>>Okay. And welcome back to the cubes live coverage here in San Francisco, California for 80 us summit 2022 Amazon web services summit 2020 New York city is coming up in the summer will be there. Check us out the cube.net. Our next guest here is Jim long. The CEO of dig also known as local. BTV a very interesting AWS customer doing some really progressive things around video and, uh, challenging the status quo in code cutting and all kinds of broadcast models. Jim, welcome to the cube. Great to see you. >>Thank you, John. Great to be here. Okay. >>So first of all, before we get into some of the disrupt option, take a minute to explain what is dig and local BTV. >>Uh, dig is all about, uh, providing, uh, edge video networking for broadcast television, basically modernizing local television and hopefully extending it to hyper local content like high schools and community government and community channels and things like that. So essentially free bringing, using the internet as an antenna to bring broadcast television to your phone, your laptop you're connected TVs. >>So if I understand it correctly, if I UN and I look at the, the materials of your site, you basically go into each market, Metro areas like New York Philly bay area, grab the tee signal out of the air. >>Yep. >>Local TV, and then open that up to everyone. Who's got, um, an >>Correct. And, uh, what, we've, where we're essentially building a hybrid network with AWS. Uh, I like to say we got all the smart and account stuff, you know, in the cloud at AWS. And we have all the dumb, fast stuff in the actual TV market. We have servers and transcoding there we work with, uh, of course, um, uh, AWS on that centrally as well. But basically that hybrid cloud allows us to be the fastest simplest and lowest cost way to get a local video. Any type could be an antenna or an IP stream to a local house. So we're, so are the local pickup and delivery people. We're not building a brand, we're not building content. We're delivering the local content to the local views. You >>Like the pipes. >>We are, we're essentially an infrastructure company. Um, we're right at that wonderful intersection of the, uh, the infrastructure and the content where I always like to play. >>I like, I love the store. I think the cost of that nature, how you're using Amazon, it's really impressive. Um, what are some of the cool things you're doing on AWS that you think's notable? >>Well, of course the, the standard issue stuff where you want to store all your data in the cloud. Right? So we, uh, and we use a quick site to, to get to that. And obviously we're using S3 and we're using media tailor, which we really like, which is cuz we first actual company on the planet. I believe that's inserting digital ads, impression based ads into local broadcast streams. So that's, that's fun because the advertisers, they like the fact that they could still do traditional TV buys and they could spice it up with digital impressions based, but ads on us. Yeah. And, and we're adding to it a real fun thing called clip it, which is user clipping. It's an app that's been running on AWS for years. It's had over half a million plays in social media. Yeah. We're combining those together and, and AWS makes it very simple to do that. >>Well, I've been using your app on my Firestick and uh, download local BTV on the app store. Um, I gotta say the calendar's awesome. And the performance is 10 times better than, than some of the other streaming apps because the other performance they crash all the time. The calendar's weird. So congratulations. Clearly you're running the cloud technology. I gotta ask you what's going on in the market? Netflix missed their earnings. The stock was down big time. Um, obviously competition what's up going on with Netflix? >>Well, what's, it's a big shift. >>What does it mean for the streaming market? >>Well, what it means is, is, is a consumer choice. It's really the golden age of consumer choice. Uh, originally back when I was a kid, it was all antenna TV. We didn't even have DBRS right. And then, uh, the cable companies and the satellite companies, the phone companies came in and took over and all of a sudden everyone started paying for TV for just linear TV. Right? And then the next thing, you know, streaming comes around, uh, Netflix shows up for, for VOD or, or SVOD, they call it cuz it's payt TV and uh, and the whole, uh, that ecosystem starts to melt down. And now you have a consumer choice market where you can pay, pay for VAD or pay for, for linear. And everyone does linear and everyone does VAD or you can use free TV. Now we correctly guessed that free TV was gonna have a huge comeback. You know, know what is it about free even obviously gen Z smarter than us boomers. They love free too. Uh, targeted advertising makes the ads less, uh, painful or less of a distraction. Uh, so we knew that free ad supported TV was gonna happen. Lots of stuff happened. And then, then the, uh, major media companies started doing their own subscription apps. Right? They're all cool. >>We like paramount plus >>Paramount plus Disney pluses, PN peacock, uh, time Warner's doing something. I mean, it's all cool, but you know, people only have so much of a big pocketbook. So what it's doing is pay TV has now become much more complicated, but also you, you know, you gotta trade off. So you saw it with Netflix, right? Yeah. Netflix is suffering from there's too much pay TV. So where are you gonna put your money on Comcast? On YouTube TV paramount plus Netflix. >>Yeah. I mean, I love the free thing. I gotta bring up something. I wanna get your reaction to a company called low cast went under, they got sued out of their deal. They were the free TV. Are you guys have issues like them? What's the cast most people don't know got was, was >>Doing same. So we started before low cast and we're uh, what we would call a permissions based system, legal system. The broadcast Mar industry, uh, is, uh, is the wild wild west. I mean, I like to say antenna TV is a direct to consumer. The antenna is a direct to consumer device and it's controlled by the channel. People it's not controlled by a platform like Comcast, right? It's not controlled by a stick. >>When you say channel, do you mean like CBS or >>Yeah, CBS or the local Korean religious cooking channel or, uh, Spanish channels or local independent to television, which is really a national treasure for us. The United States really should be making sure that local content, local channels, uh, do well local businesses, you know, with targeted advertising, Janes nail salon can, can now advertise just in San Jose and not the entire San Francisco TV market. Um, so you ha you have, have all that going on and we recognize, you know, that, that local content, but you have to have permission from the channel stuff. It's not easy because you got channels on stations. You have syndicators, it's hard to keep track of. And sometimes you, you, uh, you, you know, you have to shift things around, but, uh, low cast, uh, like another kind before it just went hog wild, illegal, trying to use a loophole, uh, didn't quite work out for 'em and, uh, >>You see, they have put out of business by the networks, the names, the big names. Yes. Content people, >>Correct. I mean the big, the big guys, but I mean, because they weren't following the rules, um, >>The rules, meaning license, the content, right. >>Well correct. Or yes, >>Basically they, they were stealing the content in the eyes of the, >>Well, there is, there is, it is a little of, a bit of a gray area between the FCC and the copyright laws that Congress made. So, um, there are people certainly out there that think there is a path there, low cast, didn't find it. We're not trying to find it. Uh, we just want to get all the free TV, uh, the bottom line. And you've seen fast channels explode recently, Pluto, uh, Samsung TV. >>And what does that all mean? >>Well, what it means is people love free TV and the best free TV out there is your local TV. So putting that on the internet and those comp, but the media companies, they have trouble with this new stuff. What's, >>What's your >>They're overthinking it. What's >>Some of this CBS, NBC, all these big guys. >>Well, those guys have a little less trouble than the people that actually, uh, they're affiliates, right? So there's 210 TV markets and the, uh, your major networks, you know, they have their own stations. And in a bit, you know, in about 39% of the population, which is about 15 to 20, is it >>Cultural or is a system system problem? >>No, it's a, it's a problem of all the, the media companies are just having trouble moving towards the new technology and, and they're, I think they're siloing it. >>So why not? You gonna let 'em die. Are you trying to do deals with em? >>Oh no, no, absolutely. For us, if we don't make money, unless stations make money, we want local TV to, to flourish. It is local TV is Neilson, just report yesterday, you know, uh, that, uh, local TV is growing. We're taking advantage of that. And I think the station groups are having a little trouble realizing that they have the original, fast channels before Pluto, before Tubi did it in movies. And, and, and what >>Are people understanding in the, in the industry? I know NA's coming up a show. Yeah, >>That's right. >>National associated of broadcasters. What's going on in that industry right now. And you're, if you get to put it down the top three problems that are opportunities to be solved, what would they be? >>Well, I think, you know, I think the, the, the, the last, the, the best one that's left is what we're doing. I have to say it, uh, I think it's worth billions. >>You free TV over the air free and stream >>O TV. Oh yeah. Over the air TV that also works with the internet, right. Public internet connected to public television stations so that everybody, including homeless people, et cetera, that, you know, they don't have a TV, they don't have an antenna, they can't afford comp. They got an >>IPhone though. >>They an iPhone. For sure. And, and so it's, it's, uh, it's a wonderful thing. It's, you know, our national broadcasting and I don't think the station groups or the major networks are taking advantage of it they're as much as they should. Yeah. And, and I don't think, you know, obviously NBC and CBS with their new apps, they're sort of done with that. They did mergers, they got, they got the virtual pay guys. I mean, YouTube TV off the ground, the only thing left is suck another shitload of good, uh, eyeballs and, and advertising. >>Well, I mean, yeah, I think that, that, and what you said earlier around subscription fatigue, I mean, nobody wants to have 20 subscriptions. >>Well, that brings up a whole new other war. That's going on that, thank goodness. We're not part of it's the platforms versus the cable companies. Right. Versus whatever. Right. Everyone's trying to be your open garden or your closed garden. They're trying to get your subscriptions in bundle self bundling it's. But I mean, it's wonderful for consumers, if you can navigate through it. Uh, we wanna, we think we'll have one of the gems in any of that everyone's want local TV. And so we'll supply that we're already doing that. We're supplying it to a couple companies, uh, free cast as a company, uh, app, a universal streaming, you know, manager, your all, all your, uh, streaming, a streaming aggregation, put your paid stuff in, put your free stuff in. They do that. And, and as, as does Roku try trying to do that fire TV, Xfinity's trying to do it. So it's all, it's a new war for the platform and hopefully we'll be on everyone. >>Well, you've been in this industry for a long time, you know, the streaming market, you know, the TV market. Um, so it's, it's good. I think it's a new battle, the shift's happening. Um, what should people know about dig local? BTV what are some of your goals for the next year or two? What are you trying to do? >>Well, what we're really trying to do is make sure that local, uh, local television thrives so that it can support wider communities. It could support hyper local content. So if you're, if you're, and we love the old paradigm and channel change, right? Forget, you know, every other app has all these boxes going by on different rows and stuff. And, and yeah, you can search and find stuff, but there's nothing like just changing channels, whether a commercial's on or, or you, you wanna see what else is on. You know, you're gonna go from local television and maybe all of a sudden, you'll see the local high school play over on another part of the, of the spectrum. And, and what we're trying to do is get those communities together. And the local high school people come over and find the local, you know, uh, Spanish, uh, Nova channel or something like that. >>So local is the new hot. >>It is. Absolutely. And by the way, it's where this high CPMs are gonna go. And the more targeted you get >>Ad revenue, >>I mean, that's for us is, is, is our number one, re we have a number of revenue streams, but targeted ads are really great for local, right? And, and so we're, we're gonna make an announce. We've >>Lost that we've lost that local, I've seen local things that local Palo Alto paper, for instance, just shut down this local sports high school coverage, our youth sports, because they don't budget, right? There's no TV community channels, like some Comcast throwaway channel. Um, we lost, we, we lo we're losing >>Local. No, I think that's a real national shame. And so I think if we can strengthen local television, I think it'll strengthen all local media. So we expect to help local radio and local newspapers. That's a bigger part of the vision. Uh, but I it's gonna happen. There's >>An education angle here too. >>There is an education angle because the bottom line is you can use linear television as a way to augment. Uh, we have a really exciting project going on in New York, uh, uh, with, uh, some of the housing, uh, projects, uh, in Harlem and, and, and the Bronx, uh, their I idea is to have the, the homework channel and they can, and literally when you have a, and both swiping and everything you can have, I mean, literally you can have a hundred schools that, that have things well, >>We know zoom schooling sucks. I mean, that didn't work. So I think you're gonna see a lot of augmentation, right. >>Amazon. >>I was just talking to some people here, AI training, machine learning, training, all here could be online in linear format. >>Yeah. And exactly. And then I think about the linear format is it's discovery television, and you can also, um, you know, you can also record it. Yeah. Right. If you see a program and you want to record it, you sit >>Record. So final minute we have left. I want to just get your thoughts on this one thing and, and ask your question. Are you looking for content? Are you, I outreach at the content providers who, >>Well, we're, we're PRI our primary mission is to get more channel local channels on which really means station groups and independence. We have a number, I mean, basically 50% of the channels in any market. When we move into it are like, this is a no-brainer. I want more eyeballs. We're Nielsen, uh, RA, uh, rated mean we support. And so we, >>How many markets are you in right now? >>We're in 21 now. And we hope to be in, uh, over 50 by the end of the year, covering more than half the United States. >>So, all right, Jim, thanks for coming on the queue. Really appreciate it. >>My pleasure. Good luck >>Recognition. Very disruptive disrupting media, um, combination of over the air TV, local with I internet. Obviously we love that with a cube. We want a cube channel anywhere possible. I'm John furry host of the queue here at AWS summit. Highing all the big trends and technologies in cloud and media back with more coverage after this short break,

