(upbeat music) >> Welcome, everyone, to theCUBE's presentation of the AWS Startup Showcase. And this episode two of season two is called "Data as Code," the ongoing series covering exciting new startups in the AWS ecosystem. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Today, we're excited to be joined by Jon Dahl, who is the co-founder and CEO of MUX, a hot new startup building cloud video for developers, video with data. John, great to see you. We did an interview on theCube Conversation. Went into big detail of the awesomeness of your company and the trend that you're on. Welcome back. >> Thank you, glad to be here. >> So, video is everywhere, and video for pivot to video, you hear all these kind of terms in the industry, but now more than ever, video is everywhere and people are building with it, and it's becoming part of the developer experience in applications. So people have to stand up video into their code fast, and data is code, video is data. So you guys are specializing this. Take us through that dynamic. >> Yeah, so video clearly is a growing part of how people are building applications. We see a lot of trends of categories that did not involve video in the past making a major move towards video. I think what Peloton did five years ago to the world of fitness, that was not really a big category. Now video fitness is a huge thing. Video in education, video in business settings, video in a lot of places. I think Marc Andreessen famously said, "Software is eating the world" as a pretty, pretty good indicator of what the internet is actually doing to the economy. I think there's a lot of ways in which video right now is eating software. So categories that we're not video first are becoming video first. And that's what we help with. >> It's not obvious to like most software developers when they think about video, video industries, it's industry shows around video, NAB, others. People know, the video folks know what's going on in video, but when you start to bring it mainstream, it becomes an expectation in the apps. And it's not that easy, it's almost a provision video is hard for a developer 'cause you got to know the full, I guess, stack of video. That's like low level and then kind of just basic high level, just play something. So, in between, this is a media stack kind of dynamic. Can you talk about how hard it is to build video for developers? How is it going to become easier? >> Yeah, I mean, I've lived this story for too long, maybe 13 years now, when I first build my first video stack. And, you know, I'll sometimes say, I think it's kind of a miracle every time a video plays on the internet because the internet is not a medium designed for video. It's been hijacked by video, video is 70% of internet traffic today in an unreliable, sort of untrusted network space, which is totally different than how television used to work or cable or things like that. So yeah, so video is hard because there's so many problems from top to bottom that need to be solved to make video work. So you have to worry about video compression encoding, which is a complicated topic in itself. You have to worry about delivering video around the world at scale, delivering it at low cost, at low latency, with good performance, you have to worry about devices and how every device, Android, iOS, web, TVs, every device handles video differently and so there's a lot of work there. And at the end of the day, these are kind of unofficial standards that everyone's using. So one of the miracles is like, if you want to watch a video, somehow you have to get like Apple and Google to agree on things, which is not always easy. And so there's just so many layers of complexity that are behind it. I think one way to think about it is, if you want to put an image online, you just put an image online. And if you want to put video online, you build complex software, and that's the exact problem that MUX was started to help solve. >> It's interesting you guys have almost creating a whole new category around video infrastructure. And as you look at, you mentioned stack, video stack. I'm looking at a market where the notion of a media stack is developing, and you're seeing these verticals having similar dynamics with cloud. And if you go back to the early days of cloud computing, what was the developer experience or entrepreneurial experience, you had to actually do a lot of stuff before you even do anything, provision a server. And this has all kind of been covered in great detail in the glory of Agile and whatnot. It was expensive, and you had that actually engineer before you could even stand up any code. Now you got video that same thing's happening. So the developers have two choices, go do a bunch of stuff complex, building their own infrastructure, which is like building a data center, or lean in on MUX and say, "Hey, thank you for doing all that years of experience building out the stacks to take that hard part away," but using APIs that they have. This is a developer focused problem that you guys are solving. >> Yeah, that's right. my last company was a company called Zencoder, that was an API to video encoding. So it was kind of an API to a small part of what MUX does today, just one of those problems. And I think the thing that we got right at Zencoder, that we're doing again here at MUX, was building four developers first. So our number one persona is a software developer. Not necessarily a video expert, just we think any developer should be able to build with video. It shouldn't be like, yeah, got to go be a specialist to use this technology, because it should become just of the internet. Video should just be something that any developer can work with. So yeah, so we build for developers first, which means we spend a lot of time thinking about API design, we spend a lot of time thinking about documentation, transparent pricing, the right features, great support and all those kind of things that tend to be characteristics of good developer companies. >> Tell me about the pipe lining of the products. I'm a developer, I work for a company, my boss is putting pressure on me. We need video, we have all this library, it's all stacking up. We hired some people, they left. Where's the video, we've stored it somewhere. I mean, it's a nightmare, right? So I'm like, okay, I'm cloud native, I got an API. I need to get my product to market fast, 'cause that is what Agile developers want. So how do you describe that acceleration for time to market? You mentioned you guys are API first, video first. How do these customers get their product into the market as fast as possible? >> Yeah, well, I mean the first thing we do is we put what we think is probably on average, three to four months of hard engineering work behind a single API call. So if you want to build a video platform, we tell our customers like, "Hey, you can do that." You probably need a team, you probably need video experts on your team so hire them or train them. And then it takes several months just to kind of to get video flowing. One API call at MUX gives you on-demand video or live video that works at scale, works around the world with good performance, good reliability, a rich feature set. So maybe just a couple specific examples, we worked with Robin Hood a few years ago to bring video into their newsfeed, which was hugely successful for them. And they went from talking to us for the first time to a big launch in, I think it was three months, but the actual code time there was like really short. I want to say they had like a proof of concept up and running in a couple days, and then the full launch in three months. Another customer of ours, Bandcamp, I think switched from a legacy provider to MUX in two weeks in band. So one of the big advantages of going a little bit higher in the abstraction layer than just building it yourself is that time to market. >> Talk about this notion of video pipeline 'cause I know I've heard people I talk about, "Hey, I just want to get my product out there. I don't want to get stuck in the weeds on video pipeline." What does that mean for folks that aren't understanding the nuances of video? >> Yeah, I mean, it's all the steps that it takes to publish video. So from ingesting the video, if it's live video from making sure that you have secure, reliable ingest of that live feed potentially around the world to the transcoding, which is we talked a little bit about, but it is a, you know, on its own is a massively complicated problem. And doing that, well, doing that well is hard. Part of the reason it's hard is you really have to know where you're publishing too. And you might want to transcode video differently for different devices, for different types of content. You know, the pipeline typically would also include all of the workflow items you want to do with the video. You want to thumbnail a video, you want clip, create clips of the video, maybe you want to restream the video to Facebook or Twitter or a social platform. You want to archive the video, you want it to be available for downloads after an event. If it's just a, if it's a VOD upload, if it's not live in the first place. You have all those things and you might want to do simulated live with the video. You might want to actually record something and then play it back as a live stream. So, the pipeline Ty typically refers to everything from the ingest of the video to the time that the bits are delivered to a device. >> You know, I hear a lot of