT’s.
In the first 4 months since release, we see teachers earning on average twice per hour than they do in regular classes. Expanded into their passions that they can’t teach at the studio and exploring new modalities with a recent podcast as an example. This has been really hearting to us. It shows we are doing something game-changing in teachers are now in control and breaking away from the ingrained habits that the Studio model enforced. This is just the start as all become comfortable with this way of working and consuming.
In the new year, we will take the next step on this journey. Teachers can come into your lounge and start giving you those whispers in the ear of what you need to do and only need your phone and a connection to a large screen (e.g. TV).
Watch for the next blog post as we delve into this even more, or read other blogs from the BodyMindLife Online Team.
