>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas it's the Cube covering NAB 2017. Brought to you by HGST. >> Hey, welcome back to the Cube. We are live at the NAB 2017 conference, the National Association of Broadcasters. Great event, over a hundred thousand people. Wow, amazing. I'm Lisa Martin very excited to introduce you to you to our next guest, Dave Clack, the CEO of Square Box Systems. Hi, Dave, welcome to the Cube. >> Thank you. >> Great to have you here. Now, you are a veteran of NAB. >> Yeah, afraid so. >> Yeah, this year's event really this over arching theme of the MET effect. Convergence of media, entertainment technology that used to be distinct. With that theme and all the buzz that's going on here, what are some of your observations on day, this isn't day one for you, but day one for most of us? >> Well, I think the show is far busier than I've seen it in recent years so we've been overwhelmed on our booth this morning. I think with folks being able to manage extremely complex storage landscapes has been a real theme for us in the discussion so far this morning. In addition, folks are so much moving towards the cloud that people have been talking about it for years, but suddenly it seems there's been a step change. People want to do it right now and so we're really noticing that in the discussion so far at least this morning, yeah. >> Do you think that's because cloud technology has matured so much as have cloud users? >> Yeah, I think exactly. I think exactly both. So, the technology is starting to mature and the band widths is really getting there so folks can use this stuff more effectively. People are getting more used to it in their day to day lives. So, you know, everyone's phone backs up to the cloud and everyone just gets used to it just being always on and always working. And so I think a lot of the confidence that people need to have when you're shooting content that's valuable and you need to have deadlines you're going to meet, then people are getting used to the fact that the cloud can be a reliable, even more reliable than a lot of the traditional storage and production approaches. >> And one of the themes along those lines that we've heard today on the program is speed and agility are absolutely key. We're hearing that studio will shoot something, a particular scene and then think you know what that would have been great in virtual reality and do the entire thing again and then that compounds costs and storage challenges, but needing things really quickly. Another thing that we're hearing is well all of us are content creators, right. We all have tablets and mobile devices. >> Yeah. >> We're not only consuming it in these ways we're creating it in these ways. And so it really becomes a challenge for whether it's broadcasters or film studios or even on the sports and entertainment side, of containing and kind of corralling this. Tell us a little bit about Square Box Systems. Who are what are you delivering by way of media asset management and who are some of your key constituents, key sectors that you work with? >> Yeah, so our CatDV is all about helping people to find and reuse their content, saving time, saving money, saving stress. Our whole pile of kind of workflow orchestration workflow automation and so being able to find and reuse is clearly really important when content is exploding in the way it has. And the ways that people consume content is exploding and so almost everybody has the potential need for a system like CatDV with this explosion of content. If you can't find your content you just don't have it. It's just taking up space and money on some storage somewhere. And so the main sectors in which we work are I guess we started our focus on broadcast production post, but now everybody have media. And so, we have a pile of customers, basketball, football, baseball, soccer in the sports market. Education, many universities use CatDV. Non-profits lots of houses of worship use CatDV. Lots of corporates use CatDV, training videos, outreach marketing, social media, you know a lot of agencies, advertising use CatDV. So, there's a few really interesting kind of use cases, things like Jay Piell, the history of space science in CatDV. You want to find out about the Mars rover or about all the space probe stuff look in CatDV. So, sports is a really interesting one. We have a load of ten NFL teams and they have some really interesting workflows around asset management. So, I was chatting with some folks from the Kansas City Chiefs a few weeks ago and what their workflow's done has done is really turned on their head the way that they make programming and content. And so, if you imagine they go to an away game then what they'll do is they'll shoot their content and on the plane on the way home, they'll load that content. They'll plug the camera card into laptops and they'll load that content, not just for tonight's show which is clearly important 'cause tonight's coming soon, but to become part of the history of that sports team. Could it become part of the historic record? >> Of course. >> And so then, let's imagine in a years' time we've got an athlete that's retiring or that's got an award or something, they can go into our system and they can say well CatDV, find me the five star clips for this athlete in this season wearing this number. CatDV will come back with a long list of content, be able to preview it whether it's on active storage, on cloud storage or wherever it is in this kind of complex landscape and then CatDV will be able to preview that media, put it into a rough cut and then within a few minutes you've got a rough cut for a really quality piece of programming that can then be made very cost effectively. So, for them it's really turned on their head the kind of psychology of program making, the psychology of logging. It really has become such a valuable thing that it's just part of their DNA then when they're making their content for their fans. >> Another thing that speaking of fans, that really interested me and piqued my interest when I was reading that Kansas City Chiefs' case study on your website is, what they're doing working with Square Box to really be