people talking about video these days, whether it's events, training, just want peer to peer experience, video is powerful, but customers want to own their own platform, right? They want to have the infrastructure as a service. They kind of want platform as a service, this is cloud talk now, but they want to have their own capability to build it out. This allows them to get what they want. And so you see this, like, is it SaaS? Is it platform? People want customization? So kind of the general purpose video solution does it really exist or doesn't? I mean, 'cause this is the question. Can I just buy software and work or is it going to be customized always? How do you see that? Because this becomes a huge discussion point. Is it a SaaS product or someone's going to make a SaaS product? >> Yeah, so I think one of the most important elements of designing any software, but especially when you get into infrastructure is choosing an abstraction level. So if you think of computing, you can go all the way down to building a data center, you can go all the way down to getting a colo and racking a server like maybe some of us used to do, who are older than others. And that's one way to run a server. On the other extreme, you have just think of the early days of cloud competing, you had app engine, which was a really fantastic, really incredible product. It was one push deploy of, I think Python code, if I remember correctly, and everything just worked. But right in the middle of those, you had EC2, which was, EC2 is basically an API to a server. And it turns out that that abstraction level, not Colo, not the full app engine kind of platform, but the API to virtual server was the right abstraction level for maybe the last 15 years. Maybe now some of the higher level application platforms are doing really well, maybe the needs will shift. But I think that's a little bit of how we think about video. What developers want is an API to video. They don't want an API to the building blocks of video, an API to transcoding, to video storage, to edge caching. They want an API to video. On the other extreme, they don't want a big application that's a drop in white label video in a box like a Shopify kind of thing. Shopify is great, but developers don't want to build on top of Shopify. In the payments world developers want Stripe. And that abstraction level of the API to the actual thing you're getting tends to be the abstraction level that developers want to build on. And the reason for that is, it's the most productive layer to build on. You get maximum flexibility and also maximum velocity when you have that API directly to a function like video. So, we like to tell our customers like you, you own your video when you build on top of MUX, you have full control over everything, how it's stored, when it's stored, where it goes, how it's published, we handle all of the hard technology and we give our customers all of the flexibility in terms of designing their products. >> I want to get back some use case, but you brought that up I might as well just jump to my next point. I'd like you to come back and circle back on some references 'cause I know you have some. You said building on infrastructure that you own, this is a fundamental cloud concept. You mentioned API to a server for the nerds out there that know that that's cool, but the people who aren't super nerdy, that means you're basically got an interface into a server behind the scenes. You're doing the same for video. So, that is a big thing around building services. So what wide range of services can we expect beyond MUX? If I'm going to have an API to video, what could I do possibly? >> What sort of experience could you build? >> Yes, I got a team of developers saying I'm all in API to video, I don't want to do all that transit got straight there, I want to build experiences, video experiences on my app. >> Yeah, I mean, I think, one way to think about it is that, what's the range of key use cases that people do with video? We tend to think about six at MUX, one is kind of the places where the content is, the prop. So one of the things that use video is you can create great video. Think of online courses or fitness or entertainment or news or things like that. That's kind of the first thing everyone thinks of, when you think video, you think Netflix, and that's great. But we see a lot of really interesting uses of video in the world of social media. So customers of ours like Visco, which is an incredible photo sharing application, really for photographers who really care about the craft. And they were able to bring video in and bring that same kind of Visco experience to video using MUX. We think about B2B tools, videos. When you think about it, all video is, is a high bandwidth way of communicating. And so customers are as like HubSpot use video for the marketing platform, for business collaboration, you'll see a lot of growth of video in terms of helping businesses engage their customers or engage with their employees. We see live events obviously have been a massive category over the last few years. You know, we were all forced into a world where we had to do live events two years ago, but I think now we're reemerging into a world where the online part of a conference will be just as important as the in-person component of a conference. So that's another big use case we see. >> Well, full disclosure, if you're watching this live right now, it's being powered by MUX. So shout out, we use MUX on theCUBE platform that you're experiencing in this. Actually in real time, 'cause this is one application, there's many more. So video as code, is data as code is the theme, that's going to bring up the data ops. Video also is code because (laughs) it's just like you said, it's just communicating, but it gets converted to data. So data ops, video ops could be its own new category. What's your reaction to that? >> Yeah, I mean, I think, I have a couple thoughts on that. The first thought is, video is a way that, because the way that companies interact with customers or users, it's really important to have good monitoring and analytics of your video. And so the first product we ever built was actually a product called MUX video, sorry, MUX data, which is the best way to monitor a video platform at scale. So we work with a lot of the big broadcasters, we work with like CBS and Fox Sports and Discovery. We work with big tech companies like Reddit and Vimeo to help them monitor their video. And you just get a huge amount of insight when you look at robust analytics about video delivery that you can use to optimize performance, to make sure that streaming works well globally, especially in hard to reach places or on every device. That's we actually build a MUX data platform first because when we started MUX, we spent time with some of our friends at companies like YouTube and Netflix, and got to know how they use data to power their video platforms. And they do really sophisticated things with data to ensure that their streams well, and we wanted to build the product that would help everyone else do that. So, that's one use. I think the other obvious use is just really understanding what people are doing with their video, who's watching what, what's engaging, those kind of things. >> Yeah, data is definitely there. You guys mentioned some great brands that are working with you guys, and they're doing it because of the developer experience. And I'd like you to explain, if you don't mind, in your words, why is the MUX developer experience so good? What are some of the results you're seeing from your customers? What are they saying to you? Obviously when you win, you get good feedback. What are some of the things that they're saying and what specific develop experiences do they like the best? >> Yeah, I mean, I think that the most gratifying thing about being a startup founder is when your customers like what you're doing. And so we get a lot of this, but it's always, we always pay attention to what customers say. But yeah, people, the number one thing developers say when they think about MUX is that the developer experience is great. I think when they say that, what they mean is two things, first is it's easy to work with, which helps them move faster, software velocity is so important. Every company in the world is investing and wants to move quickly and to build quickly. And so if you can help a team speed up, that's massively valuable. The second thing I think when people like our developer experience is, you know, in a lot of ways that think that we get out of the way and we let them do what they want to do. So well, designed APIs are a key part of that, coming back to abstraction, making sure that you're not forcing customers into decisions that they actually want to make themselves. Like, if our video player only had one design, that that would not be, that would not work for most developers, 'cause developers want to bring their own design and style and workflow and feel to their video. And so, yeah, so I think the way we do that is just think comprehensively about how APIs are designed, think about the workflows that users are trying to accomplish with video, and make sure that we have the right APIs, make sure they're the right information, we have the right webhooks, we have the right SDKs, all of those things in place so that they can build what they want. >> We were just having a conversation on theCUBE, Dave Vellante and I, and our team, and I'd