>> Announcer: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE Conversation. >> Hi I'm John Furrier with theCUBE, we're here for a special CUBE Conversation. Obviously we're remote, we're in the studio most of the time but on the weekends I get an opportunity to talk to friends and experts. And here I wanted to really dig in with an awesome case study around AWS Cloud in a use case that I think is game changing for local communities, especially in this time of COVID. You have local communities where local journalism is suffering, but also connectedness. And connected experience is what's going to make the difference as we come out of this pandemic as a societal impact. But there's a real tech story here I want to dig into. We're here with Dan Drew who is the vice president of engineering for Clinical Didja, they make an app called Local BTV which basically takes over the air television and streams it to an app in your local area, enabling access to linear TV and on demand as well for local communities. It's a phenomenal project and it's unique. Somewhat misunderstood right now, but I think it's going to be something that's going to be very important. Dan, thank you for coming on and chatting with me. >> Thanks for having me, appreciate it. >> Okay so I'm a big fan, I've been using the app in San Francisco. I know New York's on the docket, it might even be deployed. You guys have a unique infrastructure capability that's powering this new app location, and this is the focus of this conversation in this CUBE Talk. Amazon is a big part of this. Talk about your local BTV that you are protecting, this platform for broadcast television, it has a unique hybrid cloud architecture. Can you tell us about that? >> Yeah certainly, I mean, one of our challenges, as you know, is that we are local television. So unlike a lot of products on the market, you know like your Hulus or other VMPV products, which primarily service sort of national feeds and things like that. We have to be able to receive over-the-air signals in each market. Many channels that serve local content are still over the air. And that is why you don't see a lot of them on those types of services. They tend to get ignored and unavailable to many users. So that's part of our value proposition is to not only allow more people to get access to these stations, but allow the stations themselves to reach more people. So that means that we have to have a local presence in each market in order to receive those signals. So that sort of forces us to have this hybrid model where we have local data centers, but then we also want to be able to effectively manage those in a central way, and we do that in our cloud platform which is hosted on Amazon and using Amazon services. >> All right let me take a breath here. You have a hybrid architecture on Amazon so since you're using a lot of the plumbing, take us through what the architecture of this ram is on using a variety of their services. Can you unpack that? >> Yeah, so obviously it starts with some of the core services like EC2, S3, RDS, which everybody on the planet uses. We're also very focused on using ECS; we're completely containerized which allows us to more effectively deploy our services and scale them. And one of the benefits on that front that Amazon provides is that because their container service is wired into all the other services like cloudwatch metrics, auto-scaling policies, IM policies, things like that. It means it allows us to manage those things in a much more effective way, and use those services to much more effectively make those things reliable and scalable. We also use a lot of their technologies, for example, for collecting metrics. So we use Kinesis and Redshift to collect realtime metrics from all of our markets across the U.S. That allows us to do that reliably and at scale without having to manage complex ETL systems like Kafka and other things. As well as store it in a large data lake like Redshift and Corid for analytics and things like that. We also use technologies like Media Tailor, so for example, one of the big features that most stations do not have access to is realtime targeted advertising. In the broadcast space, many ads are sold and placed weeks in advance, and not personalized obviously for that reason. Whereas one of the big features we can bring to the table using our system and technologies like Media Tailor is we can provide realtime targeted advertising which is a huge win for these stations. >> What are some of the unique capabilities that you guys can offer broadcast station partners 'cause you're basically going in and partnering with broadcast stations as well. But also you're enabling new broadcasters to jump in as well. What are some of the unique capabilities that you're delivering, what is Amazon bringing to the table there and what are you doing that's unique? >> Well again, it allows us, because we can do things centrally as well as the local reception, it allows us to do some interesting things like if we have channels that are allowed to broadcast even outside their market, then we can easily put them in other markets and get them even more viewers that way. We have the ability to even do hyper local or community channels that are not necessarily broadcasting all of the standard antennas, but can get us a feed from whatever zip code in whatever market, and we can give them a way to reach viewers in the entire market, in other markets, or even just in their local area. So consider the case where maybe a high school or a college wants to show games or local content, we provide a platform where they can now do that, and reach more people using our app and our platform very very easily. So that's another area that we want to help expand is not just your typical view of local of what's available in Phoenix, but what's available in a particular city in that area or a local community where they want to reach their community more effectively or even have content that might be interesting to other communities in Phoenix or one of the other markets. >> Now I think, just going on a side tangent here, I talked with your partner, Jim Long, who's the CEO, you guys have an amazing business opportunity. Again, I think it's kind of misunderstood, but it's very clear to me that someone who follows and has huge passion about local journalism, you know you see awesome efforts out there like Charlie Sennott from the Ground Truth Project Report for America, they take a journalism kind of print view, but if you add that Didja business model onto this local journalism, you can enable more video locally. I mean, that's really the killer app, video. And now COVID more than ever, I really want to know things like there's a mural in downtown Palo Alto, Black lives matter, I want to know what's going on with the local summer restaurants, putting people out on the sidewalks. Right now I'm limited to like next door or very laggy media, whether it's the website, so again, I think this is an opportunity for that, plus education. I mean, Amazon educate for instance, you can get a degree on computing by sitting on the couch. So again, this is a paradigm shift from an application standpoint that you're providing essentially linear TV to that. >> Exactly. >> In the local economy. So I just want to give you a shout-out for that because I think it's super important. I think people should get behind this, so congratulations. Okay I'm off on my little rant there. Let's get back down to some of that cloud stuff 'cause I think what's super interesting to me is you guys can stand up infrastructure very quickly, and what you've done here, you've leveraged the benefits of Amazon and the goodness of cloud, you essentially can stand up a metro region pretty quickly and pretty impressive. So I got to ask you, what Amazon services are most important for your business? >> Well like I said, I think for us, it's managing the central services so we sort of talked about managing the software, the APIs, and those are kind of the glue, so for us standing up a new metro is obviously getting the data center contracts and all the other messy stuff you have to deal with, just to have a footprint. But essentially once we have that in place, we can spin up the software in the data center and have it hooked into our central service within hours. And we can be starting channels literally within half a day. So that's the real win for us is having all that central glue and that central management system and the scalability where we can just add another 10, 20, 50, 100 markets and the system is set up to scale centrally where we can start collecting metrics through Cloud watch from those data centers, we're collecting logs and diagnostic information so we can detect health and everything else centrally and monitor and operate all of these things centrally in a way that is sane and not crazy. We don't need a 24/7 knock of a thousand people to do this, you know, and do that in a way that we, as a relatively small company, can still scale and do that in a sensible way, and a cost-effective way, which is obviously very important for us at our size, but at any size, you want to make sure if you're going to go into 200 plus markets that you have a really good cost model and that's one of the things where Amazon has really really helped us is allow us to do some really complex things, and in an efficient, scalable, reliable, and cost-effective way. The cost for us to go into a new metro now is so small relatively speaking that that's really what allows us to do as a business and now we just opened up New York and we're going to keep expanding on that model so that's been a huge win for us is evaluating what Amazon can bring to the table versus other third parties or building our own obviously-- >> So Amazon gives you the knock basically leverage and scale. The data center you're referring to, that's pretty much just to get an origination point in the territory. >> Dan: Exactly, that's right. >> So it's not like it's a super complex data center. You can just go in, making sure that they got all the normal path to recovery and the normal stuff, it's not like a heavy duty buildup. Can you explain that? >> Yeah, so one thing we do do in our data centers is because we are local, we have sort of primary data centers where we do do transcoding and origination of the video so we receive the video locally and then we want to transcode and deliver it locally and that way we're not sending video across the country and back type of thing. So that is sort of the hybrid part of our model. So we stand that up, but then that is all managed by the central service. So we essentially have another container cluster using Kubernetes in this case. But that Kubernetes cluster is essentially told what to do by everything that's running in Amazon. So we essentially stand up the Kubernetes cluster, we wire it up to the central service, and then from then on, we just go into the central service and say stand up these channels and it all pops up. >> Well my final question on the Amazon piece is really about the future capability besides having a CUBE channel which we'd love to have on there, I told my guys we'll get there. But we're just too busy working around the clock as you guys are with COVID-19. (overlapping chatter) I could almost see a slew of new services coming out, just on the Amazon side. If I'm on the Amazon side I'm thinking, okay I'll post this as an opportunity for me. I can see sage making and machine learning coming in and adding value for the user experience. And also enabling their own stuff. They've got a ton of stuff with Prime and moving people around and delivering things. I mean the headroom for Amazon in this thing is off the charts. But that being said, that's Amazon, I could see them winning with this. I know certainly I know you're using Elemental as well, but for you guys on the consumer side, what features and what new things do you see on the roadmap or what you might envision the future looking like? >> Well, I think part of it I think there's two parts. One of it is what are we going to deliver ourselves so we talked about adding community content and continuing to evolve the local BTV product. But we also see ourselves primarily as a local TV platform. For example, you mentioned Prime and a lot of people are now realizing, especially with COVID and what's going on, the importance of local television and so we're in discussions on a lot of fronts with people to see how we can be the provider of that local TV content. And that's really a lot of stations are super excited about that too 'cause you know, again, looking to expand their own footprint and their own reach, we're basically the way that we can join those two things together between the stations, the other video platforms, and distribution mechanisms, and the viewers obviously at the end of the day, we want to make sure local viewers can get more local content and stuff that's interesting to them. Like you said with the news, it is not uncommon that you may have your Bay area stations but the news is still maybe very focused on LA or San Francisco or whatever. And so being able to enable the smaller regional outlets to reach people in that area in a more local fashion is definitely a big way that we can facilitate that from the platform and viewer perspective. So we're hoping to do that in any way we can. Our main focus is make local great and get the broadcast world out there and that's not going anywhere especially with things like HSE3 on the front, and we just want to make sure those people are successful and enrich people and make revenue. >> Yeah, you got a lot of (mumbles) but I think one of the things that's interesting about your project that I find is a classic case of people who focus in on just current market value investing, versus kind of the game-changing shifts is that you guys are horizontally enabling in the sense that there's so many different use cases I was pointing out from my perspective, journalism, and I look at that and I'm like, okay that's a huge opportunity just there, changing the game on societal impact on journalism, huge education opportunity for court cutters. You're talking about a whole nother thing around TV so I got to ask ya, pretend I'm an idiot for a minute. Pretend, let's make it, I am an idiot. I don't understand, isn't this just TV? What are you doing different because it's only local. I can't watch San Francisco if I'm in Chicago and I can't watch Chicago if I'm in San Francisco, I get that. But why is this important? Isn't this just TV? Can't I just get it on YouTube, TikTok, what is this? >> Yes and no. There's TV and then there's TV as you know. If you look at the TV landscape, it's pretty fractured but typically when you're talking about YouTube or Hulu, you're talking about sort of cable TV channels. You know, you're going to get your A&E, you're going to get some of your local through ABC and whatnot, but you're not really getting local content. So for example, in our Los Angeles market, there are about 100 and something over-the-air channels. If you look at the cross section of which of those channels you can get on your other big name products like your Hulus or your YouTube TV, you're talking about maybe half a dozen or a dozen. So we're talking about 90 plus channels that are local to LA that you can only get through an antenna. And those are hitting the type of demographics that, quite frankly, some of these other players just don't see as important. >> Under different minorities or immigrants, the each entrepreneurs of our country. >> Yes exactly, so we might see a lot of Korean channels or Spanish channels or other minority channels that you just won't get over your cable channels or your typical online video providers. So that's, again, why we feel like we've got something that is really unique and that is really under-served as far as on a television standpoint. The other side that we bring to the table is that a lot of these broadcast channels are under served themselves in terms of technology. If you look at ad insertion and a lot of the technical discussions about how to do live TV and how to get live TV out there, it's very focused on the OTT market, so again, going back to the Hulus and the YouTubes. >> OTT, over-the-top you mean. >> Over the top, yeah. And so this broadcast market basically had no