>> Announcer: Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCube! Covering NAB 2017. Brought to you by HGST. >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at NAB 2017, a hundred thousand people. The Las Vegas Convention Center is packed. And it's everything you could ever want to get involved in video and media, and it' pretty crazy exciting. I hope, trying and get the guys from spending all of our budget money next year on new cameras. But, we're excited to have Brian Raleigh on. He's a VP post-production and production business intelligence at ABC Studios. Welcome. >> Thank you, I'm excited to be here, as well. >> Absolutely, so first impressions of the show. You said you haven't been that many times. As you walk around, what strikes you? >> Yeah, this is only my second time here. I will say I've seen plenty of booths that have the words Ingestion, Transcode, Archival, Distribution, there certainly is a lot of distribution out here, the broadcasting convention. >> Jeff: Right. >> Which makes sense. >> But you're involved in that pesky little process between what comes off the camera and what goes out to distribution. >> Yeah, exactly. We're prior to broadcast, right. So my world is really production and post-production, and the production management systems we use within them. >> Right. So love to hear, kind of, how is that world evolved? It used to be you had an artist on a machine, with local files doing the editing and all this stuff, and clearly that world is long, long gone. >> Yeah, most of our production and post-production workflow is in the cloud. >> Jeff: Right. >> Or however you want to call it. And very recently, what we've done, is we've tried to move on from the kind of, email-based world and saving everything on your desktop-based world, a lot of it revolves around the push to move off of that revolves around security. >> Jeff: Right. >> Efficiencies, better distribution, better control over who has access to what. So my role is really to introduce digital production management systems. Digital daily systems, digital purchase order systems. Digital scheduling systems. >> Jeff: Right. >> Kind of take us into more of like a wholistic, one-way world that covers both the production side as well as the studio side. >> And where would you say you are on that journey? >> Year one, is what I would say. >> Year one. Early in year one, early days. >> So our department is called, the Production Business Intelligence Department, but that's really, I would say we have more enthusiasm for business intelligence than we do have knowledge of business intelligence. >> Jeff: Right, right. >> So phase one is really getting our systems rolled out. To get these digital systems in use, with 100% adoption, on all of our shows, and all of our studio and network users. Once we have that piece done, we can actually start to collect the data and make some use out of it. >> Right, right And how has kind of the efficiency in the workflow, I know you're still early days, how do you anticipate it really being impacted by moving to more cloud-based systems versus local, on your hard drive controlled? >> Yeah, so security is a hundred times better than it was before, right? Just because everything is hidden behind a password now. Access is much more controlled. Efficiency has increased many times over, as well. I'll say that we project, over the course of our first year with these systems, we will have reduced our email count, just within the studio, by 650,000. >> Well, who doesn't love that. >> Right, exactly. I keep telling them it's good. >> Jeff: Golly. >> Everything is more searchable now. >> Jeff: Right. >> Higher quality. We're getting things faster. Our PAs are no longer burning thousands of DVDs and distributing them all across town, so it's improved our world in many ways. >> Right, and how do you kind of boil that ocean. Is it kind of by department, is it by show, is it one little slice kind of spread really, really wide? I mean, that's a big roll out. You guys are a huge studio. >> When the department, that used to be called the Production Technology Department, and when it started eight, nine years ago, the approach was really like, let's build everything in house, and try to piece it out one by one. What we have learned is, that doesn't really work. It's really difficult to get adoption and it was going to take a huge workforce in order to build what we needed. >> Jeff: Right. >> So we started to go with the Best in Breed approach, with these applications. And what came with them was 24/7 support and kind of white glove training and admin services. >> Jeff: Right. >> So because I have a really small centralized team, they can focus on just the training administration. And we have really this third-party service team that comes with each one of these production management systems that we use. >> Right. >> So we've been able boil the ocean because we have a lot of help. >> Right. And the other nice thing is just because of the nature of the studios, teams kind of form around shows, right? So now you can onboard a new team around your infrastructure piece. They do the show for one season, two seasons, however many season. >> Brian: Yeah. >> Then they go away. >> Yeah, what's been really good is even though it's a huge training endeavor, for sure, with our production teams, because we have something like, 8,000 people on our freelance production teams at any time. And they're a transient workforce. They go from studio to studio and show to show. >> Jeff: Right. >> But I think something like 60 to 70% of the people that we hire, we've hired before. >> Jeff: Okay. >> So the good news is once we've trained