love to get you a reaction to this. And it's more and more, a riff real quick. We're seeing a trend where video as code, data as code, media stack, where you're starting to see the emergence of the media developer, where the application of media looks a lot like kind of software developer, where the app, media as an app. It could be a chat, it could be a peer to peer video, it could be part of an event platform, but with all the recent advances, in UX designers, coders, the front end looks like an emergence of these creators that are essentially media developers for all intent and purpose, they're coding media. What's your reaction to that? How do you see that evolving? >> I think the. >> Or do you agree with it? >> It's okay. >> Yeah, yeah. >> Well, I think a couple things. I think one thing, I think this goes along through saying, but maybe it's disagreement, is that we don't think you should have to be an expert at video or at media to create and produce or create and publish good video, good audio, good images, those kind of things. And so, you know, I think if you look at software overall, I think of 10 years ago, the kind of DevOps movement, where there was kind of a movement away from specialization in software where the same software developer could build and deploy the same software developer maybe could do front end and back end. And we want to bring that to video as well. So you don't have to be a specialist to do it. On the other hand, I do think that investments and tooling, all the way from video creation, which is not our world, but there's a lot of amazing companies out there that are making it easier to produce video, to shoot video, to edit, a lot of interesting innovations there all the way to what we do, which is helping people stream and publish video and video experiences. You know, I think another way about it is, that tool set and companies doing that let anyone be a media developer, which I think is important. >> It's like DevOps turning into low-code, no-code, eventually it's just composability almost like just, you know, "Hey Siri, give me some video." That kind of thing. Final question for you why I got you here, at the end of the day, the decision between a lot of people's build versus buy, "I got to get a developer. Why not just roll my own?" You mentioned data center, "I want to build a data center." So why MUX versus do it yourself? >> Yeah, I mean, part of the reason we started this company is we have a pretty, pretty strong opinion on this. When you think about it, when we started MUX five years ago, six years ago, if you were a developer and you wanted to accept credit cards, if you wanted to bring payment processing into your application, you didn't go build a payment gateway. You just probably used Stripe. And if you wanted to send text messages, you didn't build your own SMS gateway, you probably used Twilio. But if you were a developer and you wanted to stream video, you built your own video gateway, you built your own video application, which was really complex. Like we talked about, you know, probably three, four months of work to get something basic up and running, probably not live video that's probably only on demand video at that point. And you get no benefit by doing it yourself. You're no better than anyone else because you rolled your own video stack. What you get is risk that you might not do a good job, maybe you do worse than your competitors, and you also get distraction where you've just taken, you take 10 engineers and 10 sprints and you apply it to a problem that doesn't actually really give you differentiated value to your users. So we started MUX so that people would not have to do that. It's fine if you want to build your own video platform, once you get to a certain scale, if you can afford a dozen engineers for a VOD platform and you have some really massively differentiated use case, you know, maybe, live is, I don't know, I don't have the rule of thumb, live videos maybe five times harder than on demand video to work with. But you know, in general, like there's such a shortage of software engineers today and software engineers have, frankly, are in such high demand. Like you see what happens in the marketplace and the hiring markets, how competitive it is. You need to use your software team where they're maximally effective, and where they're maximally effective is building differentiation into your products for your customers. And video is just not that, like very few companies actually differentiate on their video technology. So we want to be that team for everyone else. We're 200 people building the absolute best video infrastructure as APIs for developers and making that available to everyone else. >> John, great to have you on with the showcase, love the company, love what you guys do. Video as code, data as code, great stuff. Final plug for the company, for the developers out there and prospects watching for MUX, why should they go to MUX? What are you guys up to? What's the big benefit? >> I mean, first, just check us out. Try try our APIs, read our docs, talk to our support team. We put a lot of work into making our platform the best, you know, as you dig deeper, I think you'd be looking at the performance around, the global performance of what we do, looking at our analytics stack and the insight you get into video streaming. We have an emerging open source video player that's really exciting, and I think is going to be the direction that open source players go for the next decade. And then, you know, we're a quickly growing team. We're 60 people at the beginning of last year. You know, we're one 50 at the beginning of this year, and we're going to a add, we're going to grow really quickly again this year. And this whole team is dedicated to building the best video structure for developers. >> Great job, Jon. Thank you so much for spending the time sharing the story of MUX here on the show, Amazon Startup Showcase season two, episode two, thanks so much. >> Thank you, John. >> Okay, I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. This is season two, episode two, the ongoing series cover the most exciting startups from the AWS Cloud Ecosystem. Talking data analytics here, video cloud, video as a service, video infrastructure, video APIs, hottest thing going on right now, and you're watching it live here on theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(click) >> Welcome this special Cube conversation in the Intel Tech Lounge at the Sundance Film Festival. I'm John Furrier with The Cube. We are here with Ari Kuschnir, who is the founder and managing partner of Missing Pieces. Doing some really amazing work on the future of filmmaking. He's got a great entrepreneurial spirit. And creative desire to deliver great product. Welcome! >> Thank you, thank you. >> So, tell them about Missing Pieces and what's going on in your world. So, there's context. Take a minute to explain what you are working on. >> Well, the premise is to be at this intersection of storytelling technology. And to make stuff people actually want to watch. And VR and AR are parts of it. But not the whole. So, I know some of the conversation focus is on, is on VR, and we're just as excited about where storytelling is headed. In terms of what technology allows us to do. But the key for me is. I'm just passionate about, a new thing comes out. And I want to figure out how to make something really great. But meaningful, and powerful with that. >> We were talking before you came out about filmmaking, obviously trained in the discipline, obviously a variety of other things. But I want to get your perspective, we're on top of this new generation, what does that mean to you? When you hear that new generation, a new creative is coming? What does that mean to you? >> Yeah, I feel like I've ridden the wave of the thing as it's happened. And I mean, the company has too. So, I went to film school in the late 90s. And it was the first time you could buy like, first Final Cut, and the first wave of that. So you could make art little movies on the weekend, you no longer needed even to go to the school itself to borrow the equipment. That was revolutionary in 1999. And then 2005, when we started thinking about the company. You know, your Vimeo, YouTube, video i-Pod all come out within five months of each other. Towards the later part of the year. And it's a revolution. It's clear that with distribution, now not only can we make it and edit it in our laptops. But we can put it out, and millions of people could watch it. And that was the first time that was possible. And it was revolutionary. And I think it still is, to some degree. So, we've just, you know, as it evolves what I see is that, it's not, I've always felt like it's not enough to make the sausage as they say. You know, the directors, the talent that I sign now. Like the project we have now here at Sundance, young Jake. Jake is a great example of a creative who you can't fit in a box. He's an Internet artist, he's a rapper. He's an interactive video maker. He did an app called Emoji.Ink. And he does celebrity emoji portraits. He has a hundred thousand followers on Instagram. So, he can command his own audience. So, when a brand, or an agency comes to him. It's a very different approach than when they come for a very straight up work for hire, director's commercial kind of thing. That is the future, I mean. The future is about having a passionate audience, making things for that