>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube! Covering NAB 2017, brought to you by HGST. >> Hey welcome back everybody Jeff Rick here with The Cube, We are getting towards the end of day three at NAB 2017, and we've talked to a ton of people from security, and storage, and applications, and now we get to talk to a creator. And really excited to have Victoria Nece on, she's a project manager for adobe After Effects, welcome. >> Thank you it's great to be here. >> Absolutely, been getting a little background on you, you were just really an animator and Adobe was smart enough to say "Hey this girl's got her shit together, we should bring her inside and have her help with the team at a bigger level." Instead of all the little things you were doing. >> Yeah so I was a motion designer mostly for documentary for a long time. And I got really into writing my own scrips and extensions and I used to say I like to make After Effects do stuff it wasn't supposed to do, and now it's my job to help make it do those things. >> Okay so what are some of the new things you said that you know, luckily we're past the official release date, you can actually talk about things >> Yes. >> So what are some of the new things? >> Uh, so we have a great new release, just came out last week, last Wednesday we're super proud of it, it's available to anyone who has creative cloud subscription. And a big thing, and this is across After Effects and Premier, is a new thing called the essential graphics panel. It allows you to make really elaborate- anything you want to do in After Effects you can go fully advanced motion graphics, and then choose the properties in editor you want to be able to change. So I can say, I'm designing something but it's on brand, I don't want you to change the color, but you can change the text, you can reposition something on the screen, we can change the background color, do all of those kind of things, and I can add those controls in After Effects and when I save those as a motion graphics template, it gets packed up and someone can use it in Premier and change those things live in the timeline with no rendering, so. >> It's really interesting just the whole collaboration, you know, kind of aspect. It used to be so much, you know, an individual sitting down on their hopefully very big machine with a lot of memory and compute, you know, working on Adobe. But now, it's really more of a collaborative effort. There's not a lot of people just working independantly all by themselves on the machine. >> True. >> Especially with Cloud and some of these really higher performance applications. >> Yeah it's actually been really interesting to watch what's happened. We have a beta service called Team Projects and I've been doing press demos where I'm in Seattle and one of my colleagues is in Germany and we're collaborating live on the same projects, I'm on After Effects, he's in Premier, I make a change, it shows up right in his timeline he doesn't even have to open After Effects, doesn't have to import anything, and it's all really seemless. And we've actually, we've all been collaborating the whole time but now you can do it without all those extra steps of rendering, and sending a file, and downloading the file, and importing it, and then adding it. Now that can all just happen in one click. >> It's like Google Docs versus Word. >> Yeah, right. >> Save and attach a file and send, hopefully you remember to save the file. >> Alright and the other thing you're really excited about is character animator. >> Yes. >> So what's going on there? >> So for people who don't know, character animator is a new application from the original creators of After Effects. It's a separate application that allows you to do real time live animation using your webcam and your microphone and also even use a touch screen, keyboard, mouse, basically hardware you already have, to power a character that starts off as a Photoshop or Illustrator file, and character animator brings it to life. We've seen some really amazing stuff people are doing with it. >> So real time live animation, so that seems like completely impossible, cause back in the day that's all we would hear about, is you know you have to render render render render render to get this animations stuff going. But now you're saying you've got it broken down so that we can do it live. >> There's this great line from The Simpsons that animation is rarely done live, it's a terrible strain on the animators wrists, and we're working to change that (laughs). It's a lot of fun and also you look at the screen and your character looks back at you, it's this really amazing experience working in it. And we've been working to make it easier to use, easier to get started, we've added workspaces so now it actually walks you through the process of getting characters set up and rigged and then a different space for performing. But it's, character animation's fun. >> And then now you're bolting that onto all these various live video distribution services. >> Mhm, we've added Mercury transmit support, which means you can go out to broadcast hardware, you can connect to absolute stream, to Facebook live, Youtube live, we're seeing things like Steven Colbert's The Late Show they use character animator to do cartoon Trump and he's improving live with a cartoon character and it's all happening in real time. >> (laughs) So as you look back and this is all fascinating and it's great, now you've got the power of the whole company to kind of make many of your visions come true. Where does it go next? It just seems like the creative opportunity, or the tools for the creator, are just exploding. >> I think there's a lot of cool stuff we can do, but for me one of the biggest things is anything we can do to save people time, and to save people doing the boring stuff, I want to give people more space to create. >> Right. >> So, don't have to think about verging, you don't have to think about all those outputs, but all the stuff about- get that out of the way, get the data entry out of the way so you can actually focus on the stuff you really want to be doing. >> And what about 360 and VR and all those crazy new technologies which are all over these halls. >> It's everywhere. Premier's got some really cool stuff this release, they've got Ambisonic audio so you can actually do VR, 360 footage and the sound comes from the right place in the shot as you turn your head. >> Ambisonic v- >> Ambisonic audio. >> Ambisonic audio. >> So there's some really cool stuff happening there. And then on the After Effects side we have some amazing partners who have been doing super cool stuff with VR, their tools are really evolving, and it's a really nice seemless workflow working with them. >> (laughs) So where does it go next? >> Oof. >> Anywhere, right? >> Anywhere really. >> No it's just amazing how again these tools that really put everything in the power of basically anybody's hands. It's kind of this whole democratization theme which we continue to hear over and over again. >> We've really focused a lot on trying to get just the tools you need right now to get you most of the way there, super simple, and then when you need to go deep, you can go deep. We're not limiting you to the simple tools, but everything's right in context, right in front of you, the stuff you change the most is right there. And then when you need to go in and tweak and get to the pro level it's another step down. And so we're trying to really build that kind of a workflow so that you have sound and graphics and color all right in edit and then you have the big pro apps for when you need to do the fancy stuff. >> The heavy lifting. And I wonder, Victoria, you talked about the community, cause Adobe's got a really active community, you guys have a huge show that brings everybody together, you obviously came out of that community into the mothership. How important is this, you know, kind of an active community around the creative process, tools you mentioned you even wrote your own scripts. >> Mhm it's, I love the After Effects community in particular they're my friends and a show like this, I see people I have really great friends that I only see once or twice a year at these kind of shows, but it's such a great strong global community that we stay in touch throughout the year, and our users really drive where we're going with things. A lot of the features in this release of After Effects, I could tell you by name who's been asking for them for years and who's super excited to see something in there. >> Okay, so if I see you again in 2018 can you give us a hint as to maybe what we'll see? Don't get in trouble. >> I might get in trouble. But we've got some really cool stuff under way. >> Alright, well we'll keep an eye, and you guys over on the table, you got to learn how to do this talking creative animator thing. I could think of some people that we might want to chin up not the real Donald Trump, but some other people. (laughs) >> Alright Victoria, well thanks for spending a few minutes with us and again, congrats on the new relase. >> Thank you, it's really great to be here. >> Alright Victoria Nece, I'm Jeff Rick you're watching the Cube from NAB 2017. Thanks for watching.

>> Voiceover: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering NAB 2017, brought to you by HGST. >> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with Lisa Martin. We are wrapping up three days of wall-to-wall coverage here at NAB 2017, theCUBE's first trip to NAB. What a great three days it's been. Lisa, I really enjoyed working with you over the last couple days. And what a show! >> Oh, what a show. Frick and Martin together again. This is the biggest show I've ever been to and seen and experienced. The breadth of solutions here for just the... I don't want to say amateur photographer or filmmaker to the six major film studios. That is so shocking, to actually see all of it in person. >> Jeff: It's a little overwhelming. I took a little walk around at lunchtime and out in between the convention center they've got the satellite trucks, and the satellite dishes, Steadicams, and drones flying around... >> Lisa: Yes. >> There's a Crazydrone on the back of a jet ski. Really, a bunch of exciting stuff. 360 cameras all over, virtual reality cameras all over. It's overwhelming, the creative tools that can be put in most people's hands today are virtually unlimited. But it just makes me wonder, is it too much? I guess it's always great to have more tools to work with from a creative point of view, to just have alternate ways to realize your vision, and bring your vision to life. >> Yeah. I would agree on the comment of 'overwhelming'. There's so much to see and do here. When I walked out to lunch, I felt like I was on a treadmill that wasn't going anywhere. Like, where's the exit? But you know, the whole theme of the event, the M.E.T. effects, I think being here you're feeling the convergence of media, entertainment, technology. One of the great quotes that I read before we came here from Shira Lazar, who's the official M.E.T. evangelist here is, "If content is king, then technology is queen." And I think we really saw that underscored in all of the different guests that we had on the program the last couple of days. From security experts to those that are enabling large-scale rendering in the cloud for movies like Deadpool 2. Talking to Adobe who's enabling the next aspiring YouTube star, to be able to have access to what they need to do to be creative and really let their creativity flow. >> Right. And in the comfort zone you see the same things that we see all the time. You see democratization of data, access to the data, we see more data-based decision-making. Especially, what I found really interesting is the conversation around audience development and audience knowledge. You know, the great advantage that Netflix had over the original cinemas or HBO is they actually knew who was watching. They had profiles on how long did they watch? When did they change channels? What were their similar likes? It's all the same things: the amazing amount of power that can be delivered via cloud to any individual or small company to really be a game-changer in terms of capabilities where before, they would have to make these tremendous investments. Same things we hear over and over and over at all the other events that we do. >> Exactly. I would say I would agree with you on that. There was a lot of transcendence, the things that we saw here. Obviously, at a media and entertainment show, but things that are very applicable in retail, in sports and sporting events, from the filmmaker studio down to the individual guy or gal. Even to healthcare, we talk about this massive volume of data. Today, incredible opportunity. A historic event, really, that happened with NASA The first-ever live 4K stream conversation from 250 miles above the Earth down to Las Vegas, of all places, where that wasn't possible too long ago. And you think of how massive data sets are. Not just in video, but also in music production. We even look at things that are transcendent to healthcare, but might not be videos. It might be the massive file sizes for all the imaging. There's a lot of cross-pollination with a lot of the other shows that we go to. I agree with you on the audience front. Being a cord-cutter... we're all cord-cutters these days, right? Something that was interesting to me was, like you said, the streaming providers know so much about the audience. And you think, well, traditional film, they don't know as much, it's been more qualitative. And actually, when we had Joan Wrabetz on from HGST, she was actually saying there's benefits on both sides. That the streaming providers actually can't change content, whereas the filmmakers can, so there's really a lot of collaboration and learning that both can do from each other even though they are, obviously, competing for mind share. >> But Lisa, you're trying to be way too professional. Let's just call a spade a spade. You got to ball with an astronaut. >> I did! >> She said there's only 40 astronauts left in the US space program. >> You're right. >> We've had two of them on theCUBE. Both women in the last six months. >> That's right. I can't even say it was a dream come true, because it's never something I dreamt was even possible. But having started my professional career with NASA aims in the Bay Area, I recognized Tracy Caldwell Dyson from her photo I saw many years ago. What a great ambassador, and very inspiring. She was talking about what inspired her to want to be an astronaut back when she was 14. The Challenger accident, which had a teacher. And we were asking her, with real-time video capabilities, what does that mean for NASA? And she was saying, think of the next generation of astronauts and the next generation that will be going to Mars. How much more inspired that they're going to be because, with this technology that they even shared today, it makes space exploration so much more tangible because now there's these incredible videos and images that can be transmitted down to Earth in real time. So that was probably one of the highlights of my life, I would say. So thank you for handing over the keys for that one. >> It's just great. When they arrived on the set after the broadcast from space, the whole area lit up. They're such, as you say, ambassadors. Astronauts as ambassadors are super smart. They're super friendly. They totally have their stuff together. To get an opportunity to have her on was really cool. That was a really great moment, and so fun. You had the background to appreciate it even more than most of us did, so that was a kick. It just goes to show you, it is really about the future. There is a very bright future ahead. We're going to keep covering it. We'll still keep going out to these events, and hopefully be back at NAB next year. >> Lisa: I hope so. >> All right. So with Lisa Martin, I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE. Thanks for watching us from NAB 2017. Keep an eye out. The busy season is just getting started here in May. We're going to be all over the airwaves for all the rest of the summer. So keep an eye on siliconangle.tv, youtube.com/siliconangle and siliconangle.com. Thanks for watching. [Upbeat Music]

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's, theCube. Covering NAB 2017, brought to you by HGST. (upbeat techno music) >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick hear with, theCube. We're at NAB 2017 in Las Vegas, California. 100,000 people all talking about broadcast industry, media industry, and tech. Met is the theme because the technology is completely interwoven in with media and entertainment. And we're excited to have a great representative from the Hollywood Section Manager, Society Motion Picture and Television Engineers. That's a mouth full, Steve Wong. Steve, welcome. >> Welcome, or SMPTE, that's the easiest. >> SMPTE, I'll go with SMPTE, he's from SMPTE. Alright so you had an interesting talk earlier about blockchain. It's interesting, we've been here for three days and a lot of conversations of kind of, similarities with trends we're seeing at other shows that we cover with democratization of data, and access to the data, and abilities of cloud, and integrated security. But we haven't really talked about blockchain. But I think that's kind of funny, that now we're hearing the blockchain conversation come in too as we hear in many places. Where does blockchain fit? >> You know it's really interesting, because originally I had heard of a blockchain for folks in the financial industry. And that's where the real big push is. And a lot of VC's were talking about blockchain. So I started to look at blockchain and median entertainment, and I said, "You know could this fit? "You know what would be an interesting fit for this?" And when you look at making a movie or a television program, it's just a lot of transactions. And that's where blockchain is absolutely perfect. >> Right. >> You know blockchain is basically a general ledger entry. So when you think of you know, why is that important? You know, I looked back to the origination of content, you know, for moving images, and that's a feature film script or a television script. >> Jeff: Right, right. >> So imagine when you write that, the first thing you do is you go and you register it with the copyright office. So my thought is, that's your first chain in that link of ownership. And so the next thing you do, is you want to option that script off. So you're going to send out a document, your PDF to your agent, and he's going to send it out to a bunch of other agents. And then you'll have a track record of that next transaction, whoever received that. >> Jeff: Right, right. >> So as you go down through that production, you know I envision being able to tie it back to that original ownership for that script. Whoever options his script to go out into the production. To actually take that all the way down to the storage, to the camera, and be able to pull even all of that meta-data together. Link it to the ownership into that chain, all the way to the distribution to the actual viewer at the end of it. >> So, the greatest descriptive term I've heard of blockchain is trust as a service. >> Steve: Right. >> Which is really an interesting way to coin it. And what's interesting about this industry, is the transient nature of the way, you know, kind of groups of people and resources are assembled around a particular project, this script in which you described. They create this asset, and then they go, you know, poof, they go back from whence