them once, there's a good likelihood that we won't need to train them again. >> Right. And, so there's kind of the application centric piece of it, and then there's kind of the infrastructure piece behind the application. I mean, good news is, you didn't have it eight years ago, but I mean the development's on the infrastructure side around storage and bandwidth and CPU. Huge change from where it was before. I mean, could you even have done what you were hoping to do eight years, kind of compared to where you are today? No, I don't think, the companies just didn't exist at that point. That's right. So the companies weren't there because the technology wasn't there. >> Jeff: Right. >> Now they've both kind of aligned, and aligned at a good time, right? When I think people are ready to hear that we need to modernize the studio. There's so much competition out there, that we need to make sure that we're doing things as good or better than everyone else. >> Right. And you said security a bunch of times. >> Brian: Yeah. >> So was the security, was it a security hole? Was it people forgetting their laptop at the coffee shop? >> Brian: Yeah. >> I mean what were some of your main security concerns that you've now been able to address? >> It's interesting. So we're ABC Studios, but we do a lot of co-productions with Marvel Studios. And Marvel Studios culture is very security centric. And because we worked so hand-in-hand with them, we've been very cognizant of the security abilities of these applications as we bring them in. So I will say, we didn't have any big outbreaks, right? We didn't have, we had shows like Lost, that people were really concerned about. >> Right. >> Scripts getting out, but more recently, we haven't had these huge high security titles, but now that Marvel is onboard, it's made us very security conscious. >> Okay. And it's more early leaks that people getting access to the assets-- >> Yeah, mostly we're worried about scripts. >> Right, right. Really, mostly scripts, as opposed to images, or-- >> Well, you're right. Scripts and rough cuts, I would say. >> Right, right, right. Okay, so that's kind of the bat, the stick. In terms of a carrot, what were some of the benefits that you hoped to achieve or you are really starting to achieve on the carrot side of the equation? >> Well, so we're still in phase one, as I said, in kind of rolling out these applications. >> Right, we'll let you talk about this in private. We will not hold you to whatever you say that's being, actually in production. >> The carrot, is so we're now called production business intelligence, but we don't have much intelligence, at this point, so, now that we're seeing some light at the end of the tunnel, in terms of rolling out these systems, the hope is, the carrot is, we're going to be able to find some really great business insights from the data we collect. The kinds of questions we want to be able to answer are things like, which of our directors that are hire are costing us the most in production staff overtime. When an editor's cut delivers, and it delivers 11 minutes long, how does that correlate with the length and complexity of the script? You start to learn these things, and the hope will be that what was going to be a nine-day production schedule, we really can do it in eight. >> Jeff: Right. >> We'll have the data, not just anecdotally, but like real data to back that up. >> Right. Now I wonder, and don't tell me if you can't, but within kind of the whole budget of a movie, production, post-production, distribution, promotion, what piece is post-production? I mean, I just think of the complexity of it. It can be just a sinkhole, if it's not managed well. >> Yeah, as a part of the production, well it depends on the show, right? >> Right, right, you know, kind of a general-- >> The variance is in visual effects, right, but I would say 10 to 20% of the budget is post-production. >> Jeff: Okay. >> And the systems piece of it is much, much less. >> Jeff: Right, right. >> One, maybe one percent. >> Right. So you could make a pretty significant impact >> Yeah. >> On the budget by being more efficient. >> For sure. >> And leveraging that intelligence. >> Well, below the line, which is what these systems really do impact, so not just post-production but production, as well as two-thirds of the budget. So absolutely, I mean that's many millions of dollars. >> Right, right. Okay, so as you look forward, have you got any insights that are kind of helping you drive to the next place, or are you just kind of working down a road map as you look at 2017, I know we're a third of the way through, which I find really hard to believe. What's kind of on your agenda, what's next, where are you going next? >> I'd say we're still working down the roadmap. We have, like I said, we have documents figured out, we have digital dailies figured out, we have production purchase orders figured out, now we're going to start looking at asset management. And we're going to start looking at scheduling. In hopes that ultimately we can really, I guess the real vision here is that we can have kind of a production ratio, right? We can start to rate our productions against each other based on all of this information that we have, but it requires some additional systems first. >> All right, Brian. Well, I wish you, at least you've got 650,000 less emails. >> I know it's a good start. >> I mean that should free up a ton of time. >> Brian: Yes. >> That's a great start. All right, he's Brian Raleigh from ABC, I'm Jeff Frick. Again, thanks for stopping by. >> Brian: Thank you. >> All right, you're watching theCUBE, from NAB 2017. Thanks for watching. (techno music)