audience, understanding it. And being able to communicate with them on a daily basis, or a weekly basis in a powerful way, right? Through story. >> Yeah, I mean, you're riding the wave. And the waves are getting bigger. One of the things we do, we do a lot of tech coverage. And we see this in Cloud computing where software changed from Waterfall to Agile. And now the craft's coming back on the software side. But still now, software is eating the creative world. Because now a new wave is coming. So, speak to that, because you're, this is, you can almost look at the old ways. You mentioned the commercials and films. Almost like the Waterfall. You know, crafts, craft it up and you ship it. And you hope it works well. >> Ari: Yeah. >> But now, you have this new model of iteration. Where it's more Agile creative. How do you do Agile, like your artist, and not lose the craft? >> Yeah, well it's a challenge. Look, I've had so many opportunities in our 10 plus year career to kind of go in that direction of just like quantity over quality. And we could just never do it. I mean we're just not cut out for it. But at the same time, I'm not, I never ignore, how to optimize the content based on data, and based on what the landscape is looking like. So, an important thing for example that we consider in every project is context. Like what, how is this project going to be released? Oh, it turns out that, it's really a big social media push. It's not a TV thing. Or it turns out specifically it's Facebook versus Instagram. And that's a very different type of edit. And a very different type of way you start the video. 'Cause you've got a certain, even a different format, and a different way of looking at the content. So, you start to get into, and then you start to iterate, and look at the different ways in which you can repurpose, and rerelease the content, but customize it for each thing. So, you get into this really interesting place where the data is driving the story. And the feedback is driving the story. >> And the audience is part of the journey. >> Yes. And the comments, and the way in which people are taking the thing that you've made and re-interpreting it, is really interesting. And part of the story. >> You trigger a lot of emotion with me, when we're talking, because, you know, as an entrepreneur, I started media businesses turning into, and no-one has even seen this kind of media business before. But I have no media training of any kind. I did a science major. So, there's certain, and I've observed that there's dogma in the journalism business. And there's, but you know, how dare I challenge that, or others. You're doing the same thing. >> I love that by the way. >> So, I want to ask you. What is the dogma with the old world, 'cause the naysayers are usually the ones with the dogma. "Oh, it will never work!" >> Ari: Yeah. >> So, you're on the front end of this new trend. But you're going to have a visibility into what they're thinking, what is that? >> The dogma is, you know, the whole like, there's only big name directors, and you know, it's a certain caliber of work. And that craft is the ultimate thing. And that you just have to make the thing great. And it'll do the thing that is needs to do. Without any thinking in terms of context, or media buyer. How it can actually become a social, socially engaged piece. So, the thing that we're always fighting is some version of that. And then because we came from a scrappy place, but we're now, you know, a pretty legit thing, I think people, some people will still be like, well that's the kind of like, the problem solving sometimes gets interpreted as scrappy. Which is a word I really don't like. And I think-- >> It's a compliment on one hand. >> Yeah. >> But some people look at it as an insult. "Oh, he's just scrappy!" >> Well-- >> "He's not legit!" >> You never want to be the cheap solution. You want to be the solution that people call because nobody else can solve this problem for you. I think we, there's a strand of the company that's like, the kind of like, pick up the phone and we'll figure it out. And, the impossible project that nobody else can do. And then there's another strand where it's just like, you just want to make stuff people actually want to watch. How hard it that? The thing where you could just buy the media, and expect the results is trickier and trickier. >> I mean you could be different, and innovative, but that might not be good. But if you're good doing it, you're differentiated and you're innovating. >> Ari: That's right. >> What's the filmmaking track on that line. Because certainly there's a lot of innovation. And with innovation comes failure. But people are trying to be different. And being different actually is a good thing. What are some of the trends that you're seeing where people are having some success. And where people are stumbling. >> Yeah, that's a good. I mean what I see is, the things that do well take cultural context into account, and again speak to the people in that way. So, it's like a feedback loop that it's creating with its own audience. And we almost always, there's almost always a time in the process when we're dealing with an agency, or a brand where things start to go a little bit like, too, too much, and in that direction that you don't want it to take. Somebody, usually me, or someone will say, "Look, if we make these changes. "Or if we go in this direction. "We won't want to share it. "And if we don't want to share it, "nobody's going to want to share it." So, that becomes a key thing. Whereas before you could sort of away with some of that, now it's like, well, it has to pass this sort of, kind of litmus test in terms of like, are you comfortable with sharing this thing, because it speaks to you or not. >> So, I want to ask you the hard question, we're here at the Intel Tech Lounge, obviously Intel is doing a lot of tech things. They're trying to get all this new tech. And I see it on, whether you watch the NFL playoffs, with, you know, with the camera angles, the games, on basketball games. You see them using the power of technology-- >> We're actually working on an Intel Olympics VR related project that got a little tease ad, CES. So, I can just say that. >> Yeah I know, so what's the tech? What's the cool new game changer in your mind. As a tool that you need to be more successful, and other artists could use? >> Hmmm, well, you tend to, yeah I mean, I think we-- >> John: More horsepower, more compute, more-- >> No, I mean it's really the, What happened with the AR was really interesting, which was, everyone realized, oh, the phone's already in our pocket. While the headset needs to be something that really needs to be standalone. It needs to be $200. You know, like, you sort of, there's different kinds of headsets, of course. They do different kinds of things. But that's an extra hardware. The phone we already have in our pockets. So, everyone's started taking AR seriously. Including the big players. And what that allowed was a, a rethinking of what the possibilities with story would be. So, in some ways this last year has been a readjustment, and a rethinking of, well, what can you do with the phone that you've already got in your pocket. In terms of expanding the storytelling. Or placing a story in the middle of your living room, you know. A layer, using the phone as a window and a layer. But I'm equally as excited about what's coming in VR, interactive VR, room-scale VR, you know. The project that we have here is an interactive 360 project with a phone. >> What's that called? >> It's called On My Way. And the artist is young Jake. And the original conceit of it, is, it's Jake, there's four Jakes in a car. And every time you move the phone to a different Jake, it changes the Jake. So, as soon as it passes the quadrants. So, the four quadrant it kind of swaps the Jake. And that creates a really fun, and interesting thing. And he actually designed it for the phone, vertical. Because that's the way most people are going to experience it. >> John: That's awesome. >> But it's playing on a headset as well. >> Oh you're definitely a new creative. Love chatting with you. >> Thank you. >> Final, well, I have two questions, first one is, Sundance, what's the story this year? What's your report? If you had to go back and your friend asked you to give him a report, "Hey, what happened Ari, "what's going on at Sundance this year?" >> A combination of really interesting high-end VR projects. Some of them leaning into this kind of like more psychedelic less narrative driven stuff. Which I really like. Kind of like really embracing the fact that it's another world, and taking you there. And then the AR stuff. There's a thing called Tender, Ten Day R. Or Tendar. Which is a play on Tinder, by Tinder Claus. Which is, uses augmented reality, and emotion, and machine learning, everything that you could hope for in a really interesting way. So, that's kind of showing you where it's going. So, I think those two things. >> Psychedelic's interesting. I always, I mean this kind of tangent. But in, I've been seeing on The Cube interviews, I think we're going to have a digital hippy revolution. >> Ari: Definitely! >> And it's coming. I mean you can feel it. It's a different culture. >> When I was looking a lot of people, yeah, a lot of people are scared to, I mean, VR is a really great consciousness expanding way to go to get into other worlds. Without, you know-- >> And will all the crap going on in the