they came. >> That's the challenge, right? >> So it really begs, it begs for better trust solutions. >> So imagine you get a deal with a show, and they say, "You know what? "We're going to pay you rate, "but we're going to give you percentage of the back end." And you say, "Fantastic." And then you go on to your next project. How do you find that out? >> Jeff: Right, right. >> Right now it's really difficult to track that all the way back, residuals or whatever. This will be an easy way to basically see who's seen it, who gets paid, what you're owed, and everything else. >> Right. Now it's pretty crazy now you said before we turned on the cameras, that it's all very, very still old-school paper based at this point and time. >> That's the crazy thing about, you know, you look at other industries, you know, and I touch a lot of industries. And you think, wow, you know, we've got basic things. Such as when I start with an employer, I can go online and download all of my stuff, and I never touch paper. But even today in the television industry and the motion picture, you know, for 99% of it, it's all paper. So basically all my stuff I have to physically give them, and fill out, you know, documents at the end of the day. You know, a PA checks me in when I show up. A PA signs when I send out, on a piece of paper, they send it in a football back to the financial office at the show. And they do all these things manually. You know, it's coming to where they're doing digital onboarding. >> Right. >> But all this stuff is still paper. Because really it's like we've been making movies for the last hundred years. >> Right, and yet we're surrounded at this conference with hundreds of thousands of square feet of new technology, and new innovation, and computer based stuff, and IP based stuff, and crazy cameras, and 360 cameras, and 4K, and 8K, and HDTV. So clearly there's no holding back the technology edge. That there's three leverages, but then you got to check-in with the PA right? >> If you make billions of dollars the same way that you did a hundred years ago You know, who's going to be the guy that going to change that? Or a girl, right? That's the challenge, if it's, you know, not broke, don't fix it. >> That's why I love Clayton Christensen's book. It's still my all-time favorite book. Right, it hard to change when you've been making money, that same old way. So what are some of your other impressions of the show? You've been coming here for a number of years. The vibe's different I keep hearing. It's our first time, but I'm curious to get your kind of general impression. >> You know the interesting thing is, you know, again following the trends in other industries, you know, to move to a true digital IP workflow. So I'm seeing that really starting to materialize around here. You know, I think that the challenge is... You know, when I started off a hundred years ago on television I was a, you know, de facto MIS manager and director of research at ABC. And back in those days, in the 90s, you know, I connected our sales team to the internet. And then you could actually send emails to the buyers, and that was like a big, big jump. >> That was a bad day though, in hindsight. >> Yeah, so um. >> (laughing) Too much email ack. >> So you see folks that, you know, understand video and BNC cables, and things like that. >> Right, right. You have another group that understand ethernet, you know, NIP. And they have always been in two different worlds. You know, at every TV station, you have your IT guy that would never touch the broadcast equipment, he was forbidden there. >> Jeff: Right, right. >> You know, a long time ago. But now you see that merger. You know, where you really have, you know, a manager or VP that understands video and understands IP, and says, "You know there's a better way to do that." And it's secure now a days, and you know, if you take the right precautions. So that's the trend that I've seen change around here. Because the cameras are all digital, right? >> Right, right. >> Everything is digital along that path, why would you have to go back to video? >> Jeff: Right. >> You know, we have things like Periscope. We can do live video to millions of people. >> Jeff: Right. >> So the technology's clearly here. >> It's just so amazing, you know again, the themes are consistent wherever we go. This just democratization of access, and ability. That I can go sit in the front row of a Dodger, Giant's game, and you know, hold up my Periscope and pretend that I'm Vin Scully, you know, for a minute. Which clearly I'm not. And people probably are not going to watch me like they love Vin Scully. But it's so interesting that at the low-end, you know, there's so many tools available for people, for creators, that they just have access that they didn't have before. At the high-end, I mean, the amount of stuff in this conference room. Again with the 360, and VR, and the IR, and the 4K, and the 8K. You know, it's fascinating. But I sometimes wonder is it too much? Are we still managing, you know, the story telling? And is it-- >> And that's what it comes down to. You have to tell a story, that's the most important thing. >> It's so competitive for the audience, right? Because the alternate is just a quick swipe away, you know. So it seems like the pressure to perform, and to get your ROI's, especially on these bigger projects, has got to be higher than it's ever been. >> Alright, this is an interesting thing, because what we've seen in Hollywood is an increase in production. You know, it used to be you'd wait, you know, for a TV season, and they'd pitch the shows to the advertising agencies in New York. But now with the increase of Netflix and Amazon, there's always a season. >> Jeff: Right, right. 'Cause they're always buying things. You know, whatever YouTube channels. You see YouTube stars that are making money, and that's a valuable audience now. Where people are saying, "I'll just watch YouTube tonight "and see what's going on there, "from the people I like to follow." >> Jeff: Right. >> So that drives production, you know, goals and costs down because you can't do a hundred million dollar YouTube production, or you can I guess, right? But you probably won't make any money with it. >> (laughing) I'm sure they are. But the other thing is just strikes me, just is the compression around, for feature movies, around the opening weekend. 'Cause there's only 52 weekends a year. >> Steve: Right. >> And, you know, some of those are probably not so great from a marketing point of view. And this just compression to make that number. Because the next weekend, or two weekends from now it's another movie, or it's another movie, or it's another movie. And so it's seems just crazy. On the other hand, the long-tail opportunities with VOD, and multi-forms of distribution, multi-language, multi-format, multi-channel are bigger than they've ever been before. So it's this interesting dichotomy in terms of the way the market's evolving. >> The interesting thing, because of that pressure, we see huge growth in analytics. You know, there was a great article from, About Netflix, talking about the genres. You know, in Hollywood we've got like 13 genres or something like that. But Netflix has like 73 genres. >> Jeff: Right. >> So they've broken down their audience 'cause they have the device. You know, they know exactly what they're watching. So they use those analytics to their benefits when they buy. You know, the studios are at a disadvantage, unless they have the same things. >> Right. >> So you see guys like Legendary investing in analytics teams and, you know, all these other folks out there that are investing in these analytics teams to make that, you know, smarter investment for those movies. >> Right, it is interesting is, again, as it gets consistent, right? Is that now, if you can track to the consumption of the material, you're not just shipping the product anymore. And it's going to a theater, and hopefully people are watching it or not watching it. But now if they're watching it on their phone, you know, where they're watching, who's watching it, you know what time, how often, how deep they go-- >> Well now that's the key. >> Jeff: It's pretty interesting. >> If you have that application, and you have the ability, you know, like Netflix does that's awesome. >> Jeff: Right, right. >> But remember most of the studios and networks, they're creating it and licensing it off. So they may not get that information. But that's where you see the other trend, where folks like HBO, they create the content, but they also want to have that application device so they can get that information. So I think that's another trend you'll start seeing. >> So will the ones that are still independent that don't have the channel, you know, start to get back as part of their channel deal, some of that data? >> It's challenging, right? Because cable companies typically don't want to release that data. You know, a secondary OTT app may not want to release that data. So it really forces a creator to own that distribution chain, so they can get that valuable data, so. >> Interesting time. Somebody said earlier, I think in the week, that Netflix, I think, is now the largest producer. I don't know what genre of category, but they're like one of the largest studios now of all. Which is pretty fascinating, when they were simply, you know, DVD rental service not that long ago for people that remember what a DVD was. >> Steve: Right. Having difficulty getting contracts with studios. >> Jeff: Right, exactly. >> But-- >> So make your own I guess, that's the ticket. >> Steve: There you go. >> Alright, Steve, so I'll give you the last word. As you look forward to 2017, if we meet again here next year-- >> Steve: Yes. >> What do you think the topics going to be? >> Again, I think what you're going to see is more folks moving to a public cloud, trusting that, and really working with it, using analytics. And the most important thing, that we touched on, is managing that security. Making sure they don't get hacked, so. >> Alright, Steve. Well, Steve from SMPTE. That was the shorter way. >> There you go. >> Steve Wong, I'm Jeff Frick. Thanks for stopping by. >> Steve: Thanks so much. >> Alright, you're watching, theCube, from NAB 2017. We'll be right back after this short break. (upbeat techno music)

>> Narrator: Live, from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE, covering NAB twenty seventeen. Brought to you by HGST. >> Welcome back to NAB. Good Afternoon , I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live at day 3 of NAB. Happy to introduce you to our next guest Shailendra Mathur, the VP of Architecture at Avid. Shailendra, welcome to theCube. >> Thank you. >> You were telling me off camera that this is your eight or ninth NAB. I'd love to, before we kind of dig into Avid and what you are doing, just get your perspective on the incredible transformation you've probably seen in those eight years. What are some things that stand out to you that maybe seemed like a fad seven or eight years ago that you've seen that are now absolutely well established and critical to the media and entertainment industry? >> Well, you know what, one thing I'll comment on right away is something I've been commenting to other folks who haven't been here that long. When we used to come to NAB some time ago, outside in the parking lot would be all these trucks. There'd be all these helicopters, right? That's how news broadcast, this was done. The parking lot is empty. That's not where things are. There are drones in here in cages, right? That's the new way. The digital age, as well as, the new technologies have evolved. The way we collect news and the way we actually capture news is changing quite a bit. So, that equipment is changing, quite a bit. Yes, yes. So, you spoke at the virtual NAB conference last month on cloud transition patterns for media enterprises tech trends. What are some of the things that you're seeing? What did you share in that conference? >> So, the biggest tech trend I think we're seeing is the move to cloud computing. Cloud has been around for a while, we all been used to it. Whether we're using DropBox or anything other mechanism of exchanging content. What's happening is that it's now being adopted by the media industry a lot more. And again, what we knew as server based computing, you had machine rooms where servers were being created but were being hosted. There was dedicated connectivity between them. A lot of that is now moving to network. And, the compute storage, all of that, is slowly moving over to the cloud. And the cloud providers are actually making it very possible to do so. So, a lot of what I was talking about at the VNAB conference was how some of these broadcasters who are faced with these new challenges: to get more efficient to have geographically distributed productions what patterns they can actually adopt to ease their transition to the cloud. So, just as an example, in the cloud there's an efficiency of doing something called serverless computing, microservices. But then, there's a lot of IP. A lot of server based compute that has been built up. So, there is a transition pattern still of going from machine room to data centers. That's the central localization. Just using virtualization technologies, going from data centers now to the public cloud. And in fact, even doing it in such a way that you're connected in all three environments. So that if you wanted to transition over you can actually connect all these three environments. So that was the main purpose of the talk and I was talking about some of the implementations that we have done as well within Avid that actually eases that transition so that you can host your server processes, how actually editing clients are working across. We have actually done a lot of implementations so I was explaining how that transition can be possible for not just broadcasters but film makers and also audio archivers. >> Yeah, I wanted to talk about audio. We've been talking a lot about film, the major studios at the conference this week, news, broadcast news, streaming services. But, you guys do a lot with audio and music production. What are some of the biggest pin points that you see in music production that can really be alleviated by moving to cloud computing? >> So artist are artist everywhere. You will find artist. You don't want to be restricted by geography in finding the person you want to collaborate with. What does cloud provide? That one centralized location where you can exchange information. Exchange your creativity. So this is one of the areas where we focused on, where we have pro tools, as our primary audio dual. And what we enabled was having two artist collaborate with each other even by sharing tracks. So, you could have somebody doing a guitar riff somewhere, a drummer somewhere, a singer somewhere, and they are collaborating on these tracks. And we are using the cloud to exchange a lot of this information back and forth. You can message each other. Hey, I need this piece of work done. They record it. You integrate it back. That was a perfect example of cloud collaboration. And this is aimed at the aspiring musicians who can collaborate. As well as professionals. >> Looking, thinking maybe, of the professionals and music production company. What does there transition, as the VP of architecture, I imagine you speak with a lot of customers who are probably quite influential in what Avid is doing from a design and R and D perspective. What is a music productions company's transition to production in the cloud look like? What are the, I don't want to say hurdles, but what are, maybe, the steps in that journey to get to cloud? Is it a destination hybrid? Is it a journey through hybrid to public? >> So that's what some of the current restrictions, I'll call it, will slowly disappear. But the fact is. When you're interacting as an artist with a surface control, a mixer, that's text tile information. That's right there. However, what doesn't need to happen is that the competitions that happened behind it doesn't have to be right there. With network connectivity you can start moving that away from the control that you have over what you're creating, your mixers. So, this is where some of the compute is moving away. Now, you have to take, especially in audio, latency is very important. Like, low latency. So, low latency networks have to be there. On the video side in fact, we're showing video editing being done directly on the cloud. With VDI technology, which is Virtual Display. Technology It improving so rapidly now. We are actually able to do editing directly. while, instead of having a workstation on premises, you actually have it running on the cloud. So those are examples, which are hurdles. But, they're not really hurdles. That's just creative choices. You need to have your color correction services control here but slowly those are the ones that are moving to the centralized data center or all the way to the cloud. And now, even some of the display aspects where you needed everything to be local, that's also moving. So things like GPU base compute that's appearing on a lot of cloud providers. That's allowing your cloud back end to drive your displays now, remotely. >> Last question for you before we wrap up here. I'd love to understand how Avid is involved from a technology perspective to help broadcast news for example, assemble a story and get it out in real-time 24 by 7. In contrast to a few years ago here at NAB when the parking lot was full of trucks with satellite towers. How are you helping to assemble the story with technology? >> Well, news is changing. News is changing. It's coming in rapidly. A lot of the new sources are in fact sometimes social feeds. I'll confess. Some of my news, in the morning, is not by the news paper. I'm checking my Facebook.