diversifying and improve their fan experience. Because from a fan's perspective they're able to slice and dice different parts of the game and deliver it in multiple platforms. Tell us a little bit more about how you help sports teams for example really diversify engaging with their fans which presumably to them is going to drive up revenue. >> Right, exactly. And I think that kind of talks to how many end points there are where people can consume this content. That clearly folks I think I heard that there are, it's getting on so that there were more mobile phones than there are Tvs in the U.S. now. So, I always consume my content on mobile devices now. We have a TV, we watch films on it. >> Right. >> But that's about it and so I think that being able to have content and then repurpose it extremely quickly for different workflows, okay being able to broadcast to the satellite channel for the KCC, that's great. But, being able to take segments that are athlete profiles for websites, for Twitter, for social media. Just being able to get that stuff out really quickly and in an automated fashion. So, if you get people in the way mistakes are made and things are slow. So, if you can just take a few boxes and rely on content getting to the right place at the right time, then that is crucial. And so, automation, big thing for us as CatDV, that is a real key thing when trying to manage this stuff cost effectively because while there's an explosion in demand there isn't an explosion in budget so how do people cope when there's all this demand for high quality content but there isn't more money to pay for it. >> So walk us through that journey. If you're talking to a Kansas City Chiefs or another sporting organization, help us understand how you help them understand where to start, to your point budgets are constrained, but the opportunity there for them to really gain much more from their existing digital assets is huge. What is that journey that you help them go on? >> That's a really good question. And, actually it's what motivates me to be in the industry atoll because we make our submergence products, we think they're great. But, asset management doesn't exist in isolation. There's cameras and networking and storage and archiving and distribution and so the first conversation that we have when engaging with any customer sports included, is What's your problem? What are you trying to achieve? And we end up having really interesting conversations about folks businesses. How is it that they're trying to get work done? What's the content creation focus like? So, how do you shoot? What do you shoot on? And so, we have to we have to almost follow the life of a file through from when it's being created as a piece of FX or whether it's some content that's being shot on a camera, well how does that get from where it's being made to the consumer and then how does it get reused so that it becomes an asset rather than a liability? Meanwhile, making sure that it's safe. It can't get lost. It can't get stolen and all that kind of stuff. So, we end up almost doing business consulting about the creative process of making content and that is really fascinating and it's only when we have a really good view of that workflow can we recommend well how's the best way to use our stuff and how's the best way for that to work with storage? >> You brought up something about safety and security. Cyber security is a huge issue and we see it in all that we talk to a lot of different industries here on the Cube and in some industries we had Ted Harrington on the program a little bit ago who's one of the security experts and he said in some industries it's sort of nice to have. More in media and entertainment it's really starting to become part of the culture. >> Yeah. >> Is that something that you're experiencing? >> Oh, very much so. >> Absolutely. >> So and there's always this balance like, so everybody wants their content everywhere and we find out when the execs say oh I don't want to log in, I just want you to send me the video. It's like, well we can do that and we send you the video and it's enormously simple but it's not secure. And so what we try and do is have a balance. We have simple tools that are secure and we have many government agencies and military agencies that use our software so we love working with those guys. They help us to improve our product and to harden it because there's so many well publicized cases of content being stolen. So, we try and get a good balance between hyper secure lockdown and very usable and we work with customers to kind of choose how far down that path they want to get. And you know there's some simple things you can do too. If you're sharing content over the internet then, putting nice watermarks on stuff whether they be visible watermarks or invisible ones that are kind of burnt in, then that can really stop people misusing content or stop people making mistakes about where content's going to be broadcast. Because it's really clear. You're not going to put stuff up if it's got a big label over it. >> Right, you mentioned working with different types of customers, broadcasts, sports, houses of worship. From a collaboration perspective, talk to us about how Square Box facilitates collaboration. >> Yeah, absolutely. So, there are kind of three core things that CatDV does, automate, collaborate and organize. Right, so for this show one of our biggest announcements is CatDV social. And so, what CatDV social lets you do is to have a conversation realtime, a bit like a Skype or a Slack conversation either between a couple of people or group about a collaborative event. So, we're making some content. You know, I need this sound file right now. So, being able to have that realtime collaborative conversation is a new feature in CatDV. We're previewing it at the show and I have to say it's getting a huge amount of interest. It's great. >> Fantastic. Well Dave, thank you so much for being on the program. We wish you nothing but continued success at Square Box. >> Thank you very much. >> And we want to thank you for watching the Cube. Again, live from Las Vegas at NAB 2017. I'm Lisa Martin. Stick around, we'll be right back.