real evolution on that front in a while and I sort of mentioned the way ad buying works. It's still sort of the traditional ad buying that happens a couple weeks in front, not a lot of targeted or anything ability. And even when we get to HSE3, you're now relying on having an HES3 TV and you're still tied to an antenna, etc, etc, which is, again, a good move forward, but still not covering the spectrum of what these guys really want to reach and do. So that's where we kind of fill in the gaps using technology and filling in the gap of receiving a signal and bringing these technologies to not only the ad insertion and the stuff we can do for the livestream, but providing analytics and other tools to the stations that they really don't have right now unless you're willing to shell out a lot of money for Nielsen, which a lot of local small stations don't do. So we can provide a lot of analytics on viewership and targeting and things like that that they're really looking forward to and really excited about. >> All right, I got to ask you, put you on the spot here, 'cause I always see Andy Jassy at (mumbles) hopefully I'll see him this year if they do an in-person event. He's really dynamic and you should send him an email; he tends to read his emails a lot, and if you're a customer and I know you are, but I've got to ask you, if you bumped into Andy Jassy on the elevator and he's like, hey why should I pay attention to Didja? Why is it important for Amazon and why is it important for the world? How does it raise the bar on society? >> Well I think part of what Amazon's goal, especially if you get into their work in public sector and education, that's really where we see we're focusing with the community and local television and enabling new types of local television. So I think there's a lot of advantage and I hate the word synergy, but I'm going to use the word synergy. As far as our goals in those areas around really helping, one of the terms flying around now is the double bottom line where it's not just about revenue, it's about how do we help people in communities be better as well? So there's a bottom line in terms of people, benefit, and revenue in that way, not just financial revenue. And that's very important to us as a business as well is that's why we're focused on local TV and we're not just doing another Fubo where it's really easy to get an IP national fee. It's really important to us to enable the local community and the local broadcasters and the local channels and the local viewers to get the content that they're missing out on right now. So I think there's a, I hate it but I'm going to use it, synergy on that front as far as-- >> Synergy and the new normal. >> Synergy and the new normal? I think COVID and some of the other things that have been happening in the news with the Black Lives Matter and a lot of the things going around where local and community has been in the spotlight and getting the word out and having really local things versus I'm just seeing this thing from three counties away which I don't really care about and it's not telling me what's happening down the street like you said. And that's really what we want to help improve and support. >> Yeah it's a great mission, and it's one we care a lot about theCUBE. We've seen the data: content drives community engagement, and community's where the truth is. So in an era when we need more transparency and more truth, you get more cameras on the street, you're going to start to see things. That's what we're seeing a lot of things. And as more data's exposed, as you turn the lights on, so to speak, that kind of data will only help communities grow, heal, and thrive. So to me, big believer in what you guys are doing. Local BTV has a great mission. I wish you guys well and thanks for explaining the infrastructure on Amazon. I think you guys have a really killer use case technically. I mean to me, I think the technical superiority of what you've done give ability to stand up to these kinds of network with massive number of potential reach out of the gate, that's pretty impressive, congratulations. >> Great, thank you very much and thanks for taking the time. (upbeat music)

>>from the Cube Studios in Palo Alto and Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a cube conversation. Hi, I'm John Furrier with the Cube. We're here for a special cube conversation about seeing with remote where Studio most of the time. But on the weekends we get an opportunity to talk to friends and experts, and he I wanted to really dig in with an awesome case study around AWS Cloud in a use case that I think is game changing for local community, especially this time of Cove. It you have local community work, local journalism suffering, but also connectedness and connected experiences was going to make. The difference is we come out of this pandemic a societal impact. But there's a real tech story here I want to dig into. We're here with Dan. True is the vice president of engineering for chemical Didja. They make an app called local Be TV, which basically takes over the air television and stream it to an app in your local area, enabling access to linear TV and on demand as well. For local communities. It's a phenomenal project, and it's unique, somewhat misunderstood right now, but I think it's going to be something that's going to really put Dan, thank you for coming on and chatting with >>Thanks for having me appreciate it. >>Okay, so I'm a big fan. I've been using the APP in San Francisco. I know New York's on the docket might be deployed. You guys have a unique infrastructure capability that's powering this new application, and this is the focus of the conversations. Q. Talk Amazon is a big part of this talk about your local BTV that you architect with this platform for broadcast television as a unique hybrid cloud architecture. Can you tell us about that? >>Certainly. I mean, one of our challenges, as you know, is that we are local television eso. Unlike a lot of products on the markets, you know, like your Hulu's or other VM PV products, which primarily service sort of national feeds and things like that, we have to be able to receive, um, over the air signals in each market. Um, many channels that serve local content are still over the air, and that is why you don't see a lot of them on those types of services. They tend to get ignored and available to many users. So that's part of our value. Proposition is to not only allow more people to get access to these stations, but, uh, allow the stations themselves to reach more people. So that means that we have to have a local presence in each market in order to receive those signals. Uh, so that's sort of forces us to have this hybrid model where we have local data centers. But then we also want to be able to effectively manage those in a central way. Uh, and we do that in our cloud platform, which is hosted on Amazon and using Amazon services. >>Let me take take a breath. Here. You have a hybrid architecture on Amazon so that you're using a lot of the plumbing, take us through what the architecture is. RAM is on using a variety of their services. Can you unpack that? >>Yeah. So, um, obviously it starts with some of the core services, like easy to s three RDS, which everybody on planet uses. Um, we're also very focused on using e CS. We're completely containerized, which allows us to more effectively deploy our services and scale them. Um, and one of the benefits on that front that Amazon provides is that because they're container services wired into all the other services, like cloud watch metrics, auto scaling policies, I am policies, things like that. It means it allows us to manage those things in a much more effective way. Um, and use those services too much more effectively make those things reliable and scalable. Um, we also use a lot of their technologies, for example, for collecting metrics. So we use kinesis and red shift to collect real time metrics from all of our markets across the US that allows us to do that reliably and at scale without having to manage complex detail systems like Kafka and other things. Um, as well, it's stored in a large data lake like red shift in Korea for analytics. And you know, things like that. Um, we also use, um, technologies like media Taylor s. So, for example, one of the big features that most stations do not have access to Israel. Time targeted advertising in the broadcast space. Many ads are sold and placed weeks in advance. Um, and not personalized, obviously. You know, for that reason, where is one of the big features we can bring to the table using our system and technologies like Media Taylor is we can provide real time targeted advertising, which is a huge win for these stations. >>What are some of the unique capabilities that you guys offer? Broadcast station partners? Because you're basically going in and partnering with broadcast ages as well. But also you're enabling new broadcasters to jump in, and it's well, what are some of the unique capabilities that you're delivering? What is Amazon brings to the table there. What are you doing that >>well again, it allows us because we can do things centrally. You know as well as the local reception. It allows us to do some interesting things. Like if we have channels that, um, are allowed to broadcast even outside their market, Um, then we could easily put them in other markets and get them even more of years. That way we have the ability to even do, like hyper local or community channels, you know that are not necessarily broadcasting over the standard antennas, um, but can get us a feed from, you know, whatever zip code and whatever market and we can give them a way to reach viewers in the entire market and other markets, or even just in their local area. So, you know, consider the case where maybe a high school or college you know, wants to show games or local content. Um, we provide a platform where they can now do that and reach more people, Um, using our app in our platform very, very easily. So that's another area that we want help Expand is not just your typical view of local of what's available in Phoenix, Um, but what's available in a particular city in that area or a local community where they want to reach their community more effectively or even have content that might be interesting to other communities in Phoenix or one of the other markets. >>You know, I think just is not going to side tangent here. I talked with your partner, Jim Long, who's the CEO? You guys have an amazing business opportunity again. I think it's kind of misunderstood, but it's very clear to me that follows in. It has huge passion of local journalism. You see awesome efforts out there by Charlie Senate from the Ground Truth Project report for America. They take a journalism kind of friend view. But if you add like that digital business model onto this local journalism, you can enable more video locally. I mean, that's really the killer app of video. And now it Koven. More than ever. I really want to know things like this. A mural downtown Palo Alto. Black lives, matters. I want to know what's going on. Local summer restaurants, putting people out of sidewalks. Right now I'm limited to, like, next door or very Laghi media, whether it's the website. So again, I think this is an opportunity to that plus education. I mean, Amazon education, for instance. You can get a degree cloud computing by sitting on the couch. So you know, this is again. This is a paradigm shift from an application standpoint, but you're providing essentially linear TV to app because in the local economy, So I just want to give you a shout out for that because I think it's super important. I think you know, people should get behind this, so congratulations, Okay, I'm often my little rant there. Let's get back down to some of that cloud stuff. So I think it's super interesting to me is you guys can stand up infrastructure very quickly. And what you've done here, you can leverage the benefits of Amazon. Goodness of cloud. You essentially can stand up a metro region pretty quickly. Try it. And it pretty impressive. So I gotta ask you what? Amazon services are most important for your business. >>Um, well, like I said, I think for us it's matching the central services. So we sort of talked about, uh, managing the software, the ap eyes, Um, and those are kind of the glue. So, you know, for us standing up a new metro is obviously, you know, getting the data center contracts and all the other you know, >>and >>ask yourself, you have to deal with just have a footprint. But essentially, once we have that in place, we can spin up the software in the data center and have it hooked into our central service within hours. Right? And we could be starting channels literally, literally within half a day. Um, so that's the really win for us is, um, having all that central blue and that central management system and the scalability where, you know, we can just add another 10 20 5100 markets. And the system is set up to scale centrally, um, where we can start collecting metrics the cloudwatch from those data centers. We're collecting logs and diagnostic information s so we can detect health and everything else centrally and monitor and operate all of these things centrally in a way that is saying and not crazy. We don't need a 24 7 knock of 1000 people to do this. Um, you know, and do that in a way that, you know, we as a relatively small company can still scale and do that in a sensible way in a cost effective way, which is obviously very important for us at our size. But at any size, um, you want to make sure if you're gonna go into 200 plus markets, that you have a really good cost model. Um and that's one of the things that where Amazon has really really helped us is allow us to do some really complex things in an efficient, scalable, reliable and cost effective way. You know, the cost for us to go into the new metro now is so small, you know, relatively speaking, but that's really allows. What allows us to do is the business of now. We just opened up New York, you know, and we're going to keep expanding on that model. So that's been a huge win for us. Is evaluating what Amazon can bring to the table versus other third parties, and we're building our own, you know, obviously which >>So Amazon gives you the knock, basically leverage and scale the data center you're referring to. That's pretty much just to get an origination point in the Derek. Exactly. That's right. So it's not like it's a super complex data center. You can just go in making sure they got all the normal backup recovery in the normal stuff. It's not like a heavy duty build up. Can you explain that? >>Yeah. So one thing we do do in our data centers is because we are local. Um, we have sort of primary data centers where we do do trans coding and origination of the video. So we receive the video locally, and then we want to transport and deliver it locally. And that way we're not sending video across the country and back try to things so that That is sort of the hybrid part of our model. Right? So we stand that up, but then that is all managed by the central service. Right? So we essentially have another container cluster using kubernetes in this case. But that kubernetes cluster is essentially told what to do by everything that's running in Amazon. So we essentially stand up the kubernetes cluster, we wire it up to the Central Service, and then from then on, it just we just go into the Central Service and say, Stand up these channels. Um and it all pops up >>with my final question on the Amazon piece is really about future capabilities Besides having a Cube channel, which I would love to have gone there. And I told my guys, We'll get there, but it's just too busy working around the clock is You guys are with Kobe tonight? Yeah, sand. I can almost see a slew of new services coming out just on the Amazon site. If I'm on the Amazon site, I'm thinking, okay, Outpost is the opportunity for me. I got stage maker machine learning coming in and value for user experience and also, you know, enabling their own stuff. They've got a ton of stuff with