(laughs) >> Yeah, or twitter. >> Or twitter. And that's where I'm getting my news. >> Absolutely. >> It's mixed in with my own personal news as well as, it's news, it's news. So, collecting that information that's become a very important source of information. Of course, story telling as a journalist doesn't get replaced. You still need the skills of making sure that you can craft it all together. So that's where assembling it telling that story through an editorial process but treating just the social feed as an input to the whole process of collecting this information. This is one change that's happening but of course it's not just social media as a source but it is also destination. That's another big change. So you're not just publishing out your story to a news outlet. You can tweet it out. So these are all changes that are happening. And these are all You ask about how are some of the customers influencing it. We just have the Avid connective end. And one of the things that we find really good about the Avid connective end these are our customers telling us how they're changing. This how we're collecting input and reacting to it and changing what we need to do to serve them. >> Excellent. Well, I'm curious what you'll see the next eight years of NAB. Shailendra, thank you so much for joining us on theCUBE and sharing your insights. >> Thank you very much Lisa. >> And we want to thank you for watching theCUBE. Again, we're live at NAB twenty seventeen on day 3. I'm Lisa Martin. Stick around, we'll be right back. (light techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering NAB 2017. Brought to you by HGST. >> Welcome back to The Cube, we are live from NAB 2017 on day three, live from Las Vegas. Excited to be joined by my next guest from Adobe, Laura Williams Argilla. Welcome to The Cube. >> Thank you so much for having me. >> You are the director of Product Management for Professional Video. >> Laura: Yes, I am. >> And you've been, you are focused on digital video and storytelling. It sounds like that's been a long-time passion of yours. >> Yes, I actually was raised in a family, my dad was a video person as well. He worked with educational technologies and helping connect people in remote areas with more populated areas for educational purposes. And he always had video gear around the house and was very passionate about watching movies and making television. And so he got me indoctrinated pretty young. And by the time I graduated from high school, I knew that I wanted to do something with media. And so I went to school for broadcasting. >> Wow, that's fantastic. So speaking of connectivity that your dad was able to facilitate, tell us about what Adobe is doing here at NAB 2017. What's the Creative Cloud? >> So the Creative Cloud is the suite of Adobe tools. And it is a collection of all of the tools that enable creativity from digital imaging to motion pictures to Photoshop and all of the core creative tools, and a collection of services that help enable the connection between those tools. At NAB this year, we're announcing the Creative Cloud additions, or updates to the video products including After Effects, Premiere, Premiere Pro, AME, Audition, and Speedgrade Prelude. The whole bundle. >> The whole bundle. So talk to us about the target audience for Creative Cloud. Is it the wannabe YouTube star? Or are we talking about broad spectrum or is it more focused on the kind of like the individual filmmaker? >> With the Creative Cloud, we actually have a really broad range of customers who we target. We target everybody from the aspiring YouTube creator who's just starting their channel, all the way up to some of the major motion pictures. Deadpool was edited in Premiere Pro, Hail, Caesar! by the Cohen Brothers was also edited in Premiere Pro, as was Gone Girl. And we continue to just see amazing adoption. Also, Premiere is broadly used in broadcasting environments, but that doesn't preclude us from also being incredibly functional for individuals or small groups. >> So if we look at kind of those target audiences as maybe the large and the small separately for a second, walk us through for the aspiring YouTuber, what are some of the benefits that person is going to get in comparison to the benefits that a creator of Deadpool would get for example? >> Sure, so I think, in general, there's a lot of overlap because they're both trying to tell stories, right? So you both start with raw footage and shape that into the story that you're trying to tell, and those tools work whether you're working on a motion picture or you're working on a YouTube channel. But I think there's certain things that we've introduced, like this year at the show, motion graphic templates, which give the opportunity to work with really powerful motion graphic effects in Premiere using simple sliders, the essential sound panel which also dramatically simplifies some of the most common audio corrections that a YouTuber or anybody would make, but especially for someone who maybe doesn't have the technical depth of being able to jump into Audition and figure out all those parameters. This is a single slider for adjusting multiple parameters to increase the overall quality of their audio with one quick move. For the broadcast and the high-end motion picture end, one of the things that we're really proud of with Adobe is that we work well with partners. We have a huge ecosystem of third-party partners, everything from asset management systems to audio enrichment systems, that you can access directly through Adobe through system panels that they can create to give direct access in our tools. And it really makes the workflow so much easier because you're not having to pop in and out of a system to get work done. >> One of the things that kind of popped up when you were talking about the commonality of benefits from the aspiring individual to a studio is how they gain efficiencies from this. Talk to us a little bit more about, with respect to the partner ecosystem, how the partnering with Adobe helps enable efficiencies across this whole production process. >> Absolutely. So one of the best examples that I can give for efficiency is the asset management systems that we can enable to have direct access for users inside of Premiere. So if I'm working with any number of asset management systems, instead of having to go and use a web interface or a client interface to access my files, that can be presented as though it is part of Premiere. So it feels like I'm getting just a panel, like a window that has a view directly into my asset management system, which makes it feel like a much more cohesive part of that workflow, and also it saves me the time. And as a former editor, I know that you lose thought process when you have to jump out of what you're doing to go get that asset and come back. With this process, the interface doesn't change. You get to stay right in Premiere and go pull the assets that you need for that. And it just makes it so much easier and so you end up spending a lot less time with the jumping between, getting back to the good state and remembering what you were doing also. >> That's a really interesting point that you bring up about how we look at technology as this facilitator, as this enabler, but also the cognitive process that an individual is responsible for whatever part of it has to go through is also facilitated by offloading some of these tasks and making it automated and simpler. That's not something that I think we've heard this week or kind of talked about it in that context, but that's quite important. >> It's very important, and I think as a creative person, you want to remain in your creative space as long as possible and you don't want to go into the administrative space of asset management. You want that to be handed to where you're working. And I do think that that constant shift of focus is really difficult to manage and stay in that productive space. So I think, to me, that's one of the biggest benefits of having these interconnected tools. >> Speaking of other benefits within Adobe from a content volume perspective, you guys are providing access to over 75 million stock images, videos, 3D assets, graphics. What does Adobe's cloud look like to be able to facilitate this quick access to things like that? >> So we have a really powerful architecture behind our cloud. Each part of the system is established to best serve that type of use, and the acquisition of Adobe Stock has been one of our prides and joys because it is, again, the direct access to millions of images and videos and you can access those directly through your product. So if I'm in Premiere and I need a stock image, I can search for stock images inside of Premiere and I can place that image and test it, it'll be watermarked. I can show it to you, say does this work? You say yes, and I can buy it without having to go through the process of replacing that image. I just click, buy, and it changes the image in place, letting me know that I've now purchased it or licensed it, which is, again, a huge time saver. But the infrastructure behind the cloud is really, wow, (laughs) it's large and scalable and we have incredible uptime service. We're very, very fortunate with the way that we've been able to manage that architecture. >> Do you find any of, is security a concern for, or are you finding it now that there's so much proficiency in, not only cloud technologies, but cloud users, that it's really not nearly as big of a concern as it was before? >> I think there used to be a lot more concern about it, and Adobe has made security a first priority for cloud assets, especially when we understand that your creative material is so much a part of your income, and it's yours, it's proprietary. You don't want other people to have access to it unless you choose to share it. So we have a full security team focused on making sure our assets remain safe. But in the past few years, we've seen an enormous shift in people's willingness to put assets in the cloud and data in the cloud. And I think as people become more comfortable with it because of the known quantity of what internet security looks like, what data security looks like, they're more comfortable with it and then they're able to reap the benefits of having that connective workflow, that they are not forced to manage, upgrade, maintain. >> Exactly. >> Yeah. >> Offloading that is always fantastic. Well Laura, thank you so much for stopping by theCUBE and sharing your wisdom of all your years of expertise at Adobe, and also before when you were kind of groomed by your dad. It was great to have you on the program today. >> Thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure. >> Good. And we thank you for watching. Stick around, we're live from NAB 2017 on day three. I'm Lisa Martin. We'll be right back. (calm and smooth electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas. Its theCube, covering NAB 2017. Brought to you by HGST. >> Hi welcome back to theCube, we are live from NAB 2017. I'm Lisa Martin in Las Vegas, excited to be joined by the co-founder of Avalanche, Josh Kolden. Hey Josh, welcome to theCube. >> Thank you. >> So tells us a little bit about what Avalanche is. >> Well, Avalanche is a file navigator for film makers. It allows, the difference being from something like Windows Explorer or an Apple finder, is that it allows you to work with files wherever they are, on different computers, in the cloud, on different units of production as they're moving around the world. Without having to do all the low-level coordinating of that data. >> So in media we're talking about massive files. How is this different from Dropbox, Box, et cetera? >> So those tools actually try to synchronize your data. So they, if you put a big media file in Dropbox it'll try to copy not only the file to the cloud but also of course to any other computers you have your Dropbox running on. What Avalanche is doing, doesn't necessarily can move it, but it doesn't necessarily move it. Instead, let's say you're an editor or studio and you want to see what's happening on set, you can see all the files as they're coming off of a camera and interact with them. Rename them, make notes, whatever has to happen, see the notes that are already applied to them. And when those files show up in editorial, in say hard drive that's when all that happens, and gets synchronized locally. So it allows people to work in a very intuitive and natural production workflow, without actually trying to copy huge amounts of data across the net. >> In terms of like the production life cycle, are we talking about pre-production, production, post-production, or the whole kit and caboodle? >> It's the whole thing, because what happens in production is you see teams of people kind of ad hoc join the production, they might have teams during pre-production that are there for a bit and teams that come on in post-production. So there's always this coordination problem of knowing who has what, you know, where is the camera? Post-production's looking for camera imports that only people that were on set know about. And this provides a mechanism to kind of have a continuity between all those different teams across the entire production pipeline. >> Continuity is key. What, give us an example, you had mentioned, and this is really built for filmmakers. If something is filmed and the crew or the director decides, you know what, that would've been great if we'd actually shot that for VR. What's the process of them, or how simple is it or seamless for them to go back in, pull something out, change it? >> Well, in those kinds of situations, I mean production generally, usually has a lot of planning involved. So you're going to know going in those kinds of issues, if it's something as big as, we want to have extra footage for VR or whatever. But one thing that happens is, let's say for example, there's a costume change where you've got a product which is a suit or something, that needs to be placed in the scene for the financing and then somebody spills something on it, but story-wise that works, so they're going to keep it in. People that are in the product teams later down the line might need to know these changes have occurred so they can either pushback and say, no we need to re-shoot that with a clean suit, or whatever that information might be. That back and forth. So this makes that even possible at all. Before it would just be making sure that somebody on production called the, that team and explained it to them. Right now, with this, you can just put a quick note on any device and it eventually be findable, you can just search it like Google, and find any information related to that suit, or that shot, or that production day. Any kind of different ways of searching for the stuff you're looking for. >> So facilitating a little bit of automation. You talk about the connectivity, but also it sounds like the visibility is there, much more holistic. >> Yeah we call it discoverability, because right now a lot of the stuff isn't discoverable. Once, say you don't know what row database entry is, once you've lost that row number. There's no way to find out where that data comes from anymore, it's just completely disconnected. So we use a framework, it's open sourced underneath, called C4, the Cinema Content Creation Cloud and that framework provides a mechanism that what they called indelible metadata where it binds attributes to media in a way that doesn't easily get lost. So downstream you can discover relationships you didn't expect to be there. You don't have to preplan all the relationships and build them in advance. >> So one of the things you and I were chatting about before we went live is how, how Silicon Valley approaches this cloud. Versus how Hollywood approaches it. Tell us a little bit more about your insights there, I thought it was very intriguing. >> Yeah, this is a really interesting thing because not a lot of people realize, because a lot of people were on both sides, Hollywood and Silicon Valley, were using the same terminology. We're talking about the cloud, we're talking about files, we're talking about copying things. But there's subtle differences that get lost. And so what I've been working on a lot in the open sourced community, and in standards is helping to communicate this new concept that what we really need is, like a web for media production. With a normal web that most of Silicon Valley and cloud tools are built on, you're expecting to be able to transfer all your data each time. You go to the website, you get the webpage right then, you get all the images that it links to right then. But you don't want to do that when you're doing media production cause that might represent terabytes of data for each shot. And you need to work relatively quickly. You might be doing renders or composites, these things might take many many many elements to layer together. You can't be requesting this data as you need it every single time. You want to kind of get there and use, do all the processing you can possibly do all at once. So an architecture like that calls for a different kind of internet. An internet where your data moves less often. You get it to the cloud and you leave it there, and you do all your processing on it. Or it's in editorial, you do all your editing with it. The pieces that you need are in the right places, and you move them as little as possible. You move, command and control and metadata between those locations, but the media itself needs to arrive either maybe by hard drive or get synced in advance, there's different ways of that moving, but it doesn't happen at the same time that the command and control is happening. So yeah, we are trying to communicate that difference. That Hollywood is used to it happening because they have the data center in their building. Silicon Valley's used to it happening because it's small data across the network. And that's where that disconnect is happening, is they both think it's just a quick call, but it works for them because of a different architecture that they're building on top of. >> Different architectures, different, I imagine objectives. How are you helping to influence Silicon Valley coming together with Hollywood and really them influencing each other? Whether it's Hollywood influencing the type of internet that's needed and why, and Silicon Valley influencing maybe get away from the on prem data centers. Leverage hybrid as a destination, as a journey. Leverage the cloud for economies of scale. What's that influence like? >> Yeah, it's really fantastic because I think it's a perfect, it's really really good relationships between the kinds of skill-sets that Silicon Valley companies bring to the table, and the kinds of creations talent that Hollywood has. In fact, there's a lot of what Hollywood production studios don't want to have to invest in. They don't want to have a data center. If they can have a secure, productive, as you need it tool set, that they turn up they performance on when they're in production and then turn it off when they're done. That's exactly what we do with camera equipment. We rent it for the production and we give it back. So we're used to in Hollywood, that production model. So it's kind of teed up and ready to use all those services, it's just this kind of plumbing level that has been everybody's pain point. >> So from a collaboration perspective, are you facilitating, like a big cloud provider meeting with one of the big studios and really collaborating to kind of cross pollinate? >> Yeah so, I've been working with the Entertainment Technology Center, that's funded, at USC yeah, they're funded by all the major studios, and have other members like Google and other big vendors for cloud and whatnot. And these groups are very interested in trying to collaborate with technology companies and figure out the best ways to work together. And I have a lot of experience with cloud and computer technology and Silicon Valley style services. And also for production. So I've been working extensively in trying to bridge that gap, in terms of the understanding, but also in terms of some fundamental tools like I was saying, the open source framework, C4, so that, kind of like the web and HTML and all that stuff came about. Nobody could go to that level of the internet and create that new economy of the internet until those foundations were in place. So that's what we've been pushing. >> Speaking of foundation, last question before we wrap here. Where are you in this, kind of first use case example of the meeting of the minds? How close are you to really fixing this facilitated to really support what both sides need? >> We've actually been doing a number of production tasks over at ETC. We've shot several short films using these things. So all these things are actually in place and usable today. It's just a matter of getting people to start using them, be aware of them. They're all free and, you know, easy to use, relatively for technical people, for Silicon Valley people. And then there's going to be another layer that we're really, that's why we're talking a lot about it, that's going to be the software companies and the hardware companies supporting it. We're pushing it through standards. So it'll be showing up on everybody's radar soon. And we'll see higher level integrations, so the digital artists that don't know how to do that lower level software stuff will just get it for free from the tools they use. And that's kind of what the Avalanche file manager does, it provides a lot of that cloud technology underneath and you don't have to worry about it, it just looks like a file manager. >> Very exciting. Thanks so much Josh for sharing your insights and what you're working on. We look forward to seeing those things coming to the forefront very soon. >> Alright, thank you. >> Thanks for joining us on theCube and we want to thank you for watching theCube. Again I'm Lisa Martin, we are live at NAB 2017, in Las Vegas, but stick around we will be right back.