world today you can almost look at this as a Sixties like movement in this modern era. Where it could be a major catalyst for massive change. >> Yeah, and there's a piece about, you know, this female shaman that grows through the tribe in Ecuador. And became the first ever female shaman for her tribe. And there's a piece called Chorus that, within it. Which is just super weird and trippy. And almost has no plot, but is amazing. >> All right Ari, you've got to run. Quick soundbite. What are you working on, what's exciting you these days? Share a little bit about what's happening. >> A variety of, again it's the full spectrum of storytelling, so it's not one thing. It's really pushing, experiential pushing, branded content pushing, original content that we're getting a lot more into that game. Long form series. VR series. Really, that's kind of the next wave for the company is to set foot, much stronger in the original space, and create our own original IP. Our own original content. >> Awesome, Ari Kuschnir managing partner and founder of Missing Pieces, check them out. Lot of great work. And again, it's a whole new game changing, from storytelling to the tech. The collision between technology and artistry, and creative, and it's happening. It's here at Sundance, at the Intel Tech Lounge. I'm John Furrier with The Cube conversation here at Sundance, which is part of our coverage. Was to look at the angle of Sundance 2018. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Veritas Vision 2017. Brought to you by Veritas. (techno music) >> Welcome back to Veritas Vision 2017. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with my cohost, Stu Miniman. Dave Nettleton is here. He's the group product manager at Google. Dave, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you, really excited to be here. >> Alright, let's talk storage and cloud. So Google Cloud Platform, we were at your show in March. Kind of the second coming out party. Diane Green at the helm. Obviously you guys are making serious moves in the enterprise. Give us the update overall and then we'll get into the storage piece. >> Yeah. Well as you say, over the last couple of years a big focus for Google has actually been shifting and focusing on enterprise customers. I think Gartner reflects that about a trillion dollars of IT spend is going to be affected by the cloud over the next three to five years. And Google has some amazing assets that its developed over the last 10 or 15 years that we can bring to bat will really help meet enterprise customers' needs, help them where they are, and really help transform their businesses for the future. So we're excited about that. >> So how's that going? One of the big thrusts that we heard in March was and we saw it. You guys have made some moves bringing in people from enterprise companies In particular, you came from Microsoft. See a lot of guys from Cisco. We saw a lot of guys running around from EMC. Diane herself from VMware, bringing a lot of that enterprise DNA. How is the the patient assimilating with those organs? >> Yeah, actually that's been one of the most exciting parts I think of the journey has been watching the team come together over the last year or two. As you say, bringing together that pool of talent that has entered one and created even new business in the past, it's amazing to see that talent group come together. Diane is doing an amazing job bringing the team together and building out all of the sales functions and other parts of the business that we need for the enterprise. Building out the partner ecosystem, as well, is obviously super critical. And when you marry that together with the technology assets that Google has, it really is giving customers unprecedented levels of capabilities in the cloud to operate their business in new, more efficient ways. >> So Google is really well known for kind of the analytics piece of the business. Look at all the pieces that have spun out of what Google has done. I'm a networking guy by background. I said when PCP was launched I said, "Google's network is second to none." Best network. Really understand when the whole wave of SDN came out. Storage on the other hand, one of those foundational pieces, but it's not the first thing that comes to mind. So give us a little bit of a pedigree of the group, what you're building, what differentiates Google from the other infrastructure as a service and cloud players. >> Yeah, and actually you teed it up beautifully, because one of our in storage big differentiators is actually our ability to leverage the network. So, let me talk you through that a little bit. So Google internally has been building out massive, scalable storage systems for years to power the rest of Google. And as we take those to our enterprise customers we find that we're able to leverage that core infrastructure together with global assets like our network. Two parts of the network actually I talk about. One is our wide area network. That allows us to actually not only store data in regions around the world, but distribute that content through hundreds of points of presence direct to customers very, very quickly. Inside of our data centers we have software defined networks that allow us to separate out compute and storage to really help us then scale these independently so that we can give massive flexibility and cost savings and pass that through to our customers. And how this shows up in our products, perhaps the best example is if you take something like Google Cloud Storage, which is our object storage product, that product is very differentiated in the industry in that it provides a single API that will meet use cases from global content serving for customers like Spotify and Vimeo who want to stream media content around the world, streaming news, web, media, videos, all the way through to archival storage. Last year we launched our cold line storage class, and this is unique in the industry because it is archival storage that's online, and it has the same API and access as all of the rest of Google Cloud Storage. So I can take a single piece of data, a video for example, I could be streaming it out to customers around the world globally, and then after a month or two I might decide that I want to archive it. I can archive that down to our colder storage class, and if a customer wants to set it up again they have instant access to it. >> What we're hearing from customers is something we heard in the keynotes here at the Veritas show is customers' cloud strategy is rather fragmented, and by that I mean they're not all in on one place to spot. Certain companies say that. How does that impact your relationship with customers on storage? How do you interact with their SaaS environment, their on premises solutions, as well as what you have inside Google? >> Yeah. I think fundamentally we believe the world is going to evolve to sort of a multi cloud world, and that includes both on premises and public clouds. And as part of that our strategy is to be, be the most open. And by being the most open that means we need to help customers be portable with their workloads. We need to help them bring their workloads to the cloud for when that's appropriate, but also if it's appropriate to take it back to say on premises to enable them to do that in a very first class way, as well. And we think what will happen is some customers will go all in on a particular cloud. There will be particular use cases and platform capabilities that will be very differentiated that they want to go all in on, and others will take a more portfolio approach. And then partners, such as Veritas and others, are great for helping customers through their information map helping manage that overall portfolio. >> Could you explain that portability? Is Kubernetes a piece of it? Is that the primary piece of it? And maybe explain a little bit more how Veritas fits in, too. >> Yeah, so the overall ecosystem is evolving. Kubernetes is obviously a huge part of that, that environment, for being able to portably move your compute around. In terms of relationship with Veritas, you know, for me it's all about helping customers solve the problems that they have and meet customers where they are. And if customers are leveraging multiple clouds, either because they use investor breed solutions through acquisitions, etc., they need the ability to be able to manage their data across all of those environments. And someone like Veritas with information map is a key partner for us in helping customers meet and manage their needs. >> So what does that mean for storage? So containers obviously for the application portability, mobility. Kubernetes is sort of Google's little lever. Everybody wants to do Kubernetes and you guys are front and center there. So that gives you credibly in the cloud world, not that you didn't have it before, but everybody now wants to belly up to you on that. What does that mean for storage? Is that just sort of like an ice breaker for you guys? Are there other things that you're doing specific to storage to take advantage of your expertise there? >> Yeah, we want to make sure that customers have a really great integrated experience as they build out their application platforms. So we're always working with them to better define and understand their needs and build that out. It is a fast emerging, fast evolving space. APIs are still evolving fast. Different layers of the stack are evolving fast. So we continue to work with