prime moving people around and delivering the head room for Amazon. This thing is off the charts. But that being said, that's Amazon could see them winning with this and certainly, you know, using elemental as well. But for you guys on the consumer side, what features and what new things do you see on the road map or what? You might envision the future looking like, >>Well, I think part of it. I think there's two parts. One is what are we gonna deliver ourselves, you know. So we talked about adding community content and continuing to evolve the local beauty product. Um, but we also see ourselves primarily as a local TV platform. Um, and you know, for example, you mentioned prime. And a lot of people are now realizing, especially with Cove, it and what's going on the importance of local television. Uh, and so we're in discussions on a lot of fronts with people to see how how we can be the provider of that local TV content. You know, um and that's really a lot of stationed. Are super excited about that, too, because, you know, again looking to expand their own footprint and their own reach. You know, we're basically the way that we can join those two things together between the stations, the other video platforms and distribution mechanisms and the viewers. Obviously, at the end of the day, um, you know, we want to make sure local viewers can get more local content and stuff that's interesting to them. You know, Like you said with the news, it is not uncommon that you may have your Bay Area stations, but the news is still may be very focused on L. A or San Francisco or whatever, Um and so being able to enable, uh, you know, the smaller regional outlets to reach people in that area in a more local fashion. It is definitely a big way that we can facilitate that from the platform. And you were perspective. So we're hoping to do that in any way we can. You know, our main focus is make local great, you know, get the broadcast world out there, and that's not going anywhere, especially with things like HSC tree. Uh, you know, on that front, um, and you know, we just want to make sure that those people are successful, um, and can reach people and revenue and, you know, >>you got a lot of uncertainty, But I think one of the things that's just think about your project that I find is a classic case of people who focus in on that just the current market value, investing versus kind of game changing shifts is that you guys are horizontally enabling in the sense that there's so many different use cases. I was pointing out from my perspective, journalism. I'm like, I look at that and I'm like, Okay, that's a huge opportunity. Just they're changing the game on Societal impact on journalism, Huge education, opportunity for cord cutters. You're talking about a whole nother thing around TV. So I gotta ask you, you know, pretend I'm an idiot for a minute. Why are pretending that this person from this making I am entity after I don't understand it? Isn't this just TV? What are you doing Different? Because it's only local. I can't watch San Francisco. I'm in Chicago and I can't watch Chicago. I'm in San Francisco. I get that. You know why? Why is this important? Isn't this just TV can I just get on YouTube? I mean, tech talk. Well, talk about the yes >>or no. I mean, there's a TV, and then there's TV, You know, as you know, um and, you know, if you look at the TV landscape just pretty fracture. But typically, when you're talking about YouTube or who you're talking about, sort of cable TV channels, you know you're going to get your Andy, you're gonna get some of your local to ABC and what not? Um, but you're not really getting local contact. And So, for example, in our Los Angeles market, um, we there are There are about 100 something over the air channels. If you look at the cross section of which of those channels you can get on your other big name products like you lose your YouTube TV, you're talking about maybe half a dozen or a dozen, right? So there's like 90 plus channels that are local to L. A. That you can only get through an antenna, right? And those were hitting the type of demographics. You know, quite frankly, some of these other players or just, you know, don't see is important >>under other minorities exact with immigrants. You know, the entrepreneurs of our country? Yes, >>exactly. You know, So, you know, we see a lot of Korean channels or Spanish channels or other. You know, um, minority channels that you just won't get over your cable channels or your typical online video providers. So that's again Why, You know, we feel like we've got something that is really unique. Um, and that is really underserved, you know, as far as on a television sampling, Um, the other side that we bring to the table is that a lot of these broadcast channels, our underserved themselves in terms of technology, Right, if you look at, you know, ad insertion, um and you know a lot of the technical discussions about how to do live TV and how to get live TV out there. It's very focused on the OT market. So again, going back to who lose, and >>then you take a little over the top with the >>over the top. Yeah. Um and so this broadcast market basically had no real evolution on that front in a while. You know, I sort of mentioned like the way ad buying works, you know, it's still sort of the traditional and buying that happens a couple weeks in front, Not a lot of targeted or anything ability. Um, And even when we get to the HSC three, we're now relying on having an h A street TV and you're still tied to an antenna, etcetera, etcetera, which is again, a good move forward, but still not covering the spectrum of what these guys really want to reach and do. So that's where we kind of fill in the gaps, you know, using technology and filling in the gap of receiving a signal and bringing these technologies. So not only the ad insertion and stuff we can do for the live stream, Um, but providing analytics and other tools to the stations, uh, that they really don't have right now, unless you're willing to shell out a lot of money for Neilson, which a lot of local small stations don't do. Uh, so we can provide a lot of analytics on viewership and targeting and things like that that really looking forward to and really excited >>about. I gotta ask you put you on the spot here because I don't see Andy Jassy at reinvent might Hopefully I'll see in this year. They do a person event. He's really dynamic. And you just said, I mean, I think he tends to read his emails a lot. And if you're a customer and you are. But if you bumped into Andy Jassy on the elevators like okay, why should I pay attention to digital? What's why is it important for Amazon? And why is it important for the world? How do you raise the bar on society? >>Well, I think part of what Amazon's goal. And you know, especially if you get into, you know, their work in public sector on education. Um, you know, that's really where we see we're focusing with the community on local television and enabling new types of local television. So I think there's a lot of advantage, and, um, I hate the word synergy, but I'm gonna use the word synergies, you know, um, this for us, You know, our goals in those areas around really helping, you know, uh, you know, one of the terms flying around now is the double bottom line where it's not just about revenue. It's about how do we help people in communities be better as well. Um, so there's a bottom line in terms of uh huh. People benefit and revenue in that way, not just financial revenue. Right. And you know, that's very important to us as a business as well is, you know, that's why we're focused on local TV. And we're not just doing another food. Go where it's really easy to get a nightie national feed. You know, it's really important to us to enable the local community and the local broadcasters and local channels and the local viewers to get the content, um that they're missing out on right now. Um, so I think there's a your energy on that front. Um, as >>far synergy and the new normal to have energy in the new normal. You know, I think I think >>of it. And, you know, um, and some of the other things that have been happening in the news of the black lives matter And, um, you know, a lot of things going around where you know, local and community has been in the spotlight, right? And getting the word out and having really local things versus hundreds. Seeing this thing from you know, three counties away which I don't really care about. It's not telling me what's happening down the street, like you said, Um, and that's really what we want to help improve and support. >>Yeah, no, it's a great mission is one. We care a lot about the Cube. We've seen the data content drives, community engagement and communities where the truth is so in an era where we need more transparency and more truth, you get more cameras on the street, you're going to start to see things, and that's what we're seeing. A lot of things. And as more data is exposed as you turn the lights on, so this week that kind of data will only help communities grow, heal and thrive. So to me, a big believer in what you guys are doing local BTV is a great mission. I wish you guys well, and thanks for explaining the infrastructure on Amazon. I think you guys have a really killer use case. Technically, I mean to me, I think the technical superiority, what you've done, the ability to stand up these kinds of networks with massive number potential reach out of the gate. It's just pretty impressive. Congratulations, >>right? Thank you very much. And thanks for taking the time. >>Okay. Dan Drew, vice president of Jennifer. Did you start up That a lot of potential will. See. Let's go check out the comments on YouTube while we're here. Since we got you, let's see what's going on in the YouTube front year. Yeah, The one question was from someone asked me Was from TV serious that Dan, Great to see you. Thanks for taking the time on Sunday and testing out this new zoom home recording my home studio. But you got to get cleaned up. Thanks for taking the time Problem. Okay, Take care. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

>>from the Keep studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a cube conversation. Hi, I'm John Furry with the Cube. We're here for a special Q conversation, housing with remote, where in studio most of the time. But on the weekends, I get an opportunity to talk to friends and experts, and he I wanted to really dig in with an awesome case study around AWS Cloud in a use case that I think is game changing for local community, especially this time of Cove. It you have local community work, local journalism suffering, but also connected this and connected experiences was gonna make. The difference is we come out of this pandemic a societal impact. But there's a real tech story here I want to dig into. We're here with Dan. True is the vice president of engineering for Chemical. Did you? They make a nap coat local be TV, which basically takes over the air television and streams it to an app in your local area, enabling access to many your TV and on demand as well. For local communities, it's a phenomenal project and its unique, somewhat misunderstood right now, but I think it's gonna be something that's going to really put Dan, thank you for coming along and chatting. Thanks >>for having me appreciate it. >>Okay, so I'm a big fan. I've been using the APP in San Francisco. I know New York's on the docket. I might be deployed. You guys have a unique infrastructure capability that's powering this new application, and this is the focus of the conversations. Q. Talk Amazon is a big part of this. Talk about your local be TV that you are protected. This platform for broadcast television has a unique hybrid cloud. Architecture. Can you tell us about that? >>Certainly. I mean, one of our challenges, as you know, is that we are local television eso unlike a lot of products on the markets, you know, like your Hulu's or other VM PV products, which primarily service sort of national feeds and things like that. Ah, we have to be able to receive, um, over the air signals in each market. Um, many channels that serve local content are still over the air, and that is why you don't see a lot of them on those types of services. They tend to get ignored and unavailable to many users. So that's part of our value. Proposition is to not only allow more people to get access to these stations, but, uh, allow the station's themselves to reach more people. So that means that we have to have a local presence in each market in order to receive those signals. Eso that's sort of forces us to have this hybrid model where we have local data centers. But then we also want to be able to effectively manage those in a central way. On. We do that in our cloud platform, which is hosted on Amazon and using Amazon service. >>Let me take take a breath. Here. You have a hybrid architecture on Amazon. So such a using a lot of the plumbing take us through what the architectures ram is on using a variety of their services. Can you unpack that? >>Yeah. So, um, obviously starts with some of the core services, like easy to s three already us, which everybody on planet uses. Um, we're also very focused on using PCs were completely containerized, which allows us to more effectively deploy our services and scale them. Um, and one of the benefits on that front that Amazon provides is that because they're container services wired into all the other services, like cloud, What metrics? Auto scaling policies. I am policies. Things like that. It means it allows us to manage those things in a much more effective way. Um, and use those services too much more effectively make those things reliable and scalable. Um, we also use a lot of their technologies, for example, for collecting metrics. So we use kinesis and red shift to collect real time metrics from all of our markets across the U. S. Uh, that allows us to do that reliably and at scale without having to manage complex each l systems like Kafka and other things. Um, as well a stored in a, uh, large data lake like red shift in Korea for analytics. And you know, things like that. Um, we also use, um, technologies like media Taylor s O, for example, one of the big features that, uh, most stations do not have access to Israel. Time targeted advertising in the broadcast space. Many ads are sold and placed weeks in advance. Um, and not personalized, obviously. You know, for that reason. Where is one of the big features we can bring to the table? Using our system and technologies like Media Taylor is we can provide real time targeted advertising, which is a huge win for these stations. >>What are some of the unique capabilities that you guys are? Offer broadcast station partners because you're basically going in and partnering with broadcast ages as well, but also your enabling new broadcasters to jump. And it's well, what are some of the unique capability that you're delivering? What is that? It's on the table there. What are you doing? This You >>well again. It allows us because we can do things centrally. You know as well as the local reception allows us to do some interesting things. Like if we have channels that, um, are allowed to broadcast even outside their market, Um, then we can easily put them in other markets and get them even more of years. That way we have the ability to even do, like hyper local or community channels, you know that are not necessarily broadcasting over the standard antennas, um, but could get us a feed from, you know, whatever. Zip code in whatever market and we can give them away toe reach viewers in the entire market and other markets, or even just in their local area. So, you know, consider the case where maybe a high school or a college you know, wants to show games or local content. Um, we provide a platform where they can now do that and reach more people, Um, using our app in our platform very, very easily. So that's another area that we want toe help Expand is not just your typical view of local of what's available in Phoenix, Um, but what's available in a particular city in that area