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas. It's theCube, covering NAB 2017. Brought to you by HGST. (techno music) >> Welcome back to NAB, live from Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin with theCube. Join me in welcoming our next guest, Rich Welsh CEO of Sundog Media Toolkit. Hey Rich welcome to theCube. >> Hi, thank you for having me. >> Great to have you. So, first and foremost, now that I got all my tongue twitches out of the way, I have to ask you, what is a sundog? >> A sundog is actually a weather affect. It's an optical illusion caused by ice crystals in cirrus clouds. And the crystals are hexagonal and they diffract the light and you get these two, they're called mock suns, or parhelians, and the aboriginal word for that is a sundog. And so, that's where that comes from. And because we're in the cloud and we're like hexagons, we have a hexagonal user inter-face in our system. So we thought this was a perfect name for the company. >> Very unique. So tell us a little bit more. Sundog is a cloud-native solution for post-production in the cloud. >> Yes. >> You were founded in 2013. Give us a little bit more of an understanding of what you're doing for post-production in the cloud. >> Okay, so the system is built around running the kind of processes that require a lot of heavy-lifting and need to scale, such as very complex image manipulation processes, restoration, format conversions, working with uncompressed content, high-dynamic range, 4K, high frame rate. These are things that become much easier in a cloud environment and you scale up and down with the workload, and how peaky demand of a production. Obviously productions come along, they do a load of work and then they shut down again. So it's really built around that kind of ability to scale in a very peaky environment. >> So given that, you mentioned 4K. There was the live stream from The International Space Station today via 4K here to Las Vegas, amazing. 4K, HG, UHG, AK, massive opportunities, generating massive content that requires agility, speed, et cetera, et cetera. Talk to us about really what the genesis was for Sundog. What opportunity did you see in the market to create this company? >> So my background is operations in post-production distribution. I worked for Dolby and then Technicolor, and while I was doing that work, I found that there was often issues again with the kind of workloads where the formats were constantly increasing, I mean, we see that now, more formats than ever in terms of not just the things people might think of in terms of downstream tablets, mobile, and so on, but even in the cinema, we have massive amounts of different picture formats, sound formats, and so on. And it makes that whole content creation process so much more complex. We felt, Chris Ralph, who is my business partner and the co-founder of Sundog, and we'd worked together in that environment, but we always had machines in a machine room in the basement. And that really was a big limiting factor to what you could do and how quickly you could adapt to new formats and new requirements for the customers, and just the workflows they may want to suddenly adopt. So we felt that building something in the cloud gave us a lot of flexibility to be able to adapt to those different workflows, to new formats very quickly because you don't worry so much about the actual difficulty of doing the processing, you're not buying boxes anymore, so speed of processing becomes a function of how much of the cloud you want to use. So it's very simple to be able to go well, if for a 4K show we have way more compute power just to keep us going at the same speed as we would have for an HD, when then as we move into things like AK, high-dynamic range, high frame rate, these things are all coming along. You can just adapt more or less instantaneously to those things as they happen without having the burden of capital expenditure and limitations of whatever you already have installed. >> So give us an idea, you mentioned cinema and I know that you work with Hollywood-level cinema organizations. You talked about the speed, the flexibility, the agility, that they get. Walk us through an example of a film studio. What's the transition like for them moving post-production to the cloud? Is it a straightforward process, multiple steps involved? >> No, there are definitely multiple steps involved. I wouldn't say it's straightforward. It's maybe not quite as difficult as people would think, but there are a lot of factors that you need to consider when you're moving to the cloud. I mean, the first obvious one is you have to move the data in. So traditionally, a broadband infrastructure is going to be something that you have to invest in over a fairly long period of time to get good cost-effective bandwidth when you're moving uncompressed data and particularly if you're now moving up and down to the cloud, but we're seeing telecoms providers moving to much more flexible business models basically. So they're installing very high bandwidth fiber, but then you have the actual amount of data that you want to move on-demand. These kind of models are enabling people to move their post-production to the cloud. And the next thing, obviously, is security. People do have concerns about security. But with that said, actually the really big cloud providers have worked very hard to lock down that element. And in fact, there are many other industries whose security requirements are very stringent. You know, military applications, pharmaceuticals, banking, oil and gas. You can imagine all these very high-value industries that require really good security. And the big public clouds are geared towards that, so actually, you can have a lot of confidence as a studio or a broadcaster that if you implement it correctly, you can have really good, I would argue better than facility security, in a cloud environment, because they're actually dealing with stuff that cannot be lost. >> Right. We were actually, theCube, just at the Amazon Web Services Summit in San Francisco last week, and that was kind of a recurring theme that the security concerns really have been quite mitigated in the public cloud. Give us an idea in terms of maybe reducing the time from shot to post-production to actually showing a cinema in the theaters. How much reduction can a cinema, or film studio expect by moving to the cloud? >> Well, I mean, you can get incredible amounts of reduction because now if you can scale to that workload, let's say a big international release feature film might have three, 400 versions that will go out to cinemas, those versions in their current kind of paradigm have to be made manually in boxes, and with operators and then they have to be watched and qualified to make sure they're going to work, and then they get shipped to the theater. If you imagine moving that workflow wholesale to the cloud and we have done that work with some of the studios, now if you can get all of the elements together up front instead of having several weeks of work to get that out of the door and into theaters, you can literally do it in hours. There's no real limitation to the amount of compute resource that you would use in that scenario, certainly not going to trouble a really big data provider like Amazon, AWS. So you can get the assets out very quickly, but then you're actually able to leverage other features of the cloud such as content delivery networks to push those files to the cinemas. So in a real like joined up workflow in that way, I mean, we're not doing all of those things yet, but we will get there I'm absolutely certain and these things can take the release cycle from weeks down to days or hours. >> So dramatic, dramatic savings. Talk to us about, before we talk about the underlying infrastructure of Sundog, walk us through where Sundog is in that entire production pipeline. >> Okay, well actually Sundog's quite a broad platform in terms of the feature set, so we find the systems used by different productions at various different stages and that can be upfront in terms of dailies, and visual effects approvals, it can be right back at the distribution end when you're making all your foreign language versions, dubbed subtitles, and so on. And then we have a lot of processes which would typically take place in the middle of the post-production phase with things like image clean-up, de-noisers, we have super resolution converters, and actually a lot of tools that aren't available in hardware, simply because it's been very difficult to get a hardware platform that could reasonably process those elements in any amount of time. Again, we're finding that the cloud is becoming an environment for productizing those really complex algorithms and image processing techniques that just have not been available to creatives up till now. >> So with the customer journey, this transition that we talked about, what does, under the hood of Sundog in the cloud, compute, storage, networking, tell us about this ecosystem? >> So we took the approach from the start that we didn't want to deal with the storage element, that was for two reasons. The one is that customers really want to control their content themselves. So we felt if we could simply point the system to their storage, then that would be a much easier way for them to have to confidence that they know where their assets are and they're in control of them. So we work in a hybrid setup where you can have your assets stored anywhere you want. In a cloud, it will have to be a cloud environment, and then our system authenticates to it. Now the system itself is in Amazon, so all the compute, and data-base resource, and then all the kind of dynamic features around automation and so on, are built on the Amazon AWS platform, but the data may exist elsewhere so it might be in Amazon, it might be in Amazon S3 storage, but it could equally be somewhere else in the world in a different data center, it be on-prem in a cloud store that you've built yourself. So our architecture really is to provision and orchestrate that resource and scale, to provide the tools, so we have all these workflows with different manufacturers tools in there that you can call on-demand. But then when it comes to actually processing it, the data starts and finishes where you want it to go and gives you complete control. So it's quite a different architecture to a lot of solutions that are currently out there where you really have a box in the cloud with the storage attached to the box, and that's kind of it. >> Well not only do you have a very unique name with a great meaning, but you also seem to have quite differentiated technology. We thank you so much for stopping by theCube, we wish you the best of luck with Sundog, and have a great rest of your day three at NAB. >> Thank you very much. >> We want to thank you for watching. Again we are live at NAB in Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin, stick around we'll be right back. (techno music)

>> Live from Las Vegas it's The Cube covering NAB 2017. Brought to you by HGST. >> Welcome back to The Cube. We are live at NAB 2017. I'm Lisa Martin. Very, very excited, kind of geeking out right now to be joined by our next two guests. Sam Blackman, the co-founder and CEO of AWS Elemental, welcome to The Cube. >> Sam: Thank you so much. >> And we have NASA astronaut, Tracy Caldwell Dyson. Both of you, welcome to The Cube. >> Thank you. >> Today has been a very historic day for technology and space. This was the first ever live 4k video stream that happened between you on Earth, Sam, and Doctor Peggy Whitson, aboard the International Space Station. >> Sam: Yes. >> Wow. Tell us about that. >> It was truly amazing to be part of history and the amount of technology that came into play to make this possible. You know, sitting in the conference room in NAB in the middle of Las Vegas, seeing astronauts 250 miles ahead, going around the Earth, 17,000 miles an hour and a seamless, beautiful 4k picture. It was mind blowing. Hard to believe it's happened still. >> I can't even imagine. I'm getting goosebumps for you. Tell us some of the things that Dr. Whitson shared about her experiences. What was the interaction like? >> Well, Commander Whitson and Colonel Fisher was also in the interview and that guy is hilarious, by the way. >> Yeah, he is. >> He is hilarious. They talked about how advanced imaging technology really helps NASA perform experiments and bring experiments that are happening on the space station down to Earth for researchers to use that data and discover how the world works inside the universe. Some of the really interesting examples revolved around some experiments they showed. With thin film technology they had a very small, metallic structure that they could pull water out of and then corral that water, convert it into a spherical shape and in the 4k resolution, you could just see every element of that thin film in a way that looked like it was right next to us. I mean, it was transformative. >> Tracy: Yeah. >> I bet it was. Well, speaking of transformative, this was, I mentioned, a really historic event for a number of reasons. Obviously, for those of us on the ground, for AWS Elemental. But, Tracy, from your perspective, you've been in space for 188... I had it here somewhere, hours. >> Yeah, days. >> You've been on STS118, you've been on the Soyuz to the station on expeditions 23 and 24. What does this capability now mean in the life of an astronaut? >> I think what it does is it helps us bring the experience to everybody here on Earth. It is so hard to capture what we are not just seeing, but experiencing. The richness, the detail, the vividness of the colors and how they're changing are all a part of looking at our beautiful planet. And just from that alone, being able to bring that to the American people, the world, really, is, I think to me a great relief. Because it grieves me to think about how in the world I would describe this beautiful, magnificent view to everybody back home. >> I can imagine. You've done extra-vehicular space walks. >> Tracy: Yes. >> And I can imagine it's indescribable. >> It is. And from the fact you're looking at our planet from 250 miles above, you see the curvature of the Earth, you see it moving at a super high speed, you don't feel the wind in your face, but there's no doubt you're traveling very fast. Just the fact that you are out in the vacuum of space. If you could bring parts of that experience to people back home ... I'm excited to think about how that would transform just the way people think, not to mention the way that they act towards our planet. >> I also think inspiration ... We were talking before we went on that you were about 14 when the Challenger incident happened, we all kind of remember exactly where we were, and that really, a teacher being in space was so inspirational to you. Can you imagine shifting the conversation and what this technology is able to do inspiring the next generation of people that want to be the next Tracy Caldwell Dyson? >> Well, I think what the technology does today, especially in imaging capabilities, is it provides so much more detail than I could even describe. That a young person today watching that, and our generation today is so visual, that they're going to pick up on things that I wouldn't even think to describe to them. And it's going to capture their imagination in ways that are astounding. Compared to I, who, just the sheer knowledge of knowing there was a teacher that was going into space, propelled me to work really hard. I can only imagine what this generation's going to be capable of because of the images that we're bringing to them. >> It's so exciting. Sam, this is really kind of the tip of the iceberg. From AWS Elemental's perspective, first of all, you just had a rebrand. But what does this mean for the future of the video ecosystem? >> Well, I think it really shows you how the technology components came come together to create unbelievable pictures no matter where you are on the planet or in space. We had a live 4k encoder on the space station itself sending down signals to Johnson Space Center, then Johnson Space Center sending redundant links to Las Vegas, here, and the convention center. And then processing the video, the interview with Tracy, here in the space center-- or, here in NAB and then using the cloud to distribute that all over the world. So these 4k images, which take a significant amount of bandwidth, can be created in space, delivered here, produced and delivered anywhere in the world using the power of the cloud and advanced networking technology. And that's pretty amazing, when you think about it. >> Lisa: It really is. I don't think the three of us are smiling big enough. >> I know. It hurts! >> There's so much relief in this face. >> Lisa: I can imagine >> I bet. >> I absolutely can imagine, I think. One of the cool things about-- This is our first time at NAB with The Cube, but we're here: Media, entertainment, Hollywood. What this shows is this transcendence of technology to space. And there's so much interest in space. In fact, Tracy, you were an advisor to Jessica Chastain on "The Martian," which is probably pretty exciting. >> Oh, absolutely. It is. >> But just the transcendence of that and how this technology can be used to power things that everybody can understand, movies and things. But also the future of space exploration, which I can imagine, right now in the era of the space shuttle being retired now, depending on Soyuz rockets to get to the space station as the next vehicle is delivered, this must be quite inspirational for you as an astronaut, as not only is the next vehicle in development, but also, the exploration of Mars. In fact, you were just last month with President Trump. >> Tracy: Yes. >> As they signed a bill. What are your thoughts about that and how do you see imaging technology being an instrumental part of Mars exploration? >> In so many ways, but at the top is the momentum. Like you said, with Hollywood has captured space in some real endearing ways. And the images from NASA, from the human space flight program to Hubble to deep space, it is propelling ... it's momentum. And I think we need that momentum, especially with our young folks because they're going to be the ones, let's face it, who are going to be in the best condition to be on the planet of Mars. So, if we can continue to feed them the images as lifelike as we can, so that they feel they're there, I think we are heading in the right direction to actually being there. >> Wow, fantastic! Congratulations to both of you. Thank you both so much for joining us on The Cube. We can't wait to see what's next. >> Sam: Thank you so much. >> Tracy: Thank you. Thank you. >> Well, for Tracy and Sam, I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching The Cube live from NAB 2017. Stick around, we'll be right back. (funky music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering NAB 2017, brought to you by HGST. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. We are live at NAB 2017 on day three from Las Vegas, I am Lisa Martin. Excited to introduce you to our next guest, Jim Blakley the GM of the Visual Cloud Division at Intel. Hey Jim, welcome back to theCUBE. >> Thank you, thank you, it's good to be back. >> Great to have you here again, you are a CUBE alumni. You've been at NAB, you said this is your third or fourth year, >> Yeah. >> Talk to us about, from cloud perspective, technology perspective, what are some of the trends that you've seen really emerge as leading technologies? >> Well I would say this year particularly there's much more focus on the things that are near and dear to Intel's heart which are virtualization, IP networks, the drive to move all the workflows to standard, compute platforms, and the thing we've seen in many, many industries over the years and we've talked about it here before at NAB, but this is the first time that I'm really seeing it taking hold. Really exciting, yeah. >> So talk to us about visual cloud, what are the benefits of visual cloud for studios, for broadcast news for streaming companies, producers? >> Yeah, there's two real values. One is, it's just a simplification of the infrastructure in the longterm. It just makes it easier to procure equipment and easier to run a software based infrastructure as opposed to having to do it all with purpose built hardware which this industry currently does use a lot of. But the other thing that's really critical is it starts to open up the opportunity for new types of experiences. Things like augmented reality, virtual reality, What we refer to as media analytics which is the application of artificial intelligence to media. Those sorts of capabilities give you the ability to tell a story in a way that you weren't able to tell it before. >> Talk to us about how a movie studio, speaking of that storytelling which, sometimes technology, a lot of times it's phenomenal. But there are times where you see where it actually gets in the way of storytelling and you lose ... We were talking to some folks the other day here, I think on Monday, about really leveraging analytics to determine even the sequence of a movie trailer. How much time should the lead actor or lead actress be on camera, in a trailer. Give us an example of a studio where they're really leveraging analytics to improve the viewing experience. Right, nowadays, a lot of the younger audience isn't going out to movie theaters because they're used to having access on tablets, mobile devices, etc. >> Yeah, I guess I haven't seen a lot of it. I've seen a few of the studios that are doing work in that area. We do see research happening at some of the bigger universities, particularly those that are tied to the studios. >> Okay, maybe UFC with their-- >> UFC yeah. We just actually announced here a collaboration, what's called an Intel Science and Technology Center, at Carnegie Melon and Stanford, that is doing research in this area and they're partnered with some of the UC schools to be able to do those sorts of analytics to be able to understand how directors, certain directors change scenes. How many shots from this angle, how many shots from that angle? Coloring and so forth. Using the analytics to understand how another story was told in order to apply it in the creation that they're making for that. >> Interesting. So cloud adoption, you're seeing that on the rise maybe in media and entertainment? >> Yeah. >> Whereas some of the things like analytics maybe are more emerging? >> It's much earlier. It's much earlier both for the technology behind artificial intelligence, media analytics. Deep learning has come on enormously over the last couple years and it's being applied very heavily in this space. But it's still early in terms of real applications where you can see a real result from it. >> The amount of data, and content that studios, broadcast news, streaming companies are generating we're talking petabyte scale, media archives. How do studios, broadcasters, etc., how do they evolve their IT infrastructure to get to the visual cloud? What's that journey like? >> Yeah, so there's a few things to focus on in that. There's how do you manage your compute and applications in that environment? What sort of infrastructure do you have? And that's where a move to a standard virtualized infrastructure really makes sense. We've seen that in a lot of different industries that you first have to make the decision that you're going to move to that sort of an infrastructure. Then networking becomes very critical because especially in this industry, because the size of the data is so large, moving it from place to place becomes one of the big constraints. So you need to think through your networking infrastructure, that can be a shift from SDI over to IP based networks that give you much more flexibility both within your environment but also to move things out into cloud environments, service provider environments. Or other services that you can get access to. Of course storage is a huge portion of the transformation. In traditional storage systems from the traditional vendors, they're great for file-based storage. That typically is the way we see people do it. More and more a lot of those platforms are also built out of standard hardware, standard equipment but really building an expertise on how to operate your cloud infrastructure across those three domains is the critical first step. >> Where is the conversation typically? Is it with IT, is it with the business? Do you see those two sides aligning to facilitate and plan this journey together? >> Yeah, over time, yeah. The initial, frankly the initial seeds usually come out of the CTO office. Whoever is looking at the edge of technology and pushing the transformation. In companies that listen to their CTO, which not all companies actually do that, but the CTO typically goes through an exploration process, understanding what the technologies are and how to apply it in their particular space. Then as that learning takes place through a group of concepts, through testing, evaluation, vendor cooperation, learning from peers in the industry, that's how it begins to deploy. >> We were talking the other day to a guest who was driving large scale rendering through the cloud. How can visual cloud enable this large scale rendering, these workloads that studios are now-- >> It already is. Most of the large render farms are in fact large clouds. They're made up of servers that are tied together often with special purpose network that gives you really good performance to share between them. But effectively they are clouds. Specially set aside for rendering. Some of the opensource software, like Renderman, that's in that space has facilitated the ability of people who may not have been creators of rendering farms to be able to pick it up and do it fairly quickly. >> You mentioned storage, cloud, compute, tell us a bit about what Intel is doing on the alliances side to enable visual cloud. >> Intel has always been an ecosystem player. We don't typically sell direct to most people. 100% of my job or 90% of my job is making sure that our relationships are in place with the equipment providers, the systems providers, the solution providers. People like Erikson, Harmonic, Cisco, as well as many of the smaller players to really help them adopt the technologies, go through this journey themselves as they transition their products from more purpose built systems to open standards, cloud oriented systems. We act as both a technical advisor to them and of course if you've seen any of Jim Parson's recent Intel ads, Intel is 98% of the cloud infrastructure. >> One of my favorite shows, The Big Bang Theory. From a perspective of industries obviously here at NAB entertainative and media, as we look at a lot of companies like an Envidea for example, who's really, and a lot of companies like them and others across industries that are starting to leverage technology for social impact. Almost every company these days is a tech company. What other industries do you work with that are great candidates for visual cloud that are generating a tremendous amount of video content, besides, media? >> I think healthcare environments are very big, not so much from the video creation but in terms of image processing and being able to look at medical images and CAT scans. Create 3D models out of all the data sets that they have so they can manipulate and view them and make diagnosis off of them. That's a big industry. The other one that we think particularly for virtual reality and augmented reality will be education. Both in terms of the typical K-12 and college but also enterprise based training. So if you're trying to learn how to assemble a new machine, you could do that assembly through a virtual augmented reality system. It scales much better than having to have everybody get their own machine to work on. >> Absolutely. Jim thanks so much for stopping by theCUBE again. It's great to have you back on the program and we hope you have a great rest of your day three at NAB. >> Thank you very much. Thanks much for being here. >> We want to thank >> Absolutely, we want to thank you for watching theCUBE. Again, we're live in Las Vegas from NAB 2017. Stick around, I'm Lisa Martin, we'll be right back. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, It's The Cube, covering NAB 2017. Brought to you by HGST. >> Welcome back to NAB day three. I'm Lisa Martin. We are here live in Las Vegas very excited to introduce you to our next guest, Alan Hoff, VP of Market Solutions for Avid. Welcome to The Cube. >> Thank you, Lisa. It's great to be here. >> You are an NAB veteran. This is your 21st year. >> Indeed, yes. >> You must have seen incredible transformation. >> Alan: It's true, yes. >> Tell us about just, you were saying before we went live that you've really been here at the start of digital transformation. Walk us through that kind of the evolution that you've witnessed? >> Yes, certainly. So when I first came here in 1996, the show was a little bit smaller and I came with a company that did non-linear digital video editing systems, not Avid but a competitor. And that was really the first link in the overall production chain that became digitized, and so that was really the forefront of the digital transformation that we're now seeing play out and ultimately culminating with all these cloud-based workflows that everybody's talking about. So I've been watching it as that digital production value chain has evolved all across knocking down one category after another, and as I say, it's really culminating now with the journey to the Cloud. >> Speaking of journey, this journey that you've been on in your seat, what are some of the things that surprise you still in yearr 21 for you at NAB? And what are some of the trends that you've seen go from maybe something buzzy to a real key value solution? >> Yeah, so I think Cloud was being hyped quite a bit a few years ago, and Avid was there. We announced some cloud-based workflows a couple years ago, et cetera, along with others. But it's really just now at this show that we're really seeing it come into a more pragmatic, broader workflow solution. The challenges that the industry is facing at all levels is that they need to create more content at higher quality that is more standout in nature and that is engaging and attention-grabbing than ever before, because there's so much more of it being created, and there are so many more outlets in which it can be consumed, and it's no longer on anybody's schedule but the consumer's schedule. So that has really thrown a wrench in the works in the traditional business models that people have gone through. And so Avid saw this a few years ago, and we developed something that we call the Media Central Platform. The goal of that platform was to standardize all the disparate different technologies and bits and standards that were out there into one unified whole to make it easier for individual artists or creative teams, like at post houses, or even the largest media enterprises out there, to get more efficient in the way they create their content and distribute their content. So what that's meant is Avid, which historically had been a very vertically oriented and closed company, had to learn how to play well with others. This is not unlike what we're seeing from other large players in the industry, Microsoft for example. These guys have realized that, in order to deliver what it is that the customers are looking for, again, regardless of their level of the segment, they have to be open and play well with the perhaps traditional competitors or folks that you never would have thought would have a solid workflow. So in the case of Avid, we, a year ago, announced that we were working with Adobe, which has always been a tool of choice for Avid customers. It's very common for them to have Avid products, Adobe products. But in some areas, we were directly competitive, and so what we ended up doing was we made it so that the Adobe Premiere products could work seamlessly within the Avid Media Central Platform. This year, we did something similar with-- >> You've got a big announcement at this show? >> Well, with EVS, we did integration. So EVS makes these, arguably, the world's best sports replay service, those great sports slomo replay, et cetera, that you see on sporting events. They have basically become the standard in that area. So we wanted to integrate the workflow. So we worked with EVS. They used our connectivity toolkit to create a flow-blown, certified membership in the platform so that an Avid user can have access to the EVS assets as if they were the Avid assets. So seamless workflow, all because that's what the customers need to be able to create this content faster and get it out to more devices. >> Speaking of the customer, you mentioned some alliance partners. In your role at Avid, you're responsible for product marketing alliances. Talk to us about what you're seeing, from the customer journey perspective, as they're transitioning media production to the Cloud. You mentioned some of the pain points. Walk us through kind of a typical journey, Whether it's a customer in sports or a customer in media and entertainment. >> Sure. Great, great. So our big announcement at the show here was the partnership with Microsoft and the fact that we were going to be moving the Avid Media Central Platform to Microsoft Azure Cloud. This is a really big watershed moment for the industry, if I may be so bold, because now, Avid with her big alliance ecosystem is going to be migrating to the Cloud. And the more gravity that the Cloud has, the more easy it will be for folks to have a peace of mind that that's a place they can trust and move to. We feel that we had a great advantage in moving to the Cloud, because we already had taken a platform approach. So when we say we're moving into the Cloud, it's obviously not to the exclusion of the typical terrestrial ways that people are accustomed to working. It's all meant to be complementary so that folks can take a hybrid approach. What I mean by this is, whether you're in sports production or in news production or in post-production, you're probably not just going to wake up one morning and say, okay, that's it. Everything I'm doing has got to be in the Cloud, because that's where everybody's going. I need to look in a very planful manner at the way I go about doing things and look at the benefits of what the Cloud brings and be selective in terms of what parts you want to migrate when. And with the partnership with Microsoft, what Avid is saying is you could continue to stay in your traditional on-premises approach here, if you want. You could being to migrate things into a private data center, either still in your own facility or maybe down the street in a data center. Or you could go fully into the public Cloud. And that last one, it's interesting how many people have reacted: oh, I don't know if I'm ready to put my assets, my gold bar equivalence-- >> Mission critical, right. >> into the Cloud, I don't know if I'm comfortable doing that. But the reality is this Microsoft Azure Cloud is trusted by every large banking institution on the planet. It's trusted by the United States Department of Defense. The biggest secrets and the largest assets in the globe are protected by Microsoft Azure. They've gone to extraordinary lengths to make sure that data is going to be secure, and the same holds true for media and entertainment assets. And to really put a fine point on it, they went and got the Motion Picture Association, the MPAA, certification for security, so they have all that. So it's as good as being in Fort Knox when it's in the Cloud. So I really want to put that to rest. I mean, these guys, all they do is think about the security and denial of access to any sort of outside threat, whereas most media and entertainment companies, that's only one of the things they're thinking about. They've got a lot going on, you know. >> Lisa: Exactly, exactly. >> And they are actually more vulnerable, even in terra firma on promoli solutions than they would be going to the Cloud. So just a little editorial aside, because security is a big concern to people at all levels of the industry. >> It is. Certainly, those in the technology space understand is, it's a reducing of the concern, but it is a concern nonetheless. It sounds like what you just articulated customers have the choice of hybrid as a journey or hybrid as a destination. >> Correct, correct, right. They might never move beyond a hybrid state, although I would predict that in five years from now, most everything is going to be cloud-based, and once people start to see the scale and reach and productivity they can get, as well as the benefits of things like machine learning and artificial intelligence (mumbles), just going to help them speed the way that they go about doing what they do. It will be clear that that's the way they should probably be doing what they do, >> Exactly. >> And that's at levels. >> And finding more value from the digital assets that they already have. That's right, exactly. And so, that's the other thing is, once it's in the Cloud, it's easier for you to repurpose and distribute, say, to over the top services, et cetera. So we were talking before about Netflix and Hulu and Amazon and Avid's role there. This may be-- >> Yeah, tremendous amount of content, 80% to 90% original content is produced with Avid. So in the last minute or so, tell us about that. >> Yeah, so Avid has grown up through the industry, we're almost 30 years old, and we understand the pains and challenges that the traditional broadcasters are facing by these insurgent and incumbent newcomers like the streaming services. But what I think is interesting is that those guys are using our tools, too, as you say, to a very large degree. So we're very privileged to have the streaming services as well as eleven of the largest international news organizations using us. Six of the largest Hollywood film studios are using us. We're very fortunate to have all that great diversity of customers that have embraced us across various parts of their workflow. >> Fantastic. Well, it sounds like not a dull moment for Avid or you. >> Right. >> I want to thank you so much, Alan, for stopping by The Cube. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> You are now a Cube alumni. I am, yes. It's great to have been here. Thanks for the invitation. >> Thank you. >> Okay. >> We want to thank you for watching again. We are live at NAB from Las Vegas. I am Lisa Martin. Stick around. We'll be right back.