customers and just meet their needs through partnerships and also first party platform. >> And as you move up the stack sort of beyond the networking storage and compute into even database, Google has got some amazing database technologies. Are you doing specific things in storage to take advantage of that, making things run faster or more available or recover faster? Can you talk about that a little bit? >> Yeah. The underlying infrastructure at Google powers a lot of our external facing services. So we actually are able to reap very interesting benefits by managing on a single shared TI, technical infrastructure, that we have at Google. But as that surfaces up to customers we have to make sure obviously that they can use it in the ways that best meet their needs. But we want to make sure that we integrate their solutions as easy as possible. So for example, Google Cloud Storage (mumbles) talking about is really well integrated with Dataproc, which is our managed Hadoop product for running big data workloads, and also with something like BigQuery, which is our massively scalable data warehousing solution. So, I can store a lot of my own structured data in Google Cloud Storage and then leverage my entire analytics portfolio to operate over that. And again, a key part of that is the separation of computer networking that we were talking about. When storage is separate from compute and we've used that very powerful software defined network, then that lets us spin up thousands of nodes in something like BigQuery to operate over data and make a very seamless experience for customers. >> So Stu kind of touched on it before. People talk about Google and Google Cloud they point to two things. Obviously the Google app suite, okay, boom. We're a customer. We love it. Everybody is familiar with it. And the other is data, the data king. And they kind of put you in those two boxes. Are you comfortable with that? Is that fair? Is that really the brand that you want? Are you trying to extend that? I wonder if you can comment. >> Yeah. Obviously our strengths have been in analytics and machine learning, and we find that that's a thing that customers are really looking to find ways to add new value to their business. But we also wanted to make sure, we also want to make sure that we're a very trusted provider offering the various high levels of services. And it's not just the capabilities but overall TCO. We want to make it much easier for people to develop new applications on the platform. We talked a little bit about some of our open capabilities, but just in general we want to make it easy for customers to get the best value out of their cloud. So you'll see us doing more and more of that. Things we've done have been like being able to create a custom, custom VM images. You can dial up your memory and size, give you a lot of flexibility to really just hone in and solve the problems that you have. >> So help us square a circle there. When you talk to the cloud, we'll call pure cloud folks, people that, you know, born in the cloud, they developed cloud from day one, no legacy infrastructure. You talk to those guys they're like, "Wow, TCO advantages "from a developer advantage, the speed, etc." When you talk to the legacy enterprise guys they'll tell you, "Oh it's expensive in that cloud. "A lot of people moving back from the cloud." Now of course we know the cloud growth is astronomical. The enterprise growth is flat at best. But there's two different exact polar opposites. Which is the truth? >> I mean the truth is it depends on what you need, right? We think cloud will be a huge disruptor to IT spend over the next several years, it already is. Wind back five or 10 years ago, I don't think people would even be thinking we'd be having the conversations that we have today. People were like, "Security, "I'm not even sure this cloud thing. "Seems like a shared colo facility to me. "I don't think I want to go near that." And it's taken us awhile collectively as an industry to educate really what the cloud is, that it's actually a much more integrated set of services that helps people up level what it is that they can do. But you know, one of the biggest challenges we still face in the industry is just education, skills. You know, it takes time to learn new skills. It's encouraging developers, working with partners, providing solutions to IT that make it much more turnkey for them to use solutions so they don't have to learn deep developer skills or super high end data science skills to get value out of their data. >> One of the hot button topics at this show has been GDPR. How does Google fit into the discussion? How are you helping customers get ready for that? >> Yeah, well obviously we're very well aware of GDPR and are working really hard to make sure that we're going to be meeting the requirements for our customers as we move forward. We take security and compliance incredibly seriously. So yes, expect us to see see us having full GDPR compliance, and then working with partners to make sure that customers can get the confidence that they need for their business. >> So Dave, as a storage technology guy, what are the big trends that you're tracking as it relates to storage that sort of are driving Google's thinking? >> Yeah, great question. So ... So, you know, more and more data is going to be coming out. Like data has traditionally been siloed. People haven't known where their data is. More and more of that data is now going to be shared within a single environment, and it's not just going to be in the cloud. That data is going to reach both onto on premises and also all the way out to the edge. IoT is going to be a huge generator of data. Being able to gather that data, manage that data, provide rich analytics over that data with machine learning and then push that intelligence back out to the edge so that actually data that's produced can just be analyzed right there is going to be super important. I love to say that data is the fuel for analytics and ML, and that fuel is going to be not just in the cloud, on prem, and all the way to the edge and managing that. It's going to be super, super, super interesting. I think network again. Network, once you start to bring low latency networks to your storage you can actually start to do really new and interesting things with your data that you'd never thought of before. If your data, if you can't access it quickly, your data is dark to you. It might as well not be there, right? >> Have things like ... How have things like Flash affected sort of bottlenecks and you mentioned the network. People talk about the network is now the new bottleneck. How is that shaping your thinking? >> Yeah, so storage trends continue, densities get higher, speeds get faster. That's a trend that's been continuing. We've been tracking it, continuing to track it. For me that just means then people will store more data and look to get more value out of that data. Sort of like the latent value of, the latent value of your data is often a function of how quickly you can run machine learning and analytics over that data and get value out of it. And you know we can do things now to analyze data faster than ever before. I was just thinking of an example the other day. I was running a query myself to look at storage usage. It's something I do regularly. And I ran the query and looked at the results. "Oh, that's cool." And then I was like, "Oh, "how many rows of data am I querying here?" And I run that query. Oh, that was like several billion rows of data that I just analyzed in like four seconds. I have no idea how much compute power was ran up in the background to meet that query, but that's the power that these new capabilities will enable over that data. >> Dave, how are customers doing with ... Kind of the thing I want to poke at is in the room data centers utilization is usually abysmal. And the biggest problem we have is when you do a technology you do it the old way. How are they doing at really taking advantage of cloud, getting utilization, utility? I'm sure if they go all serverless and per micro second it would be much better, but how are they doing? >> Well, so one of the beauties of the cloud is of course that it's a pay as you go model, right? And with storage and compute being disaggregated we see customers can provision storage, pay per gig as they go, and then when they need to run compute they just pay for the compute as they need it. They can shape custom compute instances in GCP, so they only pay for the compute that they need. When they finish they can shut them down. And if you're running something like for example a Hadoop workload where traditionally you were provisioning large amounts of compute and storage, sizing for maximum capacity, you no longer need to think about that anymore. You can just store data super cheaply. When you want to run a large 100, 1,000, 10,000 node Hadoop cluster over that data no problem. You spin it up. It spins up in under a minute. Run huge amounts of compute, shut it down, and you're done. And actually what we're finding is that like this is leading ... People are now having to ask new questions of how they manage custom controls in their business, because this is an incredible power that you can give to businesses, but they also want their controls to say, "Hey yeah, don't do that too often, "or if you do I want to manage it "and manage the cost and controls "for departments inside of organizations." So, we're building out the capabilities to help customers with that. >> Last question. Veritas were here. What do you look for in a partner like Veritas? What do you want from Veritas partnership? >> So Veritas is a fantastic partner for us. They really help us do the two things that we strive for, which is meet customers where they are today and help them transform their business for the future. So for our integration with NetBackup really helps customers in the enterprise just use existing products that they know and love and in a very turnkey way use the cloud. That helps them manage the costs and meet a lot of demands they have in their IT environments today super easily, so we love that. It also empowers them to do new things in the future. So the integration with information map we love. Helps customers identify new opportunities in their data and add new value to their business. >> Great, Dave Nettleton, Google, we'll leave it there. Thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you very much, been a pleasure. >> Alright, we'll keep it right there, buddy. Stu and I will be back with our next guest. This is Veritas Vision 2017. You're watching theCUBE. (techno music)