or a local community where they want toe, um, reach their community more effectively, or even have content that might be interesting to other communities in Phoenix or one of the other markets? >>No, I think just is not going to side tension here. I talked with your partner. Jim longs to see you guys have an amazing business opportunity again. I think it's kind of misunderstood, but it's very clear to me that follows in. It has huge passion of local journalism. You see awesome efforts out there by Charlie Senate from the ground Truth project report for America. They take a journalism kind of friend few. But if you add like that, did you business model ought to This local journalism you can enable more video locally. I mean, that's really the killer app of video. And now it Koven. More than ever. I really want to know things like this. A mural with downtown Palo Alto Black lives matters. I want to know what's going on. Local summer restaurants, putting people out of sidewalks. Right now I'm limited to, like, next door or very Laghi media, whether it's the website. So again, I think this is an opportunity to that plus education. I mean Amazon educated Prince, that you can get a degree cloud computing by sitting on the couch. So, you know, this is again. This is a paradigm shift from an application standpoint, but you're providing essentially linear TV toe because in the local economy, So I just want to give you a shout out for that because I think it's super important. I think you know, people should get behind this. Eso congratulates. Okay, I'm often my little rant there. Let's get back down to some of that cloud steps. I think what super interesting to me is you guys can stand up infrastructure very quickly and what you've done here, you delivery of the benefits of Amazon of the goodness of cloud you, especially in stand up a metro region pretty quickly try it. And it pretty impressive. So I gotta ask you what? Amazon services are most important for your business. >>Um, well, like I said, I think for us it's matching the central services. So we sort of talked about, uh, managing the software, the AP eyes, um, and those kind of the glue. So, you know, for us standing up a new metro is obviously, you know, getting the data center contracts and all the other you know, >>and >>ask yourself, you have to deal with just have a footprint. But essentially, once we have that in place, we can spin up the software in the data center and have it hooked into our central service within hours. Right? And we could be starting channels >>literate >>literally within half a day. Um, so that's the rial win for us is, um, having all that central blue and the central management system and the scalability where You know, we can just add another 10 20 5100 markets. And the system is set up to scale centrally, um, where we can start collecting metrics their cloudwatch from those data centers. We're collecting logs and diagnostic information. Eso weaken the type health and everything else centrally and monitor and operate all of these things centrally in a way that is saying and not crazy. We don't need a 24 7 knock of 1000 people to do this. Um, you know, and do that in a way that, you know, we, as a relatively small company can still scale and do that in a sensible way, a cost effective way, which is obviously very important for us at our size. But at any size, um, you want to make sure if you're gonna go into 200 plus markets, that you have a really good cost model. Um and that's one of the things that where Amazon has really really helped us is allow us to do some really complex things and an efficient, scalable, reliable and cost effective way. You know, the cost for us to go into the New Metro now is so small, you know, relatively speaking. Um, but that's really allows. What allows us to do is a business of now. We just opened up New York, you know, and we're going to keep expanding on that model. So that's been a huge win for us. Is evaluating what Amazon could bring to the table versus other third parties and or building our own? You know, obviously which >>So Amazon gives you the knock, basically leverage and scale the data center you're referring to. That's pretty much just to get an origination point in the derrick. Exactly. That's right. It's not like it's a super complex data center. You can just go in making sure they got all the normal commute back of recovery in the North stuff. It's not like a heavy duty buildup. Can you explain that? >>Yeah. So one thing we do do in our data centres is because we are local. Um, we have sort of primary data centers. Ah, where we do do trance coating and origination of the video eso we receive the video locally, and then we want to transport and deliver it locally. And that way we're not sending video across the country and back trying to think so that that is sort of the hybrid part of our model. Right? So we stand that up, but then that is all managed by the central service. Right? So we essentially have another container cluster using kubernetes in this case. But that kubernetes cluster is essentially told what to do by everything that's running in Amazon. So we essentially stand up the kubernetes cluster, we wire it up to the Central Service, and then from then on, it just we just go into the Central Service and say, Stand up these channels. Um and it all pops up >>with my final question on the Amazon pieces is really about future capabilities Besides having a cube channel, which I would love to head on there. And I told my guys, We'll get there. But what is this too busy working around the clock is You guys are with Kobe tonight? Yeah, sand. I can almost see a slew of new services coming out just on the Amazon site if I'm on the Amazon. So I'm thinking, OK, outposts. The opportunity from a I got stage maker machine learning coming in any value for user experience and also, you know, enabling in their own stuff. They got a ton of stuff with prime the moving people around and delivering the head room for Amazon. This thing is off the charts. But that being said, that's Amazon could see them winning with this. I'm certainly I know using elemental as well. But for you guys on the consumer side, what features and what new things do you see on the road map or what? You might envision the future looking like, >>Well, I think part of it. I think there's two parts. One is what are we gonna deliver ourselves, you know? So we sort of talked about adding community content and continuing to evolve the local beauty product. Um, but we also see ourselves primarily as a local TV platform. Um, and you know, for example, you mentioned prime. And a lot of people are now realizing, especially with Cove, it and what's going on the importance of local television. Ah, and so we're in discussions on a lot of fronts with people to see how how we can be the provider of that local TV content, you know, um and that's really a lot of stationed are super psyched about that to just, you know, again looking to expand their own footprint and their own reach. You know, we're basically the way that we conjoined those two things together between the station's the other video platforms and distribution mechanisms and the viewers. Obviously, at the end of the day, um, you know, we want to make sure local viewers can get more local content and stuff this interesting to them. You know, like you said with the news, it is not uncommon that you may have your Bay area stations, but the news is still may be very focused on L. A or San Francisco or whatever. Um and so being able to enable, uh, you know, the smaller regional outlets to reach people in that area in a more local fashion, uh, is definitely a big way that we can facilitate that from the platform. And, you know, if you were perspective, so we're hoping to do that in any way we can. You know, our main focus is make local great, you know, uh, get the broadcast world out there, and that's not going anywhere, especially with things like HSC tree. Uh, you know on the front. Um, and you know, we just want to make sure that those people are successful, um, and can reach people and make revenue. And, you know, >>you got a lot of it and search number two. But I think one of the things that's just think about your project that I find is a classic case of people who focus in on that Just, you know, current market value investing versus kind of game changing shifts is that you guys air horizontally, enabling in the sense that there's so many different use cases. I was pointing out from my perspective journalism, you know, I'm like, I look at that and I'm like, OK, that's a huge opportunity. Just they're changing the game on, you know, societal impact on journalism, huge education, opportunity for cord cutters. You're talking about a whole nother thing around TV. I gotta ask you, you know, pretend I'm an idiot for a minute by our pretending that this person from this making I amenity after I don't understand is it Isn't this just TV? What are you doing? Different? Because it's only local. I can't watch San Francisco. I'm in Chicago and I can't watch Chicago in San Francisco. I get that. You know why? Why is this important? Isn't this just TV? Can I just get on YouTube? Mean Tic tac? Well, talk about the yes >>or no. I mean, there's TV, and then there's TV, You know, as you know, um and, you know, if you look at the TV landscape just pretty fracture. But typically, when you're talking about YouTube or who you're talking about, sort of cable TV channels, you know, you're gonna get your Annie, you're going to get some of your local to ABC and what not? Um, but you're not really getting local contact. And So, for example, in our Los Angeles market, um, we there are There are about 100 something over the air channels. If you look at the cross section of which of those channels you can get on your other big name products like you lose your YouTube TV, you're talking about maybe 1/2 a dozen or a dozen, right? So there's like 90 plus channels that are local to L. A. That you can only get through an antenna, right? And those air hitting the type of demographics. You know, quite frankly, some of these other players or just, you know, don't see is important >>under other minorities. Back with immigrants, you know, hit the launch printers of our country. Yes, >>exactly. You know, So, you know, we might see a lot of Korean channels or Spanish channels or other. You know, um, minority channels that you just won't get over your cable channels or your typical online video providers. So that's again Why, you know, we feel like we've got something that is really unique. Um, and that is really underserved, you know, as far as on a television sampling, Um, the other side that we bring to the table is that a lot of these broadcast channels are underserved themselves in terms of technology. Right? If you look at, you know, at insertion, um and you know, a lot of the technical discussions about how to do live TV and how to get live tv out there. It's very focused on the o t T market. So again, going back to who lose and >>the utility well, over the top of >>over the top. Yeah. Um and so this broadcast market basically had no real evolution on that front in a while, you know? And I sort of mentioned, like the way ad buying works. You know, it's still sort of the traditional and buying that happens a couple weeks in front. Not a lot of targeted or anything ability. Um, And even when we get to the HSC three, you're now relying on having an H s street TV and you're still tied to an antenna, etcetera, etcetera, which is again, a good move forward, but still not covering the spectrum of what these guys really want to reach and do. So that's where we kind of fill in the gaps, you know, using technology and filling in the gap of receiving a signal and bringing these technologies. So not only the ad insertion and stuff we can do for the life stream, Um, but providing analytics and other tools to the stations, uh, that they really don't have right now, unless you're willing to shell out a lot of money for Nielsen, which a lot of local small stations don't do s so we can provide a lot of analytics on viewership and targeting and things like that that they're really looking forward to and really excited >>about. I gotta ask you, put you on the spot. He'll because I don't see Andy Jassy. It reinvented might. Hopefully I'll see him this year. They do a person event. He's really dynamic. And you just said it made me think he tends to read his emails a lot. And if your customer and you are. But if you bumped into Andy Jassy on the elevators like, Hey, why should I pay attention to? Did you? What's why is it important for Amazon? And why is it important for the world? How does it raise the bar on society? >>Well, I think part of what Amazon's goal And you know, especially if you get into, you know, their work in the public sector on education. Um, you know, that's really where you know, we see we're focusing with the community on local television and enabling new types of local television eso. I think there's a lot of, uh, advantage, and, um, I hate the word synergy, but I'm going to use the word synergies, you know, um, this for us, You know, our goals in those areas around, you know, really helping, you know, Uh, you know, one of the terms flying around now is the dot double bottom line, where it's not just about revenue. It's about how do we help people and communities be better as well? Um, so there's a bottom line in terms of, uh, people benefit and revenue in that way, not just financial revenue, Right? And you know, that's very important to us as a business as well is, you know, that's why we're focused on local TV. And we're not just doing another food. Go where it's really easy to get a night. The national feed. You know, it's really important to us to enable the local, um, community and the local broadcasters and local channels and the local viewers to get that content, Um, that they're missing out on right now. Um, so I think there's a energy on that front A so >>far, synergy and the new normal to have energy in the near normal. You know, I think I think Kobe did. >>And you know, um, and some of the other, uh, things that have been happening in the news of the black lives matter and, um, you know, a lot of things going around where you know, local and community has been in the spotlight right and getting the word out and having really local things versus 100. Seeing this thing from, you know, three counties away, which I don't really care about, it's not telling me what's happening down the street, like you said, Um, and that's really what we want to help improve and support. >>Yeah, I know it's a great mission is one we care a lot of cute. We've seen the data content drives, community engagement and communities where the truth is so in an era where we need more transparency and more truth, you get more cameras on the street, you're gonna start to see things. That's what we're seeing, a lot of things. And as more data is exposed as you turn the lights on, so this week that kind of data will only help communities grow, heal and thrive. So, to me, big believer in what you guys are doing local be TV is a great mission. Wish you guys well and thanks for explaining the infrastructure on Amazon. I think you guys have a really killer use case. Technically, I mean to me. I think the technical superiority of what you've done. Abilities stand up. These kinds of networks with massive number potential reach out of the gate. It's just pretty impressive. Congratulations, >>Right. Thank you very much. And thanks for taking the time. >>Okay. Dan Drew, vice president of James. Did you start up? That's a lot of potential. Will. See. Let's go check out the comments on YouTube while we're here. Since we got you, let's see what's going on the YouTube front year. Yeah. The one question was from someone asked me, Was stiff from TV Cres that William Dan, Great to see you. Thanks for taking the time on Sunday and testing out this new zoom home recording my home studio, which I got to get cleaned up a little. Thank you for your time problem. Okay, take care.