>> Voiceover: Live from Las Vegas it's The Cube, covering NAB 2017, brought to you by HGST. (lively music) >> Good morning, welcome to The Cube I'm Lisa Martin, and we are live at day three of the NAB Show in Las Vegas. Very excited to introduce you to our first guest this morning, Michael Harbin, the VP of Pac-12 Networks. Good morning Michael, welcome to the cube. >> Good morning, how are you today? >> Very good, very energized. >> Oh good (laughter) >> Day three. So Michael, tell us about Pac-12 Networks, The content arm of the Pac-12 Conference. >> Sure, we have a six regional sports networks in the western US, and then one national feed, we also have digital properties and some over-the-top services on Twitter and Facebook Live, so we're involved as we can be in all forms of distribution. We're located in San Francisco, the conference itself is over 100 years old; it was 100 last year. The networks launched four years ago, this will be our fifth season coming up in August. We're very proud, very happy of our distribution, and our student athletes, and our partnership schools, and it's a great place. >> So you are the first and only sports media company that is owned by its 12 universities. >> That's right, so the SEC is partnered with ESPN, and the Big 10 Networks are partnered with Fox, so we're on our own, we stand on our own, and we do the best we can with what we have. >> Give us an idea of the genesis of the network. >> It started with the new commissioner, Larry Scott on the Pac-12 side, he came in and had a vision for helping the Pac-12 realize what it could be, as opposed to... Being on the West Coast has its disadvantages; our audience size isn't that big, our games start when the East Coast is going to sleep sometimes, so he wanted to get rid of an East Coast bias that existed in collegiate sports, and really make Pac-12 what it should be. We have the best geography, we have the best schools, we have land in... Tech and entrainment, so we have a lot going for us, and I think he brought those things to the forefront, and helped position Pac-12 in a much stronger position than it had been. In the world of liscencing content, we leapfrogged at the time the rest of the conferences in our deal with ESPN and Fox for our football and basketball games. With the games that weren't sold to Fox and ESPN, commissioner Scott thought to create a media company that we would own and control, and that would distribute the rest of our collegiate and athletic events that we have that are controlled by the Pac-12. >> So you mentioned basketball, football, you do big events, but you also do small events. Give us an idea of what it's like to produce a big event in the fall; a big football event, versus some of the smaller Olympic sports like field hockey? >> Sure. We have our three seasons; fall, winter, and spring, so obviously winter, the mostly indoor sports, but in the fall we kickoff big with our football season, and there's 12 or 13 weeks, and we have a championship game in early December which is a big event. That's one of the reasons the Pac-10 went to the Pac-12; the NCA says if you have 12 football teams, you can have a championship game. >> Okay. >> If you have less than 12, whoever has the best record is the winner, so we added two schools, and we have a champ game; those media rights were sold to Fox and ESPN, so it was a nice deal for us. So we start off with football; those are more traditional productions that everybody's used to. Big 53-foot truck pulls up, we do our production compliment with seven, eight or nine cameras depending on the game, depending on the market, depending on the week, the time of broadcast. We usually get- we choose our games after Fox and ESPN chooses theirs, so sometimes we get good games, sometimes we don't. They're all good; they're all Pac-12 games, so they're all good. But those are very traditional productions that are done in very traditional methodologies that everyone would see. As we start getting into basketball, those two are typical productions, but the volume of basketball games is such that we found a new way to do those games a little bit less expensively than the others. >> So less resources? >> Yeah. And then of course the spring sports where you're into baseball and softball, track and field. Track and field is a very expensive sport to produce because there's a lot going on at any one time. In that way, we've gotten away from video as a means of transmission and done IP transmission, which saved us a lot of money, and as we've got that IP path between our schools and ourselves, we've learned to do new things with it. We're doing content sharing back and forth, advanced production techniques, multiple camera paths that we normally wouldn't have on a production of that size. All of our shows, no matter where they are or what sport they are are produced in surround sound 5.0, so we think we lend a lot to the smaller sports that get smaller audiences, but we think we put a lot of production value to them to do the athletes and the sport justice. >> Talk to us about the underlying technologies that are necessary to support going from video to IP so that you can really open up the types of content and where it's distributed. >> Right, so one of the difficulties- we have around 100 venues in the 12 schools that we have to be able to broadcast from. Depends on the university; at Standford, those soccer and lacrosse fields could be way out. They call the campus 'the farm' for a reason. There's a lot of acreage there to cover. And some of our venues aren't even on campus. UCLA football is at the Rose Bowl, USC is at the Coliseum, so we had to find a way to get away from video which is just a single path and costs a lot. We needed more bidirectional service, we needed something that was secure and had really low latency so that when we did our productions we did the coaches interviews afterwards, it's basically like a phone call. We also provided internet services to the production, which everybody needs internet connectivity. The Chyron people, whomever. The crew itself, just for checking in and their report times and things like that, and we also provide four-digit extension dialing for our in-house phone systems. It's a very efficient and cost-effective way for us to do our production out there, and provide this suite of services that if I was just using a video circuit, I wouldn't have access to unless I paid extra for it. >> So presumably, creating a ton of content, how do you maintain all this content and be able to retrieve things, be able to livestream, have things on demand, that's that underlying archival storage strategy? >> So we produce 850 events throughout a year, and that's just to give you an idea, I think Big 10 and SCC are around 400, 450. We have a lot of volume going on, and we do a very good job, I think, of archiving that, logging those games, adding metadata, as much metadata as we possibly can to it. Including repurposing the closed caption files, we attach that as data, we get articles, stills, whatever we can gather about that particular game, we add it as metadata, and then we archive that. We keep it on very fast, short-term storage in our building on spinning disk, and after it ages, after about the second season, we push it into Amazon Cloud. It goes right into Glacier if it's that old, but immediately when we do a game, we push it up to S3 in Amazon, where we share and monetize our content at that point, and then from there it just goes to Glacier, so we have, we think, a very efficient workflow, it's highly automated, we have a great media management department that does a terrific job with very few people, very scarce resources, they do what I think is one of the best jobs in the industry in terms of saving that content in an effort to monetize it in the future. So if you can find it and search through it and get clips from it, it's going to be that much more valuable for us. >> So one of the prevailing things that we've been hearing all week, and not just here, is the democratization of content. The audience, we're very much empowered, right? As a viewer of anything we want; we're binge-watching, we're streaming, we're time-shifting, we're sharing it on social media. What is the process that Pac-12 Networks goes through to understand your audience as well as you can to deliver them the experience that you think they want? >> We have the data that comes back from our TV Everywhere product, there are OTT platforms that we can gather up and sift through. We've undertaken a fan engagement project to work with our universities about the type of people and who attend their football games, or their sporting events, and a way of better understanding who our audience is and tailoring our program to that. Understanding who they are, what their preferences are, it will help us, I think, to fine-tune the kind of content we put in front of them. Everybody loves a winning team, and you have no problem filling seats or getting an audience when your team is winning, so we understand that; we just want to be better during those times where the team might not be undefeated, so we'd like to get people in there anyway. It's a challenge for us, it really is. >> What about this concept of original content? You're now producing original content. There are three shows? >> Yes. We have some anthology shows; The Drive, and All Access during football and basketball season that give a behind-the-scenes look akin to the HBO shows on the professional side that look at professional sports. We go behind the scenes, and the stories for some of our athletes and some of our teams are quite compelling, and it makes good television. That gets also supported by our shoulder programming for our live events; pre and post-game SportsCenter-type shows that we do, and we try to do live halftimes that are topical for every one of our sports events that are played, so that's a lot of volume, a lot of churn that goes through a small studio in a small facility. We think it helps the live events look better, I mean, live events are what people are tuning in to watch. You can't fast-forward through a sporting event which advertisers just love, you kind of have to consume it in the moment, unless you can keep yourself away from the internet or your phone for a few hours until you get a chance to watch the game. We think being in live sports is a really special place to be, because you can't fast-forward through it. Any support that we give those live events, that's really what the other original content is geared to, is to build interest in those teams and those events, and attract people to them. >> So you have this concept of TV everywhere. Original content, traditional content, how is the cloud helping the Pac-12 Network to really collaborate across all the content, all of the connected fans and wherever they are? >> Sure. Just to make a distinction, we have the TV Everywhere which is the authenticated platforms that our cable providers use, and we have our own digital properties as well that still need to be authenticated, and then there's the over the top platforms like Facebook Live that are everything but the 850 events that go on the air. So behind the scenes, sideline reporters in the locker rooms, whatever else we could produce, pep rallies, that we think could be compelling content for Facebook Live we do. On Twitter, we've licensed out the 851st event and beyond, so we do some very limited productions, but still quality, that gets distributed on Twitter. So that's kind of this thing. TV Everywhere is basically the high-end product, and then these kind of ancillary second-screen experience, whatever you want to call them that don't need to be authenticated, that anybody can pick up and watch. That's how we make that distinction. I'm sorry, what was the second part of that question? >> How does cloud help collaboration? >> So we were really early adopters of producing those streams ourselves, so with Elemental Technologies who is a wonderful vendor and partner of ours, they're now owned by AWS, I point over there, they're somewhere in the building. >> (laughs) >> We're a big early adopter of their technology, we've really tried to strive for a business partnership with our vendors, rather than just a check-writer, check-casher relationship, which doesn't do us well, we don't think. We developed this relationship with them, and they helped us deliver our mezzanine streams to Occami and distribute from there, but we do that encoding in-house on their equipment. Eventually I think we'll move that to the cloud and get it all virtualized, but for right now we run their servers in our house, and they understand that we would like to get it out as quickly as we can as some point, but we're working on emptying our CER as fast we can; I don't want any blinking lights in my CER if I could get there someday, but that's a dream. >> So last question, we just have about thirty seconds left, you're in San Fancisco, >> Yep. >> With a really cool opportunity; sports entertainment technology. When you're looking for young talent who could potentially be swayed by the big Googles of the world and Facebook, what is really unique and cool about working with Pac-12 Network? >> For us, it's a two-edged sword. We love being in San Francisco; it gives us access to young people, a new way of thinking, different technology companies that are more IP/IT centric than TV centric. So we think that gives us a real advantage. The other edge of the sword is that we lose a lot of network engineering especially, systems engineers to the tech companies; they would prefer to work at Uber or LinkedIn, something like that. TV's kind of a dying tech, you have to jazz it up a little bit to gain their interest. >> But it's evolving based on what you're talking about-- It is. It's very much that skillset for being an old-time TV engineer is becoming less and less important than network engineering or systems engineering skillsets; that's what we really look for. If somebody has a Cisco certification, he gets our- or she gets our interest, rather than just 'I've worked in television for 20 years,' because we know which direction we're going in. >> One of the things that you articulate as we wrap things up here is that every company this day and age is a tech company, so we wish you the best of luck. You've said you've been at this show for 30 years >> 30 years. >> I can't even imaging all the things that you've seen. Michael Harbin, thank you so much for joining us on The Cube. >> Thank you very much, it was a pleasure being here. >> We want to thank you for watching, we are live from NAB in Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin, stick around, we'll be right back. (techno music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE covering NAB 2017. Brought to you by HGST. (techno music) >> Hey welcome back everybody. I'm Jeff Frick and you're watching theCUBE. We're at NAB 2017. A hundred thousand people, Las Vegas Convention Center. The place is packed from top to bottom, 3 halls, 2 floors. Hopefully you can find theCUBE if you're looking to find us. It's hard to find it. A lot of people here. We're excited to be joined by I think the best title of anyone that we've had on the show over the last couple days. It's all about content, but at the end of the day you got to find content creators. And we've got one here. Lucas Gilman lists as adventure photographer, filmmaker, and G-Technology, GTeam ambassador. Lucas, great to see you, thanks for stopping by. >> Thanks for having me. >> So tell us a little bit about your company. I know you're an independent photographer, videographer. Some of the work that you do, some of the stuff that keeps you busy from Monday 9 to 5. >> Exactly. So a small film production company. We also do stills. So it's sort of a one-stop shop for a lot of brands that I work with. We're basically trying to service everything from still images for advertising purposes and commercial purposes to video for commercials, advertisements, and/or stock use. >> So as you look around, the ways that you can now capture imagery, I'll just say as a more generic term, with 360 cameras and drones and regular photography and GoPros and all of this different stuff. I mean, what a palate of tools that you have to work with. >> It's amazing how the technology is really changed. I remember that when I first started out in the photography and digital photography, we would have 16 megabyte cards and now I'm using SanDisk cards that are 256 gigabytes. And the -- >> The 1 T's are coming, I keep seeing >> Lucas: Yeah, yeah exactly. - the 1 terabytes are coming. >> We're excited to get some of those. (laughing) But yeah, it's crazy that sensor technology keeps getting better, more pixels, more data. Which really throws sort of another monkey wrench into your solution because the cameras are getting higher capacity every year. We just shot a project in Iceland with a RED 8K Helium camera. That's a 36 megapixel still camera essentially, but shooting 24 frames or 30 frames per second of data. So we're talking, we shot 24 terabytes in a week. (laughing) >> 24 terabytes in a week. >> Lucas: In a week. >> Yeah so definitely adds a whole other layer of complexity now. Because now you can shoot so much, you can shoot at such higher res. Now you got to capture that stuff, you got to store it, you got to manage it. >> Lucas: And back it up. >> And back it up. >> And because, it's digital right? It's ones and zeros and once those are gone, they're gone forever. So my typical strategy is to have everything in three places. It's kind of the rule. Two, usually in the office. We have a primary copy and then a copy that doesn't ever go anywhere. And then we also have one off-site, so in the unexpected event of a fire, flood, tornado, or getting robbed or something like that, you still have those assets at home. >> Right, right. So I assume that's how you got involved with G-Technology to begin with. >> Yeah, it really started with when I was younger I had an unfortunate incident where brand X had a failure and I went out and found these G-DRIVE minis, which are amazing. I buy three of them per trip. And I reached out to them and sort of told them the story and they had this team that they were putting together and I was fortunate enough to be asked to be a part of that team. >> Okay so what's the mission of the team. What is a GTeam ambassador? >> The GTeam ambassadors are basically, they pick people in different disciplines whether you're a wedding photographer, or a filmmaker, and they basically pick people that are hopefully the best at what they do. Because as a photographer and a filmmaker, I'm out in the public a lot and people ask me, "What kind of camera should I buy? What kind of hard drive should I buy?" So our mission is to go out and educate people on not only the products we that use in our workflow that we rely on for our livelihood, but to really educate people and say, "Hey, you know I know you may never be shooting the Tour de France or going to Iceland and shooting expedition but this is how you could back up your images from your wedding or your kid's soccer game or something like that." >> Jeff: Right, right. >> So sort of an educational role as well as hopefully a little bit of inspiration as well. >> Right. And when it comes down to it, you mention that you used another product that failed you. That's like the old days and you forget to save your Word document, right? It only happens once. >> Lucas: Exactly. It happens once. (laughing) >> It's a very painful experience. >> Right, right. So I mean, is it just reliability? Is there something else in these G-DRIVEs that you like? Obviously reliability is A number one but is there more to it than that? >> Totally. So I was really drawn to the G-Technology because they're really the only ones, or were the only ones, that were putting enterprise class hard drives into enclosures. And people say, well what's the difference? And to me, you're getting a professional product. It's something that's going to last longer. It's meant to be put in an enclosure, in a RAID array. Because like I said, everything needs to be backed up and once it's gone, it's gone. And face it, there's a lot of people that want to be photographers these days. And filmmakers. And I can't go to a client and say "Oh it didn't work out." You know? (laughing) There's no take two. No second chance, you know so. So I really, it is the backbone of my business. Whether you're a restaurant or a photographer, you are providing a product or a service, and if it doesn't work out for somebody, they're not going to come back. >> Right. And it is so easy to go to the alternative. Now what about about Cloud? Is Cloud part of your workflow? >> It is. I'm getting more and more into it. I'm using different resources. But I don't rely on the Cloud as my primary backup. It's a way that's convenient for me to get images to clients or video clips or finished products because then I'm not shipping a drive across the country via FedEx or whatever. So it's another tool in the arsenal. I don't rely on it exclusively, but I feel like it is an important and powerful tool to be able to distribute assets and at the end of the day, make it more convenient for everybody involved. >> So what did you say, 24 terabytes in Iceland. >> 24 terabytes. >> What was the coolest part of that trip? >> Ice caves. >> Ice caves. >> We went