[Announcer] Live from Las Vegas. It's the Cube, covering NAB 2017. Brought to you by HGST. >> Welcome back to the Cube. We are live in Las Vegas at the very exciting NAB show 2017. And I'm very excited to introduce you to our next guest, Andy Shenkler. Andy is the EVP, Chief Solutions and Technology Officer, for Sony DADC New Media Solutions. Andy, welcome to the Cube. Thank you very much for having me. You are a veteran, not only of the media and entertainment industry, but of NAB with this year's theme of the M.E.T Effect. That's the convergence of media entertainment technology. What are some of your initial thoughts about the show this year. >> Well, I haven't had a lot of time to visit the whole show yet, it's only opening day. (laughs) I think that over the last 20 years, of even attending these events, it's been heavily focused on kind of cameras and the backend production technology. And over the last several years, we've seen cloud technology, software driven, IP, interaction take place. Even with the thematic change of it being M.E.T., that's clearly coalescing even more. It's no longer a this is a thing that's coming. It's here. And how do people really take advantage of that as they kind of move forward. >> I'd love to get your perspective as you were saying, you've been in the media and entertainment space for about 20 years. >> Yup. >> Around the time of Nabster. Which is like we were saying before, it's hard to believe that was 20 years ago. I'd love to just get, a high level picture of, You must have seen massive evolution in media and entertainment. Tell us a little about that, some of things that really stood out to you. Over those two decades, as milestones. >> There's clearly the ones that we all as consumers know, right. The iPods and iTunes and the advent of Netflix and Amazon Video and things of that nature. And I think those are the very tangible ones. From behind the scenes, I think it's the challenges that the businesses had to go through, right. How do you actually deal with rights problems that are global in nature, right. You suddenly have a world that's portable. You suddenly have problems where I downloaded something or I want to consume a piece of content that I really enjoy, I get on a plane and I'm suddenly in a territory where I no longer have the right to watch that. Those are significant challenges that have to be overcome. And it's not always just technology, right. There's huge legal issues and things like that. And so there's a real striation between what we as consumers expect to find and what the business needs to do to change to accommodate that ever growing, that consumption rate that people want. >> Absolutely. So tell us about the supply chain solutions that Sony DADC is delivering for the media and entertainment industry. >> Sure. So, we started about nine years ago, and it's not that certainly supply chain solutions aren't nine years old. And I think our perspective on it was one where we were fortunate to start with a white piece of paper, rather than transform a legacy business. And when we did that, we said what does the solution five years from now need to look like? And so we run full supply chain offerings for companies like Sony Pictures, BBC Worldwide, Village Roadshow, PlayStation, Funimation, things of that nature. And we're talking about distribution of content to roughly 15 hundred endpoints globally. So that's multiple languages, multiple versions, trying to keep all of that stuff on track. And really the way we approached the problem was, I know it sounds terrible but, really to get human out of the mix from the perspective of what's actually not good for people to do. Looking at millions of permutations of data is not really a strong suit for people. It's a good strong suit for a computer. It had up to that point in time being relegated to Excel spreadsheets and emails. And we tried to eliminate a lot of that by putting systemic decision-making in place. And that's really what's allowed us to scale at a fairly aggressive pace. >> So are we talking about artificial intelligence, machine learning? >> I wouldn't go so far as to say that. >> Okay. >> Much more rules-based engines, logic around it. So let's take an example. Maybe you have a motion picture, we'll say like a Spider-Man. Spider-Man is made and it's available in 15 countries. Each one of those countries have different compliance and rules, cultural rules. Maybe you can't show certain imagery or you can't have somebody drinking in Saudi Arabia or something like that. So now you've left, you've left customer service reps to have a conversation that a I need you to send this to all of these places. How are they suppose to know all of the possible combinations of things. Then on top of that, not just knowing it, how are they suppose to interrogate a library of millions of assets and say, oh yeah, I figured out all the different combinations of things to make that happen. And do so within the timeline, >> Right, yup. >> to hit a business goal. That worked great in the beginning, when it was, we're going to get 50 titles out. Now we deliver 60, 70, 80 thousand titles a month. Suddenly, that is no longer sustainable for a human project. You couldn't get enough people in this building to go through that much content. >> Got it. So it's really kind of rules-based. So you've got users of the Sony technology, film studios, broadcasters, music labels. Give us an example of say, on the broadcast side, about what they're looking to do with managing assets to meet consumer demand and ensure that it's with this multi-channel distribution model, they're meeting consumer demands, wherever those consumers are. >> So I think from a broadcast perspective, which even in that world, that's blending, there is no traditional broadcaster as we know it anymore, even a broadcaster has VOD services, they might have some sort of mobile provisioning, OTT. And so therein lies there challenge, right. They've put in large infrastructure over many years, They continue to reinvest in that. Along come a Netflix of Google, whomever, with global licensing, the ability to move incredibly rapidly. And so they're looking at it and and saying, how do I compete, how do I stay relevant in this space. Market share as we know, is starting to move away from the broadcast side, linear television per se. And so where we come into play is, we say, we've already got massive amount of content available, you've licensed it already. Let us make that available, let us run that infrastructure for you. Your focus should not be on, how do I make sure that the power plant stays up. But rather, how do I market, how do I differentiate, how do I create a compelling proposition to consumers, so that I can effectively compete as this grows. >> Okay, so you're really helping them to scale on ways that they would never would have been able to do on their own. >> I think we're just helping them get there sooner. It's not to say that they could never do it. I think that's a lot of ego, a lot of hubris. It's very much that we've leveraged kind of our position as Sony, as what we have done for a lot of partners in this space. And we've said, there's a reasonable way to kind of level the playing field. >> Right. >> Right. A supply chain should