(majestic music) >> Everyone, welcome to this special CUBE Conversation. I'm John Furrier, co-host of theCUBE, co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media. We're here in our Palo Alto Studios for theCUBE talking about cloud computing and all the greatness around what's happening in tech. We're here with a practitioner who's also the CTO and lead engineering manager executive. His name is Dan Drew, he's with Didjatv. They're a hot startup that's growing doing a unique solution around changing the game and opening up TV for the masses. Great, great opportunity. Thanks for joining me. >> Thanks for having me. >> So one of the things I love about what you guys are doing is you guys are a start up that's challenging the status quo with TV, taking over the air in cities and having an app where you can watch TV without having to, literally cutting the cord. And so it's challenging, but there's some technical things that require cloud. You guys are growing, you're a user of cloud. How are you looking at building out the engineering team? Because you're DevOps, you've been doing DevOps from day one, but you have to have local presences in these markets. You have a data center in each market, plus you have cloud, you're a hybrid. >> Right, exactly. Well, I mean, for us, the cloud is essential because we have, even though we have to have a local presence for each of these markets, because we're obviously receiving local signals and we can only do that in the market, you can't receive an LA signal in Boston, right? So we have the local presence, but at the same time we want to have all of our central stuff managed in a much more effective way, in a central way that we can scale as we grow, right? So as we continue to add markets across the country, which we hope to do very quickly, we want to make sure that the central services that manage all the things that are common in the apps can grow and totally grow as automatically and as scalable as we can. And so we can most effectively accomplish that by leveraging cloud technologies. >> Just to get the idea straight now as we kind of get to the cloud stuff, is you guys are taking over the air TV, which is free-- >> Yes. >> The old antenna days without cable, and there's channels that are available for free. And then putting that into a local region, so LA, Phoenix, San Francisco, Boston, they have their local broadcasts over the air. You bring it in and it's digital and the user's access it via apps and all the things that connect in the edge in the home? >> That's right. >> That's pretty much the general concept? >> Yeah. So basically what we do is we allow you to get all those things without having to worry about an antenna in your house or if you're mobile or whatever. So a lot of people these days might just get a Roku and not want to worry about a physical antenna or whether you're pointing it in the right direction or whether there's some other house in the way. And so we allow them to get the over-the-air channels at high quality no matter where they are without having to worry about sort of the antenna part of the problem. >> It's a great mission, I love it. It's ambitious, a lot of moving parts. You have the content, you got transmission, but it really opens up freedom for people, whole new demographics, great stuff. So okay, how do you make this happen? You got to go deploy clouds. So you obviously want to use the most efficient. You guys are lean and mean. You don't have a huge IT staff. It's you and then a couple of people, basically you. >> Yes, we have a two person off staff and me and some engineers. But yeah, we're pretty lean. >> Yeah, there's not going to be a big data center in the future given what you guys got, but you've been successful with the cloud. Take us through how you guys laid this out with cloud and with the hybrid solution. What are some of the things that you've implemented? What's the architecture, how does it work? >> Well, as you can imagine a lot of our problem is managing sort of network architecture, make sure we have that laid out and that the data, one of the key things for us is the data centers and the cloud talking to each other, as with any hybrid solution. So we spend a lot of time with automation. One of the challenging things with cloud is your first instinct is just get things up. And so you immediately just start going into consoles and start spinning things up, and the next thing you know you've got a huge mess, right? And your ability to get things working or scale, you realize you have to kind of start again or you're constantly working around the problem you created. So we've invested a lot of time in ramping up for automation, make sure every part of the system is well-defined, well understood; that we have the networking set up the way we need to so the data centers can talk to each other. And then also a key part of the decision in a hybrid model is what's in the cloud and what's not? So for us, managing the TV signal, we're basically transcoding incoming signals 24/7. So that's one area where if you look at cloud pricing, that's not the most effective thing to do, is to have 24/7 content going in and out. So that's the type of thing we look at. Okay, we're going to do-- >> And plus you've got a geography challenge, so that's an easy check. >> Yeah, yeah. But you might be tempted to say let's put all the transcoding in the cloud because scale and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But if you really look at the other factors like how is that going to slow down your network, your ability to deliver streams, your cost effectiveness, that's just where you start to say okay, this offer's going to stay here, this offer's going to go there. >> And that's a latency concern and cost, both or-- >> Definitely latency. We pride ourselves on how quickly we go from over the air to someone's phone. I mean, if you compare-- >> That's table stakes for you, that's like the core app? >> Yes, yes. I mean, we're 30 seconds to a minute faster than Hulu or any of those people as far as our streams going live. And then the other table stakes, because we're lean, is managing our costs. And it's obviously, piping all of that into the cloud for us is not cost effective. And then we also looked at other third-party services like analytics. So our services that manage events and things like that that are core to your app of getting metrics or who's watching your app, how, are they watching it, what device are they watching it on, what time are they watching it? So we looked at different solutions, and that was again a place where the cloud solution ended up matching our requirements and, from a pricing perspective, just made a lot of sense for us versus some other third party or rolling our own, right? >> So cost is not an issue? If it's centralized, you put it in the cloud because you take care of the geography, that's key with the TV signals or whatnot. And then cloud prices, right, if it matches the requirements, manage it within Amazon? >> Yeah. >> And Amazon's your cloud, right? >> Yes, that's right. >> Okay. Okay, so stepping back for a second, you mentioned networking. Because I think one of the things I'm hearing in a lot of these conversations with friends and practitioners who are doing some cutting edge work is they're staying with the holy trinity of the three horsemen, if you will. Storage, compute and networking. The game doesn't change. No matter what people say about storage being dead, it's never going to be dead, right? Those things will change though. So the question I have for you, Dan, is what's the impact that cloud has had on network? I mean, compute's pretty straightforward. You know what compute is. You throw money at compute, you can spin up stuff so it scales, that's a beautiful thing. Storage, some visibility to add storage, some work to be done there; but network has always been a problem. Do you start with networking first? How does cloud and cloud native and those services impact networking? >> Well, it's one of those areas, naturally like all of those areas I guess, but network certainly, where there's really no replacement for expertise and really understanding how does this work? And then being able to apply that to, okay, what does, in our case, like Amazon, provide as far as how much bandwidth can we get in and out? And then planning, okay, how do I manage my hops if I'm going to go build my VPC and my network layout? And how that's all going to go from we're getting a signal over here and it's going to hop, hop, hop, hop, hop. What are those hops and how do we get the most bang for buck out of that? Make sure that that's a little latency between each of those as possible. And that's something where you just have to have the networking experience to understand what are all the variables because there's a lot of levers you can pull in the cloud. They give you a lot of options, which is a blessing and a curse. It's not just push a button and it's magically the perfect solution. You have to really go in and understand what are all those things you can tweak, including what type of instance you choose, which can affect your network bandwidth, as well as your processing power. I mean, you really have to dig into those things. But I would say, for most companies, Amazon or someone like that is still investing way more effort than you're ever likely to in making sure the network and the infrastructure is solid. And they're more invested in doing it because they have to support all these customers on it, and they all have to be happy. >> So they know they have to address it. It's just evolution. >> Exactly, exactly. And yeah, you may have special needs where there's options they provide where maybe you pay more to get higher performance if you need that, but I would say, certainly for some, a company like us, there's no way we're going to spend as much effort trying to get the data center up with the big pipes and everything else that you have. You just got to make sure that you don't shoot yourself in the foot by configuring it wrong. >> And that's really the key. I mean, provisioning, configuration, human error, these are all things. I mean, people also said about Amazon early on, oh securing the cloud sucks. Now it's better security. I mean, the head of the CIA said, on the record, my worst day of securing the cloud is better than my best day on premises. And so it is getting those kinds of scale of things. But at the end of the day, packets are packets and you go from point A to point B. Networking, that's never going to change. So your point about serviceability and programmability comes up, so you guys are living the DevOps ethos because you have to. And you're building that into your entire plan. And this is kind of where I see this next level of evolution where networks are programmable. So what does that look like? Is that configuring configuration management, things from these early trip wires, configuration management, monitoring, easy ones. What's next? What does programmable networking mean for cloud architect because that seems to be an open question right now. What's your thoughts to that? >> I mean, if you're talking about a system like Amazon or I assume like Azure or Google, a lot of that is there where you see like the security issues for example, or where people didn't really make the effort to understand how to lock that down or they couldn't figure it out, things weren't working and they said, all right, open the world, whatever. But if you look at managing security groups, we spent a lot of time managing security groups who can talk to who. Make sure only the people that can talk to each other are supposed to talk to each other. And that's really where I think a system like Amazon will again do that better than you can without a lot of effort, which is they sort of boil it down to just say this person can talk to this person on this port and we'll do the rest. We'll manage firewalls and make sure the ports can talk to each other, whatever. But you just have to tell us they can, and we'll worry about what happens underneath. And so I think you get a lot of that already. Again, it's one of those things where you can shoot yourself in the foot. You can bang your head against the wall a lot of why can't these things talk to each other, but at the end of the day, I'd rather they couldn't talk to each other than it was too open or-- >> Right, it's interesting. You look at the networking thing at the end of the day, if you make it programmable, it just has to work. And I think that brings up the trade offs operationally. And as you guys grow your operation, what are some of the operational factors that you, when you look at the the dots you're connecting with your business as you guys grow, on operations? Is it a trade off of cost and performance? Because obviously you have performance issues on the app because you're streaming to the TV, but you mentioned costs. How are you balancing those trade offs? And what do you look for operationally to evaluate the trade off? >> I think a lot of the time it comes from what do we want our core competencies to be? Is it worth it for us to build this ourselves or develop that skill set? And then you trade that off of what would it cost us to build it ourselves or use Amazon's solution or use some other third-party solution? And then it really comes down to, even if that's more expensive, do we really want to build it ourselves even though that might be cheaper? Is that really worth it to us? >> It's not a core competency. And if you can get it out in the web, why not? >> Yeah, so for example what's in our data centers are transcoding stack, all of that. Yes, we do that ourselves. We don't use Amazon's transcoders, all of that, because that's just key to our business and it's important that we manage that very tightly and it does what we want. And it's also much more cost effective because of what we're doing. We're not just transcoding it (overlapping dialogue)-- >> It's your competitive advantage. That's what you guys are banking on as IP. >> Exactly, but managing the network infrastructure? No. (chuckles) Spinning up Docker containers? No. We're happy to shell that off to Amazon and just-- >> I was talking to a network buddy the other day, and he says, John, what's the big thing with cloud? What's in it for me? I go, here's the modernization of cloud. You're a commandline guy. Commandline interface is over because if you want to go cloud, you're going to be dashboard driven. You're going to be looking at a much more operator role, less of a go in and do more commandline interface, configure these switches, do these things. Kind of connect the dots form. And he goes, okay. Then his next question, which I'll ask you, is he goes, how do you evaluate cloud providers? What's the criteria? Because Amazon's got the most services. They've been around the longest, but Google's got great AI and Azure's got Azure stuff. I'm trying to find some strengths here. (Dan chuckles) They've got Microsoft Office, okay, and some other things. But how would you evaluate, if you had a bank off again today, how would you advise friends in terms of what to look for in a cloud provider? >> I think obviously maturity. This is not something you change your mind about six months from now. If you're going to pick a cloud provider and start deploying on it, that's an investment. You have to be willing to live with that decision for years, likely, right? If you picked wrong and it was painful enough, you might make the switch. So I think you definitely have to do the due diligence on does it do what I need it to do? So for us, it's not just networking and infrastructure. That's, what other service do they have? So for example, the database supports we use. We use their eventing supports so we can send metrics. We use Redshift for big data storage. So you kind of have to look at what does your product need now or in the future? And what do we get? Is it worth it? And you're never going to get everything, but you may find that one gives you 80% and the other one gives you 60 and the other one give you 30. One gives you Office, whatever that, you know. And then also, like integration. You want to look at what else might I want to integrate with and what does that look like? For example, having done a lot of technology evaluations, that's a big key as, well, we're going to plop this not just by itself and it's going to solve everything. We're going to have 10 other things that integrate with it. And how mature is that ecosystem? >> Yeah, and then you have to tie it to the core competency, which you mentioned earlier. >> Core competency, and then you look at other higher level things like what a support looks like? If something goes down in the middle of the night, and I going to be able to talk to someone