>> 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 are back at NAB 2017 with a hundred thousand of our favorite friends doing everything about broadcast media. It's media, it's entertainment, it's technology, it's the M.E.T. effect, which is all the rage here at the show, because you can't really separate the three, they're all tied together. Really excited to be joined by our next guest, who's in the weeds, keeping an eye on this, trying to keep up with all the crazy trends. He's Avi Swerdlow, he's a Manager, Research and Development at the Walt Disney Company. Avi, welcome. >> Thank you, thank you for having me. >> Absolutely, so first off, we talked a little bit before we went live, your first time at the show, kind of general impressions of NAB? >> Yeah, it's big, a lot of walking, is my first impression. Aside from the tired feet, it's really exciting to see all the new tech out here. From talking to other people who have been in years past, it seems like things move really fast here. So what you were seeing last year is completely different of what you're seeing this year. But loving all the different sections, everything from hardware to some of the more data-driven stuff. Noticing that a lot more things are moving digital, that a lot of demos are now on laptops instead of physical. >> Right. >> Which is exciting to see. I've been impressed by some of the bigger company, like Microsoft's and IBM's machine learning efforts. And equally impressed by some of the hardware plays at DGI and GoPro, so really, really exciting stuff. >> Yeah, it's really interesting, kind of bifurcation of the market. On one hand, you've got all this crazy high end stuff with 4K and 6K and 8K and ultra HD and all these things and 360 and all these crazy cameras. At the other hand, you've got democratization of distribution with YouTube and Vimeo and all these tools being brought down in a price point, Samsung, 360 camera, where you can be a relatively small content creator and have amazing tools at your disposal. So the opportunities from a creative point of view have probably never been richer. >> Absolutely. I think a lot of what we're trying to focus on is moving in that digital direction for some of our content. Trying to implement some of those lower end or more cost efficient tools and those distribution points to get our content to people faster while at the same time trying to keep up on the higher 4K end. Something that's interesting I've chatted with my colleagues is that things move so fast that it's hard year to year to come here and see all the new things that are completely different from what you saw last year. >> Right, right. >> Now you have to start implementing those things. So I think it's a balance between all of that. I think, given that we're a big media company, some of those lower end tools are really interesting to us. In a sense that, take news for example. It's equally exciting to go live on Facebook video as it is sometimes to do it on a traditional broadcast. So I think learning how we integrate those and integrate those well are some of what we're trying to explore. >> Right. One of the topics we talked about before the cameras turned on was this virtual reality and augmented reality, VR and AR. It is pretty interesting because you talked specifically about data infusion on top of tech. And I remember the first time I ever saw a sports broadcast where, I think it was Fox maybe, that put the score bug on the upper left hand corner. You're like what is that, you're taking valuable real estate. Now we're so accustomed to this multi-layers of data on top of the broadcast. Take like a Bloomberg channel, where some of those things, where now they have multiple feeds that are constantly going. It's a very different way to consume data but that's what people really want these days. >> Absolutely. I think that last year was kind of this year of AR, VR. Where people thought there was going to be this massive revolution all of the sudden where everybody would be, would have headsets and VR would become ubiquitous. I think that will happen eventually, it's probably going to be a slower burn, mostly because people don't have devices yet. I think there's not enough content out there, not enough devices out there. Regardless, I think that if you distill down what AR and VR is at its core, it's the augmentation of information over something else. >> Right. >> So I think a lot of people are now starting to explore, what are the baby steps you take to implement some of that technology into your workflow. Assuming that people don't have devices yet, so I think, when I look at some of the virtual sets that we're seeing around this show and the implementation of information over, let's say, news or sports broadcasts, that becomes really interesting. If you use, we were talking about photogrammetry or volume capture, if you can use some of that and do interesting stuff for instance, if you're looking at a sports game and you're able to create in something like Unity or Unreal, an asset that represents the sports game, it becomes a much easier way to understand what's going on in the game then just a set of numbers. Yes, when you saw that score in the top left hand corner that was exciting. Now imagine seeing a live 3D version of the game same information unfolding, just in a different way. I think those are the baby steps towards this AR, VR implementation and eventually you might get to a point where everybody has a headset but baby steps for the average consumer. >> Right, right. In a lot of conversations about machine learning, you said you're excited about some of the machine learning, you've got the metadata and better metadata around the assets themselves, but now actually getting into the assets at the frame level to do more exploration so that people can, it's the age old adage, find, consume and share-- >> Absolutely. >> The stuff that they're most interested in. There's a lot of new opportunities because of the horsepower of these machines here that we're surrounded by, in terms of the massive capacity, and speed of the storage systems, to do things that you really couldn't do inside the assets themselves. >> Absolutely. I think our problem at somewhere like Disney is unique. It's different than at Google or at Facebook. We're not looking at this huge well of content like YouTube. We're looking at a smaller amount of content and what's really important to us is accurate metadata about our content more so than just having metadata. A lot of what we focus on is definitely metadata extraction but to the extent that we're going to use these machine learning tools we want to have really good training sets and get back really accurate data. So a lot of what we focus on is being able to have a QA layer on top of the machine learning efforts. Being able to use machine learning efforts that can be honed towards one show for instance. >> Right. >> So only extracting a certain set of characters. We really enjoy using these tools and enjoy finding ways that we can apply them to a unique problem which seems to be different than the problem that some of them are trying to address. >> Right. >> But regardless, they're working really well for us. >> So what are some of the use cases, or can you share any of how you're using machine learning to get and score that kind of metadata. >> Yeah. For instance, we're starting to use metadata in some of the ways other people are. Some of the stuff that I can talk about for instance is facial capture, location capture. Things that other people are doing but again, they're unique to one show. For instance, a Quantico on ABC might be something where we have a set of characters that we're looking for. We're starting to use machine learning to look at things like that. >> Interesting. Now Disney obviously, great company, been around forever, huge legacy. I'm just curious to the conversations in the hallway there's just this crazy wave of technology butting up against, we still have to tell great stories. Disney has a long history of telling great stories whether it's through the original animation studios or all the vast properties in which you guys have grown up. Is there still a creative ying and yang there-- >> Absolutely. >> Is there a thread and a rebalancing about technology versus