into these caves that literally have streams coming out them that the ice they were saying is like 10,000 years old. And you're like the first person to touch this ice. It's really, really crazy. >> And how many people on that shoot? >> We had 6 people. So we had a professional athlete, a surfer. I typically shoot adventure sports and travel. So we brought a professional surfer, we had a MOBI operator, a camera operator, and a grip, - [Jeff] Right. >> an assistant to help out. >> I'm just curious your point of view, right. Even in commercials and advertisements and stuff, still a story narrative, right? It's got to be part of the equation. It's what pulls everything together. >> Story is king, and the second part of that is the quality of the production has to be there. Whether it's the video quality, the content, and/or the sound, all those things are integral keys to being successful. >> So do you find... I just, you know, there's so many toys here. It's like toy heaven for production people. Is it easy to get distracted from the storytelling because of all the toys? How do you begin to integrate and experiment with drones, whether it's your footage, or some of these other tools, and yet kind of stay true to a beautiful narrative that someone's going to be interested in consuming. >> Well it goes back to that thing we were all taught. KISS, right? Keep it simple, stupid. We use drones. We shoot in the water. We use all these tools. But the minute that that tool becomes so heavy that it takes away from being able to tell that story, that's when we've got to be careful because you can get sucked into trying to do a steadicam shot or a MOBI shot all day and all of a sudden you've wasted a whole day if something's not working. So you got to be consistent about what the vision is and your storyboard is because, yeah. Walking around the halls here there's a helicopter you can ride in now all of a sudden. It's like a mini drone. And, I do feel like a kid in a candy store. But you need to make sure that you're not getting so focused on the technology that you're not focusing on that storyline. Because that's really what clients will come back for. It's because as a creative, anybody can go out and automate things and make drone shots and this and that, but it's that story that really ties it all together. >> Right. And I think it's just really interesting how your photography background, more freely into multimedia, right? Which includes video and all the permutations that there are. I saw a cool thing where I guess you can unwrap the 360s so now you get this new kind of artistic, kind of ball impression. So the options are so huge for you right now. >> Yeah, it's really, the sky's the limit. As a professional, I need to make sure that I'm staying up with technology because really the technology is so accessible now from people taking images with their cameras and/or videos. I need to make sure that I'm setting myself apart from that demographic by doing something as a professional that is something that they can't offer. >> Right alright, I'll let you get a plug in so we can go in and see the Iceland footage. Where should people go to take a look at some of your work? >> So they should go to gtechnology.com. There'll be that Iceland. And they'll also be some workflow involved in that video so the people might actually learn something about what they might do to back up their images and/or videos. >> Alright Lucas, well hopefully maybe you got an extra room for a gofer or something on your next trip. And I can come help schlep pumpkins for you. Alright. Lucas Gilman, thanks for stopping by. >> Thanks for having me. >> He's Lucas Gilman and I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE. We're talking about G-Tech and really cool movie making, media making. It's all about media and technology here at the NAB 2017. Thanks for watching. (techno music)

>> Narrator: Live, from Las Vegas. It's the Cube! Covering NAB 2017, brought to you by HGST. (electronic music) >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCube. We're here at NAB 2017 in Las Vegas Convention Center, 100,000 people, place has got a buzz, last year was all about AR and VR, this year it's all about machine learning and AI, platforms and storage and cloud, kind of sounds familiar with most of the other events that we go to. So we're really excited to have industry veteran, Roger Sherwood, he is the global strategy media and entertainment lead at Cisco, welcome Roger. >> Thank you very much. >> So first off, you've been coming to this show for a little while, first impressions? >> This is my seventh year, we've been super relevant for the last two or three years, we used to be buried away in the hole, in a dirty corner. Yeah, what a fantastic show! I think it's bigger than ever. More exhibitors than ever. Which amazes me in this space, but it's pretty fascinating to see what's going on right now. >> Now, you guys are doing big things, you basically took over cisco.com. >> Yes, we have. We get to do that for two weeks a year. >> For two weeks, so tell us about what's going on with Cisco and media. >> Well, for the show itself, NAB has become one of our major events. We used to do INTX and SCT and very cable, you know, Telco, and all that shows. Strong recognition within the company that a lot is changing on the content side, the production side. And we've had these customers for many, many years, very much selling into the IT side of these places, and two years ago, we really took an approach of, we're really becoming quite relevant on the broadcast side. The technology has changed, the technology has moved frpm from very traditional SDI technology, to IP. And that's Cisco's wheelhouse. Virtualization, UCS, orchestration, security. For the first time, we're very, very relevant on the content acquisition, distribution, production side. So yeah, we get to take over the Cisco homepage, because for the next two weeks, a lot of people want to talk about media and entertainment. Brand new website, brand new customer testimonials and everything else. It's nice to get that recognition from the company that this is a big thing. >> Right. And there's a solution behind the takeover, right, it's not just for publicity. >> Oh, no, no, no. It's all real. We're absolutely doing things. The big thing for us is this transition to IP. We're an IP company, 30-35 years ago, the company was founded on the premise of IP. This industry is one of the last ones to go from a legacy protocol. I mean, broadcast has been broadcast, it's been the same for 30-35 years. >> It's your classic kind of opportunity meets capability. >> It is in transition. And Cisco loves to go into transition, and what Cisco also loves to do, is take out legacy network protocols. So, SDIs, are exactly that. IP is here, I will say that only in 12, 18 months however, have we actually had the compute capacity, the bandwidth capacity, to take what is essentially, you know, I'm being filmed in uncompressed video right now. >> Right. >> You know, the routers and switchers that we sell, have not been able to process that amount of information. The last 12, 18 months, Moore's Law on everything else, and some software optimizations. Uncompressed video is flowing at high speed, across data networks, that Cisco provides. That's a great place to be, as this industry recognizes. >> It's funny, the Moore's Law thing, because people like to poo-poo on it, you know, but no, Moore's Law is an attitude. >> Roger: It absolutely is. >> It's a way to attack problems, with just massive increases in capability, whether it's networking, storage, or compute, and the combination of the three together, it's crazy. >> And that's exactly where we found ourselves two years ago, and so, we have very good timing. But we are a company that likes to step into those, you know, and say, "We've got this!" We understand, we've seen so many transitions in other industries, from legacy to IP. And hey, this one is just high cashe for the company, I mean the brands, and the names, and the companies that we get to work with right now, from Disney to NBC, to the BBC, these are fabulous companies that have global recognition. Like Cisco. >> Right. And it's interesting with the UCS comparison, not so much that it's Apple's origins, but the fact that Cisco is taking more of a solutions approach, and not just for the routers and the switchers, you know, kind of the IP backbone, but an integrated solution, where you can pull and compute, and you can pull and store, and oh by the way, it also has the networking stuff, so now you're offering customers a really interesting package. A cloud-based application solution, if you will, and then, as you mentioned, still partnering with best of breed applications across the country. >> And that's been key. This industry demands, in some cases, immediate solutions, I have a problem, I need to solve it. And I'm not so interested in an architecture, in a road map, and tell me where you're going over the next 12, 18 months. I need something now. So yeah, we absolutely have been very focused on, I mean everything on our booth is available to buy. Sometimes we show up to shows, and it's all futuristic stuff that maybe we don't even develop at some point. It's all in our price list. The partner side of this, is absolutely key. So we would not be here without Grass Valley, without Everts, Sony, Evias, big, big, traditional broadcaster vendors that have validated our solution, and turned around to the industry and said, "These guys get it." >> The other interesting part is that you guys are doing so much in the space, you've got the solutions base, and that you are doing the partnering, and that it's a great move for Cisco, right? You've got so much better-- >> I mean, it's really very few companies that can do the IP side of things. When you add in security, compute, orchestration, professional services, training. Like, just training broadcast engineers that have been so steeped in high-quality video, and they've known SDI, and they're now coming to us and saying, "Help me get trained in IP, "I recognize this transition is coming, "but I've got a legacy skillset, help me transition." There aren't many companies that can offer that range of solutions and services. And we're doing this with-- >> Real security, over and over again. The last couple of days, I mean, it's a huge to-do. >> So I try to move that from the last thing we talk about, to the first thing that we talk about. You move to an IP network, you can add an IP network to a data center, that center is connected to the internet, and these guys would actually be free. >> But the other cool thing for you guys, is that the primary distribution method, the SDI, or some of these other old-school broadcast methods are now no longer an important piece of the puzzle. But there's now all this stuff that's going out on all different types of applications, and all that stuff's IP at the core, right? Those are all IP applications at the core. Whether it's Snapchat, Instagram, Youtube, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Those were never going to broadcast medium. >> And you know, 2009, 2010, this industry was saying, "We're going to go IP," but it was always, "Well, you know, it's out there in the future." You're exactly right. The ability to now, the barrier to entry, to get this type of content onto an IP network, and down to every single device on the internet, It's never been so low. And so that's where you're seeing this high-value, premium content creation, acquisition, editing process. It's been recognized that they've got to move as well, they've got to move to a far more flexible infrastructure, automation, machine-learning of how things work, analytics, you know, the whole caboodle. And we're right there to support this industry to do that. >> And it's such an easy fit, right, because this industry is built on temporary projects, and the temporary assembly of a team, and they come, and they produce, and they create, and then there's a lot of derivative assets-- >> And tear the whole thing down. >> It's perfect for-- >> Absolutely. We've been talking about that with some of the Hollywood clients, and that's exactly what, they stand on a massive amount of infrastructure, for the latest Avatar movie, for instance. And then they tear it all down, and it's all written off, and then they go build a new one somewhere else. We think the industry can be a lot smarter about that. There is a way to truly repurpose. Hey, what you just built? You no longer need to throw it all away. >> So I want to shift gears a little bit, we have a lot of opensource shows, opensource is big, and you're part of the Alliance for IP Media Solutions, so there's always this question between now, the kind of opensource deriving standards in adoption, versus the old-school, standard's body. What role has AIMS played, give us a little bit more color, as to their role, and how that's kind of shaping things. >> So I say the old-school standards are absolutely alive and kicking. SIM, TVSF, Amwar, these guys have been around for years. What they are very focused on, however, is really making sure there is technical, inter-operability between ourselves, and all the vendors in this industry, as this move to IP takes place. So, we want a utopia where you can plug in a Cisco infrastructure, or a Reaster, or an Everts, and it's all going to work. That's what those standard bodies do for the industry. AIMS has basically said, "That's great, but it's a very, very technical thing." And there's some very, very technical people, that like to talk technical things To truly drive an industry forward, we've got to sort of go up the stack, and become much more relevant from a marketing perspective. And AIMS has basically said, "Look, we support all the adoption of IP, "but let's actually go push out news cases, "let's push out public references of customers "that are doing this today." We need to drive the industry forward at that level. So, very much rather the promotion of open standards, inter-operability, but really looking at how we market that, and foster the adoption of these standards. >> Okay, so last question before I let you go, priorities for 2017, it's hard to believe we're a third of the way through the year, but I'm still asking the question, because we still have a ways to go. What's kind of your top of mind awareness, what are you working on, obviously a big launch here for the next couple weeks, but looking down a little bit further down the road, what's your top of mind? >> Virtualization. We've been looking at virtualization, we've been telling the industry that they need to move to virtualization, that all these applications that are currently hardware, software, a lot today, that hardware piece is going to disappear, and we're all going to move into software. It's all going to move into VM ware, you need an IP foundation before you can do that, and that's what we're seeing take place right now. 12 months from now, the main headline for Cisco is going to be how we're helping every application vendor, and our customers move truly into a virtualized data center model. And then again, back to our little thing about Avatar and the tear down, that just becomes a thing of the past. Now it's about reusing all of that data center, over, and over, and over again. For all of the other Avatar sequels. >> It's so funny right, it's a recurring theme we see all over the place. It's just a little bit late here in the ME space. Alright, well Roger, thanks again for taking a few minutes of your day. And I'll see you around, and go Warriors. >> Absolutely. >> Alright, that's Roger Sherwood, I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCube from NAB 2017. We'll be right back after this short break, thanks for watching. (electronic music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube, covering NAB 2017, brought to you by HGST. >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with the Cube, we're at NAB 2017, at the Las Vegas Convention Center. A hundred thousand people that are here, have been coming for decades, it's really quite a convention. It's our first trip here, but we're really excited to be joined by an industry veteran, she's been coming for a while, coming off a pretty impressive keynote, it's Wendy Aylsworth. She's the Chief Executive Officer at Walden Pond, and a many year veteran at Warner Brothers, right? So, welcome. >> Yes I am. Thank you. >> So first impressions of the show. You've been coming for a while, it seems to have kind of a different theme every year, what do you see this year that kind of strikes you? >> A little less focus on physical devices and I think there's a growing focus on software, and how those applications help streamline production processes, distribution processes, so you're seeing the real, more heavy move to IP and software applications. >> Right, right. Which, of course, is so consistent with what we see in many other industries, right? Between, a lot of it is driven by your mobile phone and expected behavior, and basically the entire world. I say it's like your remote control for your life now. Basically everything is on your phone. But a big piece of it is Cloud. And with Cloud now, people can dial-up at a moment's notice, basically infinite amounts of compute and store, and leverage that horse power in ways that you just can't do on a local device. So I'm curious, you've been in the business for a while, how has Cloud adoption changed the game? And how does it continue to change the game as we look forward? >> Yeah exactly. I just came from this keynote by Steven Guggenheimer, of Microsoft, where he talked about it being all about bandwidth, processing and storage. And, as those increase, and become more available it kind of democratizes the ability for people to get away from having to purchase their own physical devices, and it has opened up really a wide capability for new methods of doing production that actually couldn't even be done before. As well as long distance collaboration, and more rapid distribution, and then the ability to track and understand how data is flowing, so that you might be able to better understand the consumer. It really allows a content creator to get closer to their audience. And over time I think we will continue to see that ability grow. >> Which is so interesting because the proliferation of types of content is exploding, right? >> Wendy: It is. >> Everything from your classic big houses, to new houses like Netflix. Somebody told me earlier in the week that Netflix is one of the biggest producers now of independent content, to YouTubers, with not much more than an iPhone and a microphone that can go out, and if they've got a compelling piece of content, and they relate to a specific audience, can see tremendous numbers that a lot of people would do anything for. So that democratization is a huge item, but if you don't have an audience and you're not reaching them, and you're not measuring them, pretty tough because everybody is one swipe away from something else to watch. >> Well in fact, one of the discussions, really now is about that marketing capability because, the best marketing capabilities are still in the hands of the people who have been doing it for decades and decades and know where their audiences are and how to reach them, although those are shifting. And, the ability to provide tools that help new content creators find their audience are going to become critical needs in the future. >> Right, right. And less and less we see at other places, I'm sure we'll see it here, is that marketing intuition going to be the driver of the big spin. Now it's okay, you have intuition, but what's, You know, do you have some data to back it up? And the intuition can help drive the direction and the data collection, but at the end of the day, we see it in every other industry, I'm sure we'll see it here too, where it's data-driven decisions, using automation, using software to get better results in an increasingly competitive world. >> Yeah, and getting the right results because, as we know, there's tons and tons and tons of data, but it's understanding the data and putting good intelligence to it that allows you to make the right decisions. >> Right, right. Now as you're consulting to executives, who've been in the industry a while, what are they telling you? Are they excited? Are they scared? Are they slightly caught off guard? I mean there's so much new information opportunity. I'm struck by this kind of compression, it seems like, from the outside looking in, around your release weekend, it's so competitive to have. So there's only, whatever, 52 weekends a year, so many films trying to hit that particular window, and it seems like this, such pressure to make that number in a really short period of time. At the other hand, there's all these on-demand opportunities, there's all these alternate forms of distribution. It seems like a really difficult changing environment for these houses to be in. >> It is. It's a difficult changing environment. I haven't heard anybody be disappointed or pessimistic about it. I think they recognize that throughout history things change and you must change with it. The interesting thing there is, is that it's traditional windows are shrinking, but hopefully over time it'll become more apparent where there can be other moneys to be made in later windows or in different