who can help me out? So there's a lot of things, if you get sort of the higher level of decision making, you really have to consider this is a bet for the product to be up 24/7 that people are going to rely on, and you want to take a real deep dive and look at it. >> Dan, we were talking before we came on camera here about Kubernetes and containers, and you had mentioned there's been some homegrown versions of containers. Containers have been around for awhile. But now, more than ever, you're seeing that as kind of a linchpin, a track towards micro services, which is the path towards server lists and all this greatness that the cloud can bring with cloud native, if you're ready for it. So the question I have for you is, for folks that are looking at containers and Kubernetes, what in those technologies, what should they look for there? Obviously, maturity is one. Kubernetes, I think, has kind of become a de facto standard, but you still can pull that down and run it in your own Kubernetes. Do you use Amazon? So what should folks, practitioners, look for in the technologies behind containers and Kubernetes? >> Well, at this point, like you said, there used to be about half a dozen different container management systems, and I'm sure they're still out there. But more less, Kubernetes has won. If you go to any cloud provider, they will have Kubernetes support. And then there's a pretty big ecosystem around Kubernetes now. So you're really looking at what's going to help me deploy my software the easiest? A lot of people are still using packages and things like that. And I think a lot of the reason for the adoption of containers is not just hey, it's another packaging system, but it has the advantages kind of like virtual machines. And I think everybody loved virtual machines for the right reasons, but where containers kind of took over is they're more lightweight. Virtual machines, because they're an entire hosted operating system, they have a lot of overhead. And you have to really reserve resources and things like that for that world. >> And they served a purpose at that time. >> Exactly, right? For the same concept of having an isolated package that I can just install on machines and it works, still holds true. And that's what container provides but with a much smaller footprint where you can run them without all the extra overhead and all the extra stuff that's in between a virtual machine and its host. So I think they serve that containers are just sort of the next evolution of the virtual machine. And then where something like Kubernetes comes in is sort of similar like where VMware would have been, where you can sort of put your services in a repository and then say, look, here's a bunch of hosts, go figure it out. Which, once you get to scale, that's really where you want to be. If you're still micromanaging how many instances you have, you're not going to scale. >> You're not ready for Kubernetes basically is what you're saying? >> No. >> So there's a tipping point for Kubernetes. What is that tipping point? What's the scale? What's the order of magnitude, general view on (overlapping dialogue) >> Well, I mean, if you're talking about containers, if you're already sort of in the container world, that tipping point for that, or say Amazon's container service is sort of day one, don't start deploying containers manually. That's just crazy. Figure this out. And even if you configure it to say you're only going to to two and I'll worry about autoscaling later, at least you have that foundation and you know where your containers go and you know someone's managing the host for you instead of you going I'm going to go to host X and tell it run container Y, and I have to do that all manually because now you're sort of gone back to the stone ages of operational deployment of where I'm going to log in and install a package and do everything manually. >> And nobody wants that by the way? >> Nobody, nobody should want that. If you do, please, please don't work. I don't know what to say. >> Don't show up. >> Don't show up. Don't show up. >> Or buy short stock, whatever company. >> Yes, exactly. So I think yeah, if you're going to go the container model, you want to go figure that out and get the expertise and get that set up. And again, even if you are not going to use all the bells and whistles right away, there's a lot of, like with any technology, a lot of quirks and challenges with managing containers like managing networking of how does this request go from someone's browser to this container running on this host inside a container? And that's not trivial. So having something like Kubernetes that just sort of handles that, not that Kubernetes doesn't have its own quirks and challenges to get it set up and running, but the whole point of that system is to deal with that, of give me a cluster of hosts and I will help you just load balance and deal with this stuff. >> So, Dan, final question for you. You've been in the industry a long time. You've seen the waves of innovation. You had a stellar career as Head of Engineering, VP of Engineering at Didja; VP of Engineering CTO, again, growing start ups and you're DevOps, you're lean and mean and growing, so that's cool. Not the big IT shop. But as the world changes, what are you most excited about now? Because you've seen the movie before. You've seen the old days, you saw the transition, you're seeing what cloud is bringing. I see you're on top of it here. What's exciting about this time right now? What are you excited about? >> Well, I think what's exciting is that you're seeing a lot more technologies that enable companies to scale and grow. I mean, the hardest thing in a company, like once you get past, geez, even like 30, 50 people, if your company is getting that big, you start to see the technology start to trip over. You really start to see the issues of, crap, we've got a spike and the whole service went down, or whatever that is, or a database failover. And so the fact that it's much easier and less effort to access technologies that allow you to scale, granted you have to make the effort to learn how to use them, but the fact that they exist versus go roll your own of everything, I think is exciting. And I think, on the same track, the availability of these scalable data stores like Aurora or Redshift or whatever, where you used to again just have to figure that out yourself, I mean, storage is the biggest pain for scaling. That's the first thing that dies horribly, right? So just the fact that things like those are available and managed for you, I think will help make a lot of companies be successful, where three, four, five years ago that wasn't available and you would have had to figure it out yourself and just falling over. >> And the upshot too is when you're a builder like yourself, when you're building stuff and deploying, you can do more with 20 people on a team. >> Oh yeah, yeah. >> I mean, just think about the productivity. I mean, think about what you do with 20 now with cloud that you'd have to ramp up to and fundraise for. Build out the data center, get the QA department, get the engineering. I mean, massive amounts of overhead and time loss. >> Well, you don't need 3 DBAs anymore, right? So absolutely. What we can do with a 10-person team today is massive compared to what we could do five years ago. >> All right, Dan Drew, CTO, Executive Vice President of Engineering at a completely called Didja. D-I-D-J-A-T-V, check him out. Hot startup doing a really amazing mission trying to bring over-the-air TV to local communities on an app with programming. Certainly guys, any CUBE content you want, feel free to use all of our free content. Happy to donate theCUBE content to the Didja mission. Thanks for coming on, I appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Okay, Dan Drew here inside theCUBE. I'm John Furrier with a CUBE Conversation here in our Palo Alto Studios for theCUBE, thanks for watching. (majestic music)

(lively classical music) >> Hello everyone, welcome to this special Cube conversation, we are here at the Power Panel Conversation. I'm John Furrier, in Palo Alto, California, theCUBE studies we have remote on the line here, talk about the cloud technology's impact on entrepreneurship and startups and overall ecosystem is Jim Long, who's the CEO of Didja, which is a startup around disrupting digital TV, also has been an investor and a serial entrepreneur, Sarbjeet Johal, who's the in-cloud influencer of strategy and investor out of Berkeley, California, The Batchery, and also Joseph Jacks, CUBE alumni, actually you guys are all CUBE alumni, so great to have you on. Joseph Jacks is the founder and general partner of OSS Capital, Open Source Software Capital, a new fund that's been raised specifically to commercialize and fund startups around open source software. Guys, we got a great panel here of experts, thanks for joining us, appreciate it. >> Go Bears! >> Nice to be here. >> So we have a distinguished panel, it's the Power Panel, we're on cloud technos, first I'd like to get you guys' reaction you know, you're to seeing a lot of negative news around what Facebook has become, essentially their own hyper-scale cloud with their application. They were called the digital, you know, renegades, or digital gangsters in the UK by the Parliament, which was built on open source software. Amazon's continuing to win, Azure's doing their thing, bundling Office 365, making it look like they've got more revenue with their catching up, Google, and then you got IBM and Oracle, and then you got an ecosystem that's impacted by this large scale, so I want to get your thoughts on first point here. Is there room for more clouds? There's a big buzzword around multiple clouds. Are we going to see specialty clouds? 'Causes Salesforce is a cloud, so is there room for more cloud? Jim, why don't you start? >> Well, I sure hope so. You know, the internet has unfortunately become sort of the internet of monopolies, and that doesn't do anyone any good. In fact, you bring up an interesting point, it'd be kind of interesting to see if Facebook created a social cloud for certain types of applications to use. I've no idea whether that makes any sense, but Amazon's clearly been the big gorilla now, and done an amazing job, we love using them, but we also love seeing, trying out different services that they have and then figuring out whether we want to develop them ourselves or use a specialty service, and I think that's going to be interesting, particularly in the AI area, stuff like that. So I sure hope more clouds are around for all of us to take advantage of. >> Joseph, I want you to weigh in here, 'cause you were close to the Kubernetes trend, in fact we were at a OpenStack event when you started Kismatic, which is the movement that became KubeCon Cloud Native, many many years ago, now you're investing in open source. The world's built on open source, there's got to be room for more clouds. Your thoughts on the opportunities? >> Yeah, thanks for having me on, John. I think we need a new kind of open collaborative cloud, and to date, we haven't really seen any of the existing major sort of large critical mass cloud providers participate in that type of model. Arguably, Google has probably participated and contributed the most in the open source ecosystem, contributing TensorFlow and Kubernetes and Go, lots of different open source projects, but they're ultimately focused on gravitating huge amounts of compute and storage cycles to their cloud platform. So I think one of the big missing links in the industry is, as we continue to see the rise of these large vertically integrated proprietary control planes for computing and storage and applications and services, I think as the open source community and the open source ecosystem continues to grow and explode, we'll need a third sort of provider, one that isn't based on monopoly or based on a traditional proprietary software business like Microsoft kind of transitioning their enterprise customers to services, sort of Amazon in the first camp vertically integrated many a buffet of all these different compute, storage, networking services, application, middleware. Microsoft focused on sort of building managed services of their software portfolio. I think we need a third model where we have sort of an open set of interfaces and an open standards based cloud provider that might be a pure software company, it might be a company that builds on the rails and the infrastructure that Amazon has laid down, spending tens of billions in cap ex, or it could be something based on a project like Kubernetes or built from the community ecosystem. So I think we need something like that just to sort of provide, speed the innovation, and disaggregate the services away from a monolithic kind of closed vendor like Amazon or Azure. >> I want to come back to that whole startup opportunity, but I want to get Sarbjeet in here, because we've been in the B2B area with just last week at IBM Think 2019. Obviously they're trying to get back into the cloud game, but this digital transformation that has been the cliche for almost a couple of years now, if not five or plus. Business has got to move to the cloud, so there's a whole new ball game of complete cultural shift. They need stability. So I want to talk more about this open cloud, which I love that conversation, but give me the blocking and tackling capabilities first, 'cause I got to get out of that old cap ex model, move to an operating model, transform my business, whether it's multi clouds. So Sarbjeet, what's your take on the cloud market for say, the enterprise? >> Yeah, I think for the enterprise... you're just sitting in that data center and moving those to cloud, it's a cumbersome task. For that to work, they actually don't need all the bells and whistles which Amazon has in the periphery, if you will. They need just core things like compute, network, and storage, and some other sort of services, maybe database, maybe data share and stuff like that, but they just want to move those applications as is to start with, with some replatforming and with some changes. Like, they won't make changes to first when they start moving those applications, but our minds are polluted by this thinking. When we see a Facebook being formed by a couple of people, or a company of six people sold for a billion dollars, it just messes up with our mind on the enterprise side, hey we can do that too, we can move that fast and so forth, but it's sort of tragic that we think that way. Well, having said that, and I think we have talked about this in the past. If you are doing anything in the way of systems innovation, if your building those at, even at the enterprise, I think cloud is the way to go. To your original question, if there's room for newer cloud players, I think there is, provided that we can detach the platforms from the environments they are sitting on. So the proprietariness has to kinda, it has to be lowered, the degree of proprietariness has to be lower. It can be through open source I think mainly, it can be from open technologies, they don't have to be open source, but portable. >> JJ was mentioning that, I think that's a big point. Jim Long, you're an entrepreneur, you've been a VC, you know all the VCs, been around for a while, you're also, you're an entrepreneur, you're a serial entrepreneur, starting out at Cal Berkeley back in the day. You know, small ideas can move fast, and you're building on Amazon, and you've got a media kind of thing going on, there's a cloud opportunity for you, 'cause you are cloud native, 'cause you're built in the cloud. How do you see it playing out? 