not be the level of differentiation, right. We don't simply say, oh well, here's a really good manufacturing supply chain, there's only one company who should use it. It should be leveraged by many, many facilities. And so we take that same view from a digital perspective. Traditionally, we've been sending content out all around the world. We've now moved to a model that says, why don't we just host it all singularly, in any format that you want. Your choice, any spec, any DRM, but it's centralized. So for one of our customers in fact, They aired something in Japan, and 24 minutes later, it's available everywhere else. >> Wow. >> That couldn't be done if I also had last mile bandwidth considerations to take into account. And we believe that that 24 minutes is sawed by about half. We think we can get that down to under 10 minutes. >> Question for you. And the speed theme, >> Umhmm. >> Has come up a number of times today, >> Sure. >> with different folks that we've talked about. If we look at a Netflix, as you have brought up for example, from an audience perspective, the audience is so empowered, and we have access to anything we wanted, whenever we want it, bing watching, streaming, we're time shifting. >> Right. >> So you think, wow, Netflix has a great advantage because they know so much about the audience. At the same time, until they started creating unique content, they couldn't really change the content. Versus on the flip side in the film industry, They haven't really historically known their audience. >> Umhmm. >> It's been more of, probably, qualitative data and decisions, at the same time, they can change content. So, do you work with the streaming services, as well as the traditional film studios. Do they have a similar challenge that can be solved by using media as a service? >> So for ones who want to use everything that we offer end to end, again, that level playing field, we give everybody visibility. We believe data transparency is pretty important. We recognize that people hold on to data as kind of the the keys to the kingdom at this point. Certainly Netflix does and they're leveraging it quite well, right. It's hard to find fault with what they're doing from a business perspective. At the same time, as a consumer, you really don't want to have to be potentially loyal to a particular brand, right. That's not how capitalism works, but that's a different problem. But people who run on our platform, we think that there is a good balance. And both sides should have visibility to a lot of that data because it should help each other. They should really, a rising tide should float all boats, and not just create this imbalance. Because it becomes difficult to amortize costs if there's one and only one solution in the market. And that's really how we try and approach that problem. >> So in terms of, what kind of volume of content are we talking about here? >> So we store today, just over 20 petabytes of content, roughly a million hours worth of. This is premium content, so this is not user generated. This is not like youTube clips of somebody's cat. There's probably a couple. There's probably a couple in there. >> (Lisa laughs) >> No grumpy cat in there? >> There might be a few in there but that's not primarily what's what it is. We're talking about high end premium content. And in about 23 languages. So the variations that we have are very high. Now, a lot of times, people will say well, it's easy to get to a million hours because people do bad data. And so they'll store something, they'll store something like Spider-Man with a hypen in the middle or a space or all together. We're actually very, very focused on not having that. So these are all unique assets. So it's a very large library when you look on it on a global scale. >> So how can a a linear network versus a streaming network access a million hours of content. >> We actually don't differentiate between a linear and a streaming network. Because at the end of the day, we're a complete IP solution. The ability to uplink through satellite is fine, it's just another method of transport. But really all they do is, they come to us with their licenses and then we provision the assets for them in their specifications. And we make it available to them anywhere. It's pretty straight forward. We try and take a lot of the heavy lifting off their plate, reduce their infrastructure costs, reduce the team sizes from a scaling perspective so they don't have to grow so much. We really and try to flat rate a lot of this to make it easy and predictable. >> Fantastic. Last question since we're running out of time here. >> Sure. >> I know that you guys have really migrated the media supply chain to the cloud, going all in with AWS. You had mentioned that that had started about a year ago. Tell us about what you're doing with AWS and how has that influenced the genesis of media as a service? >> So I think what I should tell you first is that, when I went to the team to talk about this, I borrowed a line from The Hunt for Red October, where they said Cortez reached a new world and burned his new ship so that his men could not go back. (Lisa laughs) >> We got rid of our data centers first and then told the team we're going AWS. So there was no going back. We were making this move, there wasn't going to be hesitation and an all in model is the only model that worked for us. They hybrid model is just not cost-effective. We had to embrace something that was future proof and seemed like the right one. Where we've benefited from it is, clearly, there is economic advantages. But some of the other advantages, are like what I was talking about before, 24 minute time from receipt to availability everywhere, would have been unthinkable in a completely contained environment, where I had to have huge lead time for scalability. I had to know in advance that I would need more storage or more transporting capacity or more bandwidth. I no longer need to have that level of information upfront. I live in a world of unpredictability. People come in with requests all the time, that I didn't know an hour ago was going to be asked for. I'm finally in a position to be able to offer a solution to all of them that says, go ahead, do whatever you like, our system will manage it and we have confidence in the AWS infrastructure to be able to support that. >> Well sounds like a fantastic partnership that's going to be-- >> It's very good, we're very happy with it. >> Really enabling a lot of, more content creation, more uses of this content in the future. >> And we really want to see that. We want to see people create differentiated solutions for consumers without having to worry about how the sausage gets made. >> Exactly. Nobody wants to know that. >> Nobody wants to know that. (Lisa laughs) >> Well Andy, thank you so much for joining us on the Cube. >> Thank you. >> And sharing your insight. I know you just got to the show not too long ago so we wish you and your feet healthy next few days. >> Thank you very much. >> And we look forward to seeing you back on the Cube sometime soon. >> I appreciate it. Look forward to being with you. >> Alright, we want to thank you for watching. Again, Lisa Martin, live at NAB in Las Vegas. Stick around, we'll be right back. (techno music)