augmented settings. So I'll use as an example virtual reality. If virtual reality becomes a type of media in its own right, then it could be that you take a title type of content and one of its offshoots is a virtual reality piece that's then sold separately and monetized separately. So I think there is pressure on the traditional windows, to make them shorter, to get more revenue faster, but there are an awful lot of new technologies bubbling up that will create new types of content in the future and the smart players will get into that and monetize it as rapidly as they can. >> The other thing of course, that's changed significantly, along with Cloud, is just the cost of all this technology infrastructure, in terms, you know, just compute, and store, and networking just continue to crash down in terms of the cost and now, with these alternative things that you might have down the road, that you may or may not even know are going to be opportunities. How is that changing looking at the asset value? Cuz before, maybe you couldn't keep dailies, or maybe storage of all this stuff was a liability, it was expensive, and once you've got the finished product out the door maybe you're less likely to keep all the derivative works. But in today's world you might have some new distribution form that you didn't even think about before. Oh I wish I had this version, or that version, or that rough cut. >> I think asset keeping is always going to be a problem. I don't think it's any different than our homes, or any closet or drawer you own with, you know, when you started in your first apartment you had limited space and every time you get a bigger house then you fill it up, and then all of a sudden you decide you want to downsize and you got a problem. And I think that's always going to be a challenge, where companies have to figure out, what is the best of these assets that I should retain, and what should I not bother to retain. Because it's frankly too expensive to keep everything. That said, in the shift from analog to digital content creation, we've seen the production step, it's just so easy to take more photos and keep them. So there's been a shift in putting the onus on the content, directly on the content creator to decide what they think is the best of their work that should be kept, because it's unmanageable now. Just like my cellphone pictures are unmanageable. >> It's funny the pictures, because before, you know, pictures were rare, and a special picture was special, because it was like open up an Easter egg, right? You took your film down, maybe it was a couple weeks after you got back from vacation, you had a couple rolls of 36, and maybe one or two great ones right, >> Maybe you got one great shot, yeah. >> where you had that treasured picture of a relative or something. Now it's almost a curse of abundance because you can just push your button down, and the hard drives are getting bigger, and everything is getting faster. Now I have thousands, I can't even find a good one, not because I didn't have a good one, because I have to wallow through 2,472 cuz the 73rd is the one that I really want. That must be amplified tremendously in this space. >> Maintenance of your storage, again, I don't care whether it's the shoes in your closet or your photographs on your phone, or for a movie production. All of the footage that they're shooting and all of the special effects, and all these different forms of content that are coming in. Management of what you're going to retain is still a problem. Maybe there's machine learning that can help us wittle that down. >> Right, right. Certainly AI and machine learning are coming. But I wonder if you're hearing much about that, not only for the standard metadata that we would want, we had someone on earlier talking about archiving and basic kind of metadata, but now we can get into the metadata at a frame level, and a lot better intelligence. I'm sure in the future will be value judgements as well, as to whether this is a good shot, or not a bad shot, or it's applicable to whatever. Are you seeing much curiosity, adoption, experimentation, what do you kind of see? >> A lot of interest, a couple of experiments, not particularly in the what to say area, but a lot of experiments in other areas of production that are monotonous and boring like, take the example of pulling great shots from a film, in order to cut together a trailer, or a teaser that's going to go on the air. Well, a machine can pick out the best shots, thereby saving the person time of going through all the shots, and pulling the right footage. And then the editor can spend their time doing what they do best, which is taking those shots, and cutting them into an interesting sequence. So, I see a lot of experimentation going on that rudimentary machine learning being applied to quality control. So every time a file gets shipped from one company to another, they check it to make sure that it's correct. Well applying a machine, that's a really boring job, applying a machine to figure out whether that pile came in correctly and didn't get corrupted, great use of machine learning. >> So when you're in the field, what do you hear as kind of the top priorities from some of the people that you're working with now, in this super crazy, evolving environment? What are they looking to your help and assistance for? >> Well, in terms of Cloud sorts of work, they're looking to reduce their capital assets and be able to aggregate and use the resources of the Cloud to lower their costs of development. >> Just kind of a classic CAPEX versus, yeah... versus OPEX. >> And in some cases, whether they can help streamline their process, and speed up their schedule, and do things more in parallel. >> It seems like a perfect match. Because movies, by their very nature, are these transient little projects that form and come together, be produced, and then they disappear. >> Wendy: And then they disappear. >> And that's like perfect kind of an application for a Cloud world, which is the same thing, it's on demand, you assemble it, use it, when it's done it goes back. So it seems like a pretty good match. >> And applications in the Cloud that are modeling themselves to offer the services, based upon the usage, as opposed to setting up a long-term contract, those are the apps that are going to win. >> Right, and that's very consistent with the way that industry has worked for a long long time, right? >> Wendy: Yeah. >> Yeah, alright, well I'll give you the last word as you're leaving the show here in a couple days, headed back to L.A. What do you thinking about for the balance of 2017 that you're taking away, that you're excited to share with some of your clients? >> I think the power of doing little steps, and getting involved into using machine learning in various methods, whether that be in the Cloud or in a local Cloud. And then looking longer range to where artificial intelligence will actually play into that. But there's initial steps that have to be done in terms of applying machine learning first, and then I think we'll get into the more interesting stuff of artificial intelligence five years down the street. >> Yeah, early days, exciting times. >> Wendy: It is very exciting. >> Alright well Wendy, well thanks for taking a few minutes out of your busy day. >> I really appreciate the time. >> Alright, Wendy Aylsworth from Walden Pond. I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching the Cube. We're at NAB 2017, from Las Vegas. We'll be right back.

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

>> Narrator: Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering NAB 2017. Brought to you by HGST. (lively music) >> Welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here, everybody, with theCUBE. We are live at NAB 2017 at the Las Vegas Convention Center. 100,000 people, all kinds of gear. If you're into video and you're into fun, this is the place to be. We're real excited to have Brian Frager on. He's a VR and AR creative producer for Technicolor. Welcome Brian. >> Thank you, happy to be on. >> And then, on your bio, you have all my new vocabulary words that I've picked up. Photo, I can't even say the stupid word. Photogrametgramatry? >> Gamatry, photogrammetry. >> Jeff: Awesome. >> Yeah. >> So, first off, welcome. >> You've been doing this PR thing, since the beginning, early days. >> It's still early days. >> Jeff: It's still early days. >> Basically, I have a film back on, a traditional film production. But when I saw these new work flows emerging in these interactive stories and really, the whole spectrum of story telling opening up from what was, traditionally, either a film or a video game. Now, there's this whole spectrum of experiences in between that are, very much, a hybrid between the two and you, as a user or an audience, have some agency and some control over how you effect the experience. I was just all in on that. I took a deep dive into coding and development and the game engines and landed at Technicolor within the last few months. >> And that's through the volumetric video response to that, right? Cause you're creating a space or correct me if I'm wrong. >> Brian: Exactly. >> And now you interact in that space. >> Exactly, so you're building a whole environment and the idea is that, the user rather than, most 360 experiences that we're seeing right now that are being shipped as VR, are, really, just from a fixed point. Even though you can look around and that's, a little bit, innovative it's still very restrictive in how you can interact with the space. We focus on real time rendered game engine experiences where you build the entire environment and so, really, you, as a user, can go walk around the whole room, look at anything, inspect things and you just have a lot more freedom to explore. >> On the story telling aspect of that, how does that now, get stitched into what's, basically, a video game engine? >> That's a great question. It is a paradime shift because rather than dictating the sequence of events or the linear story and force feeding it to an audience, you're, really, creating an open world. You want to design it in a way where they still take away a narrative experience or at least some kind of experience from it. But you need to give the user freedom to navigate that world however they see fit. It's about a lot of play testing, to be honest, to get early iterations out into user's hands and to see what they're instinct is. You have an idea for how they're going to consume something but until you see someone in the experience and see what they're impulse is and what they want to interact with, then you can build towards that. So, it's a more iterative process that's more akin to game development. >> Are you sharing any funny stories or surprises or something where you thought somebody's going to go left and they went right, just completely counter to what you built into your script if you will? >> Oh man, funny experiences. You know, so we've been to a few festivals. We premiered it at Sundance and then at South by Southwest. We've put hundreds of people thought it. There's one character that's very anthropomorphized and we had an idea that people would like to interact with it. But the minute it shows up, there's people getting on the ground next to this little water buffalo and he's just chillin and looking around. And there's people sitting right next to him and trying to pet him and do all kinds of things and you realize people, once they feel emersed in a space and they find something they can emotionally connect with, they just want to hang out there and spend some time with that as a microcosm of the experience. So, we added some little interactive elements to him. So, that was an insight. Actually, the fumiest was when I showed it to my mom for the first time. They don't, totally, understand this new world. A character appeared and she happened to be standing, you never know where the user's going to be standing in these paths. So, she happened to be standing directly in the path where the character was going to run. So, she turns around and sees the character and it just starts running straight at her and she just screams and throws the controller. (laughing) And the character just goes right through you but you know, that immersion. You feel like you're about to get hit by something. >> Right, right. So, a lot of us have played, I've got the Samsung thing I put my Galaxy in. What are some of the secrets that help people feel that immersive experience? In terms of is it, really it's not the super quality view cause a lot of times, you don't have that. But a lot of times, it's the softer things is what pull people in. So, what are the things that, really, make it connect with people from VR? >> Absolutely, there's a lot of elements because, really, you are recreating reality, sense by sense. The nice thing about VR is our visual system is so overpowering in terms of how we interpret the world around us that, luckily, that's been the access point and the entry point to this whole VR boom that we've seen. Is that, finally, mobile screens are at a point, the sensors are all packed very tight. So, we can, really, ship at a low cost. Google cardboard, for example, being the widest distribution and give people a pretty compelling visual experience. That's really step one and I'd say that's, pretty well, established and distributed. >> Visuals and audio have been married but, really, it's about bringing the other senses into VR. For example, the agency of being able to move around a space and interact with real things in the space. That's more commonly termed mixed reality and that's going to be the next wave that you're going to see which is highly interactive spaces that are more of a mixture of the virtual world and physical elements. So that, even though I'm in a headset and I see a pen, in the headset, when I reach out and touch it, there's really a pen there that's tracked in the space. That adds a whole other level of immersion that allows it to be social. Because that's a contract between you and I that this is a physical thing that one of us is holding. It allows for a whole new world of opportunities of what can be done in VR. >> How important is the social aspect, in terms of adoption? Yourself or your mom cruising around on her own versus the opportunity to bring other people in? Is that some of the stuff that's going to make this, really, the killer app to get it over the next hump? Or what is the killer app, I guess, beyond cruising around half the time? >> 100%, I think it's making it social. How to open up that world. Because right now, it is a very isolating experience. There's no reason that it has to be, necessarily, it's just that the user base is not congregated around individual platforms. Facebook made a big opening salva last week when they released their Facebook spaces. That allows you to bring in people from the real world into your virtual experience. By being able to, through Facebook Messenger, I can call out while I'm in VR, I can call out to anyone who has Facebook Messenger's app installed. Then, I get a little video feed and they see me as an avatar on their phone screen. So, it's those hybridizations of connecting people in VR to people who are outside in the real world that's going to, really, hit the inflection point of wide adoption. >> There were some early versions of that in the past right? Where you had these virtual reality spaces inside the computer but they were not nearly as immersive as the ones that we have today. Why did those not, really, take off What was the one of them? I can't think of the name right now. Let's say it's Second City but that's not it. >> Brian: Oh, Second Life? >> Second Life versus today's world. What changed? >> Sure well, I wouldn't characterize Second Life as a failure. It had it's heyday. >> No, not a failure but I mean, it was an early attempt at what you just described, really, in the Facebook Messenger which is what triggered the thought. >> And funny enough, the Second Life team is now creating the virtual version of that called High Fidelity. So, they have their own attempt. There's a couple of other like ALTSpace Nobody has the install base of Facebook. And so once you plug in to that community, you're already connected with your friends. It just takes away the friction. The friction of VR is, really, what's holding back people. That and the isolation, I'd say, from wide adoption. Which is that, it's just not a seamless experience. Going in, finding the app I want, connecting with people easily. Being an early adopter, I've tried to run meetings through the Oculus social spaces. There's just a lot of friction with technical issues and people dropping in and out. It improves. They do releases all the time. All those issues are being worked out and the friction's just going to slowly going to go away to the point where it will be more convenient for us to take a meeting where we can sit face-to-face and read each other's expressions then it will to try to get the same amount done over the telephone or something like that. >> I have to laugh cause every time, whether you're on WebEx, pick your favorite meeting tool. It's still technical issues. I was thinking that YouTube video. One of the greatest YouTube videos ever. >> New medium, same problem. >> Yeah, same problem. Is Bob even here? He checks in at the end of the meeting. So, that's very cool. As you look forward and I know it's a fast moving space. What are some of your priorities? What do you see as some short term changes that are going to make a big impact? And what about, say a year from now. I don't even want to even guess much further out than that, that you see coming down the pike that's going to have a huge impact on the adoption of VR? >> Sure, so at the low end, we're starting to see inside out tracts mobile solutions. Meaning that, you can get that same kind of freedom to wander around a space that you can on a Vive or an Oculus but with a mobile headset. So, because the price point and the buried entry is so low, everyone already has or they'll have soon enough, a phone that's capable of running an experience like that. I think that will be an important first step. At the Technicolor Experience Center, which is Technicolor's new VR and AR and mixed reality focused wing, they're really betting that these immersive stories are the future of entertainment and how that will trickle across different market adjacencies and verticals to apply to medical and education and sports and fitness. The applications are just endless. I think we're seeing early Enterprise adoption right now. And then, on the consumer side, gaming is, really, where they found the early niche and there is a modernization model. But what we're, personally, interested in is showing people the very, very high end of what VR can be. Because once we show them the high end, they have a compelling reason to familiarize themselves with whatever it can be to them today. We're working on very high fidelity tract spaces where social and networks and we can be geographically together or remotely beamed in together but we feel embodied in that space in a way that's more immersive than currently available. In terms of being able to move lens and interact with the objects around us. That's what we're trying to prove out at Technicolor is how do we build high end entertainment experiences around those technical infrastructures that are not widely deployed today but they will be coming. I think, for monetization on those models, you're going to see a lot of installed spaces that people will, hopefully, flock to to get these high end experiences. >> So, what's your favorite high end experience right now? >> Well, I did get the chance to do the Void, the Ghostbusters VR Experience after Sundance and that was pretty incredible. It was a lot of fun. Just cause you're in it with someone else. It's like a new version of laser tag. It can apply to other areas, that was just a shooter game. Just that shared experience where we are both in the space together and we just know that we're getting access to this virtual world that no one else is seeing is a really special thing. >> It's just amazing how powerful the social aspect is to all these things. >> You want to talk about it with people. >> You want to talk about it. You want do it with somebody. You want to share it. It's such a powerful impact. >> Yeah and, I think, even on the mobile side that will help open up the world a lot because right now, if it's on a Vive or an Oculus, you can plug it into a monitor or a TV and I can see what you're doing in it. So, that's easy enough for me to feel like I'm, at least, participating in your experience. But when you're in mobile right now, you're, pretty much, locked in and I, really, have no idea what you are doing in the experience. So, I think, making it easily shareable across traditional channels or just me being able to opt into your experience or jointly share one, those are all things that are going to make it much more compelling for us to just say, hey, we have 10 minutes, let's dive into VR and do something together. That would be fun. >> Right, right, very cool. Alright Brian. Thanks for stopping by out of your busy day. >> Of course. Great to talk. >> Alright, Brian Frager. I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE from NAB 2017. 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