'Cause you're scaling with Amazon. >> Well, so we obviously, as a new startup, don't have the issues the enterprise folks have, and I could really see the enterprise customers, what we used to call the Fortune 500, for example, getting together and insisting on at least a base set of APIs that Amazon and Microsoft et cetera adopt, and for a startup, it's really about moving fast with your own solution that solves a problem. So you don't necessarily care too much that you're tied into Amazon completely because you know that if you need to, you can make a change some day. But they do such a good job for us, and their costs, while they can certainly be lower, and we certainly would like more volume discounts, they're pretty darn amazing across the network, across the internet, we do try to price out other folks just for the heck of it, been doing that recently with CDNs, for example. But for us, we're actually creating a hybrid cloud, if you will, a purpose-built cloud to support local television stations, and we do think that's going to be, along with using Amazon, a unique cloud with our own APIs that we will hopefully have lots of different TV apps use our hybrid cloud for part of their application to service local TV. So it's kind of a interesting play for us, the B2B part of it, we're hoping to be pretty successful as well, and we hope to maybe have multiple cloud vendors in our mix, you know. Not that our users will know who's behind us, maybe Amazon, for something, Limelight for another, or whatever, for example. >> Well you got to be concerned about lock-in as you become in the cloud, that's something that everybody's worried about. JJ, I want to get back to you on the investment thesis, because you have a cutting edge business model around investing in open source software, and there's two schools of thought in the open source community, you know, free contribution's great, and let tha.t be organic, and then there's now commercialization. There's real value being created in open source. You had put together a chart with your team about the billions of dollars in exits from open source companies. So what are you investing in, what do you see as opportunities for entrepreneurs like Jim and others that are out there looking at scaling their business? How do you look at success, what's your advice, what do you see as leading indicators? >> I think I'll broadly answer your question with a model that we've been thinking a lot about. We're going to start writing publicly about it and probably eventually maybe publish a book or two on it, and it's around the sort of fundamental perspective of creating value and capturing value. So if you model a famous investor and entrepreneur in Silicon Valley who has commonly modeled these things using two different letter variables, X and Y, but I'll give you the sort of perspective of modeling value creation and value capture around open source, as compared to closed source or proprietary software. So if you look at value creation modeled as X, and value capture modeled as Y, where X and Y are two independent variables with a fully proprietary software company based approach, whether you're building a cloud service or a proprietary software product or whatever, just a software company, your value creation exponent is typically bounded by two things. Capital and fundraising into the entity creating the software, and the centralization of research and development, meaning engineering output for producing the software. And so those two things are tightly coupled to and bounded to the company. With commercial open source software, the exact opposite is true. So value creation is decoupled and independent from funding, and value creation is also decentralized in terms of the research and development aspect. So you have a sort of decentralized, community-based, crowd-sourced, or sort of internet, global phenomena of contributing to a code base that isn't necessarily owned or fully controlled by a single entity, and those two properties are sort of decoupled from funding and decentralized R and D, are fundamentally changing the value creation kind of exponent. Now let's look at the value capture variable. With proprietary software company, or proprietary technology company, you're primarily looking at two constituents capturing value, people who pay for accessing the service or the software, and people who create the software. And so those two constituents capture all the value, they capture, you know, the vendor selling the software captures maybe 10 or 20% of the value, and the rest of the value, I would would express it say as the customer is capturing the rest of the value. Most economists don't express value capture as capturable by an end user or a customer. I think that's a mistake. >> Jim, you're-- >> So now... >> Okay, Jim, your reaction to that, because there's an article went around this weekend from Motherboard. "The internet was built on free labor "of open source developers. "Is that sustainable?" So Jim, what's your reaction to JJ's comments about the interactions and the dynamic between value creation, value capture, free versus sustainable funding? >> Well if you can sort of mix both together, that's what I would like, I haven't really ever figured out how to make open source work in our business model, but I haven't really tried that hard. It's an intriguing concept for sure, particularly if we come up with APIs that are specific to say, local television or something like that, and maybe some special processes that do things that are of interest to the wider community. So it's something I do plan to look at because I do agree that if you, I mean we use open source, we use this thing called FFmpeg, and several other things, and we're really happy that there's people out there adding value to them, et cetera, and we have our own versions, et cetera, so we'd like to contribute to the community if we could figure out how. >> Sarbjeet, your reactions to JJ's thesis there? >> I think two things. I will comment on two different aspects. One is the lack of standards, and then open source becoming the standard, right. I think open source kind of projects take birth and life in its own, because we have lack of standard, 'cause these different vendors can't agree on standards. So remember we used to have service-oriented architecture, we have Microsoft pushing some standards from one side and IBM pushing from other, SOAP versus xCBL and XML, different sort of paradigms, right, but then REST API became the de facto standard, right, it just took over, I think what REST has done for software in last about 10 years or so, nothing has done that for us. >> well Kubernetes is right now looking pretty good. So if you look at JJ, Kubernetes, the movement you were really were pioneering on, it's having similar dynamic, I mean Kubernetes is becoming a forcing function for solidarity in the community of cloud native, as well as an actual interoperable orchestration layer for multiple clouds and other services. So JJ, your thoughts on how open source continues as some of these new technologies, like Kubernetes, continue to hit the scene. Is there any trajectory change in open source that you see, that you could share, I'd love to get your insights on what's next behind, you know, the rise of Kubernetes is happening, what's next? >> I think more abstractly from Kubernetes, we believe that if you just look at the rate of innovation as a primary factor for progress and forward change in the world, open source software has the highest rate of innovation of any technology creation phenomena, and as a consequence, we're seeing more standards emerge from the open source ecosystem, we're seeing more disruption happen from the open source ecosystem, we're seeing more new technology companies and new paradigms and shifts happen from the open source ecosystem, and kind of all progress across the largest, most difficult sort of compound, sensitive problems, influenced and kind of sourced from the open source ecosystem and the open source world overall. Whether it's chip design, machine learning or computing innovations or new types of architectures, or new types of developer paradigms, you know, biological breakthroughs, there's kind of things up and down the technology spectrum that have a lot to sort of thank open source for. We think that the future of technology and the future of software is really that open source is at the core, as opposed to the periphery or the edges, and so today, every software technology company, and cloud providers included, have closed proprietary cores, meaning that where the core is, the data path, the runtime, the core business logic of the company, today that core is proprietary software or closed source software, and yet what is also true, is at the edges, the wrappers, the sort of crust, the periphery of every technology company, we have lots of open source, we have client libraries and bindings and languages and integrations, configuration, UIs and so on, but the cores are proprietary. We think the following will happen over the next few decades. We think the future will gradually shift from closed proprietary cores to open cores, where instead of a proprietary core, an open core is where you have core open source software project, as the fundamental building block for the company. So for example, Hadoop caused the creation of MapR and Cloudera and Hortonworks, Spark caused the creation of Databricks, Kafka caused the creation of Confluent, Git caused the creation of GitHub and GitLab, and this type of commercial open source software model, where there's a core open source project as the kernel building block for the company, and then an extension of intellectual property or wrappers around that open source project, where you can derive value capture and charge for licensed product with the company, and impress customer, we think that model is where the future is headed, and this includes cloud providers, basically selling proprietary services that could be based on a mixture of open source projects, but perhaps not fundamentally on a core open source project. Now we think generally, like abstractly, with maybe somewhat of a reductionist explanation there, but that open core future is very likely, fundamentally because of the rate of innovation being the highest with the open source model in general. >> All right, that's great stuff. Jim, you're a historian of tech, you've lived it. Your thoughts on some of the emerging trends around cloud, because you're disrupting linear TV with Didja, in a new way using cloud technology. How do you see cloud evolving? >> Well, I think the long lines we discussed, certainly I think that's a really interesting model, and having the open source be the center of the universe, then figure out how to have maybe some proprietary stuff, if I can use that word, around it, that other people can take advantage of, but maybe you get the value capture and build a business on that, that makes a lot of sense, and could certainly fit in the TV industry if you will from where I sit... Bring services to businesses and consumers, so it's not like there's some reason it wouldn't work, you know, it's bound to, it's bound to figure out a way, and if you can get a whole mass of people around the world working on the core technology and if it is sort of unique to what mission of, or at least the marketplace you're going after, that could be pretty interesting, and that would be great to see a lot of different new mini-clouds, if you will, develop around that stuff would be pretty cool. >> Sarbjeet, I want you to talk about scale, because you also have experience working with Rackspace. Rackspace was early on, they were trying to build the cloud, and OpenStack came out of that, and guess what, the world was moving so fast, Amazon was a bullet train just flying down the tracks, and it just felt like Rackspace and their cloud, you know OpenStack, just couldn't keep up. So is scale an issue, and how do people compete against scale in your mind? >> I think scale is an issue, and software chops is an issue, so there's some patterns, right? So one pattern is that we tend to see that open source is now not very good at the application side. You will hardly see any applications being built as open source. And also on the extreme side, open source is pretty sort of lame if you will, at very core of the things, like OpenStack failed for that reason, right? But it's pretty good in the middle as Joseph said, right? So building pipes, building some platforms based on open source, so the hooks, integration, is pretty good there, actually. I think that pattern will continue. Hopefully it will go deeper into the core, which we want to see. The other pattern is I think the software chops, like one vendor has to lead the project for certain amount of time. If that project goes into sort of open, like anybody can grab it, lot of people contribute and sort of jump in very quickly, it tends to fail. That's what happened to, I think, OpenStack, and there were many other reasons behind that, but I think that was the main reason, and because we were smaller, and we didn't have that much software chops, I hate to say that, but then IBM could control like hundred parties a week, at the project >> They did, and look where they are. >> And so does HP, right? >> And look where they are. All right, so I'd love to have a Power Panel on open source, certainly JJ's been in the thick of it as well as other folks in the community. I want to just kind of end on lightweight question for you guys. What have you guys learned? Go down the line, start with Jim, Sarbjeet, and then JJ we'll finish with you. Share something that you've learned over the past three months that moved you or that people should know about in tech or cloud trends that's notable. What's something new that you've learned? >> In my case, it was really just spending some time in the last few months getting to know our end users a little bit better, consumers, and some of the impact that having free internet television has on their lives, and that's really motivating... (distorted speech) Something as simple as you might take for granted, but lower income people don't necessarily have a TV that works or a hotel room that has a TV that works, or heaven forbid they're homeless and all that, so it's really gratifying to me to see people sort of tuning back into their local media through television, just by offering it on their phone and laptops. >> And what are you going to do as a result of that? Take a different action, what's the next step for you, what's the action item? >> Well we're hoping, once our product gets filled out with the major networks, et cetera, that we actually provide a community attachment to it, so that we have over-the-air television channels is the main part of the app, and then a side part of the app could be any IP stream, from city council meetings to high schools, to colleges, to local community groups, local, even religious situations or festivals or whatever, and really try to tie that in. We'd really like to use local television as a way to strengthening all local media and local communities, that's the vision at least. >> It's a great mission you guys have at Didja, thanks for sharing that. Sarbjeet, what have learned over the past quarter, three months that was notable for you and the impact and something that changed you a little bit? >> What actually I have gravitated towards in last three to six months is the blockchain, actually. I was light on that, like what it can do for us, and is there really a thing behind it, and can we leverage it. I've seen more and more actually usage of that, and sort of full SCM, supply chain management and healthcare and some other sort of use cases if you will. I'm intrigued by it, and there's a lot of activity there. I think there's some legs behind it, so I'm excited about that. >> And are doing a blockchain project as a result, or are you still tire-kicking? >> No actually, I will play with it, I'm a practitioner, I play with it, I write code and play with it and see (Jim laughs) what does that level of effort it takes to do that, and as you know, I wrote the Alexa scale couple of weeks back, and play with AI and stuff like that. So I try to do that myself before I-- >> We're hoping blockchain helps even out the TV ad economy and gets rid of middle men and makes more trusting transactions between local businesses and stuff. At least I say that, I don't really know what I'm talking about. >> It sounds good though. You get yourself a new round of funding on that sound byte alone. JJ, what have you learned in the past couple months that's new to you and changed you or made you do something different? >> I've learned over the last few months, OSS Capital is a few months and change old, and so just kind of getting started on that, and it's really, I think potentially more than one decade, probably multi-decade kind of mostly consensus building effort. There's such a huge lack of consensus and agreement in the industry. It's a fascinatingly polarizing area, the sort of general topic of open source technology, economics, value creation, value capture. So my learnings over the past few months have just intensified in terms of the lack of consensus I've seen in the industry. So I'm trying to write a little bit more about observations there and sort of put thoughts out, and that's kind of been the biggest takeaway over the last few months for me. >> I'm sure you learned about all the lawyer conversations, setting up a fund, learnings there probably too right, (Jim laughs) I mean all the detail. All right, JJ, thanks so much, Sarbjeet, Jim, thanks for joining me on this Power Panel, cloud conversation impact, to entrepreneurship, open source. Jim Long, Sarbjeet Johal and Joseph Jacks, JJ, thanks for joining us, theCUBE Conversation here in Palo Alto, I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. >> Thanks John. (lively classical music)