let's not forget what should be-- >> A hundred percent. >> Job one. >> Absolutely. I think that's why I really enjoy working at Disney. It's always story first. My background is actually in creative development in the film industry so I always come at it from a story first point of view. I enjoy that the rest of the company does as well. But if you look at Disney's history, it's always been technology complimenting story. Think about the multi-plane camera in Snow White. The reason Snow White was able to be made was because Disney democratized animation. He figured out the technology that made animation possible at a feature film scale. Without that machine, that would not have been possible. I think in our core history you have these certain technologies that are put to use in the service of story. I think that's pretty much how we approach everything. We're looking for stuff that's going to augment our storytelling efforts. Not replace it, not degrade it in any way but only to enhance it. That's in our legacy. >> Right, right. That's interesting, I've never heard it explained that way but that is so much the trend that we continue to be on today. It's democratization of the data, democratization of the access to the data, democratization of the analytics of the data. And then operating at scale. Which requires, in today's scale, I'm not talking about a two hour movie scale, actually be able to set animation, but massive amounts of data that are flowing through the system. So how do you-- >> Absolutely. We want to use that data to empower our storytellers. To empower anybody at the company to tell better stories. But data management it's tough. I think a lot of what we had to do is first of all put in place the plumbing to make that data easily accessible. To make it easily searchable. To make it correct. To make it authoritative. To get people out of their spreadsheets that you had stored away somewhere. And unify that data so that it starts to tell a story. We've been very successful in those efforts. But it's a massive undertaking because you have companies that have not necessarily thought from a data first point of view and are now realizing that the actual value of this data. So part of what we're doing is extracting that metadata. Doing it in a way that's extremely accurate and authoritative. But also going as far upstream as possible to try to find are there other people that are already collecting this metadata and can we have them put it into a central database as opposed to everybody having their own little corner of data? >> Right, right. Is there an effort to reassess the value of the data? Where before just raw data in and of itself was a liability. Was expensive to store, expensive to keep and there was always trade off decisions about what you keep what you throw away. Now there really is the opportunity to keep it all and there's significant data outside, maybe beyond the box office gate of the feature film with all the various distribution channels and ancillary things. Obviously Disney is way ahead of the curve in terms of licensing and realizing value beyond just the core asset. But are there new ways now that those models are being worked in so that you can justify the additional expense of all this extra metadata and storage and infrastructure which, at the end of the day, you got to pay the bill-- >> Certainly. >> To the data center. >> Absolutely. I think to the extent that we can use our data to tell our stories to gain new insights it is extremely valuable. I think there are efforts around the company to, not necessarily store as much data as possible but to find what data is valuable and where it is. We're finding more and more data that is valuable. Because when you are able to unify it with other data it starts to tell a story. That's both data about our content, about our content performance, about our consumers, that what types of stories we should and shouldn't be telling. I think it's not just taking everything but it's figuring out what data is actually valuable and then trying to derive as much insight as possible from that. >> Right. Alright so, 2017, what are your top priorities for this year? Can't believe we're a third of the way through 2017- >> I know. >> It used to be like a stereo question, I guess it's not an end of the year question anymore. >> I would say one of our main goals is really to advance our automation efforts. I think also to the extent possible to advance our metadata tagging efforts as much as possible. I'd say that's top of mind at the moment. In addition to some other things but that's some of the stuff we're thinking about. >> Alright, great. Well Avi, thanks for-- >> Thank you for having me. >> For taking a few minutes and enjoy your first ever >> Thank you, yeah I will. >> NAB 2017. Alright Avi Swerdlow from Disney. I'm Jeff Frick from theCUBE, you're watching us like from NAB 2017 at the Las Vegas convention center. We'll be back after this short break. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: It's The Cube. Covering NAB 2017. Brought to you buy HGST. >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with The Cube. We're at NAB 2017. It's not only 100,000, it's 102,000 people according to the official press release talking about the media and entertainment and technology. That theme is actually met as the technology is so intimately to media entertainment that you can't separate them out anymore. We're really excited for our next guest. He is right in the heart of it. He's in his happy place. He's leading the whole contingent here. It's Eric Weaver. He's the global director of media, entertainment, and market development for HGST. Eric, welcome. >> Thank you so much. Glad to be here today. >> So first impressions of the show. I'm sure you've been here a 1000 times. It's crazy. >> Yeah, no, it's really amazing. It's always a wonderful show. There's so many great people here really trying to get an understanding of what's coming up, what's going to solve their problems that they're facing right now. >> And the problems keep getting bigger because people want more. I mean it's amazing you walk around the level of gear and equipment. Some of the green screen setups here, they look like professional studios. And now we've gone from HD to 4K to AK to ultra HD. We've got 360 cameras. Little commercial ones by Samsung and professional grade ones. That's only going to increase the complexity of trying to manage all this stuff. >> Absolutely, it's really becoming a reality now that 4K and UHD are coming down the pipe. I think I heard some number that 56% of all sets will be that by 2020. And it's really great because you'll see the creative community starting to embrace HDR or UHD because they have never seen it before and until they go into the color suites and see the difference, they're absolutely blown away. So you're going to have a drive here. You're going to have a drive between the director saying this is what I want, and this is my look, and the camera or the tv set saying, this is what we can produce in theaters and what we can produce. >> Right, we didn't even talk about VR or AI. >> And VR and AI absolutely are some of the hottest topics out there right now. Trying to comprehend. You're also seeing a big shift from 360 video to photogrammetry and computational photography and these things. Volumetric capture. And those things are really going to be taking over in the next couple years and they are huge in understanding how they work for everyone. >> Okay, so you dropped a couple new vocabulary words. I have to have you dig in a little deeper. >> Alright, so volumetric. >> Photogemetric first? >> Photogrammetry. Photogrammetry. So what photogrammetry is is recreating a room with photographs by stitching them together. So for example, I worked on a piece called Wonder Buffalo and in Wonder Buffalo we basically took 956 photographs of a room and then stitched them together at 50 megapixels each and created this whole new room environment. You combine that with what's called volumetric capture. So instead of 12-24 cameras pointing out where you're stuck in a locked position which is a traditional 360 video. You're now doing 36 cameras in and those 36 cameras doing an almost hologram. The big difference here is now all of a sudden you feed it into a gaming engine, like Unity and you can walk around and explore the entire scene. So it's the closest you've ever seen to the Holodeck by maybe Star Trek or something. >> Right. >> It's really quite an amazing experience. >> Now on the other side of the equation, on the simpler side, you know you've got a lot of independent film makers now have YouTube and Vimeo and all these distribution platforms and you know, I'm a huge Casey Neistat fan. You know, he's got his little $2000 camera and he's out shooting and getting tremendous views so the focus on audience and story telling and sort of the democratization of distribution is another huge trend. >> Absolutely. Really big. YouTube is, what's fascinating about something like YouTube is YouTube wasn't possible a couple years ago. Something like the Cloud made YouTube possible. If you historically look back, you'll see something like the electricity juxtaposition, and until Niagara Falls was there, we didn't have the ability to have electricity in such volumes. And so some of the breakthrough cases might have been like Upcoa, who produced aluminum. They were burning, tearing down whole forests to put together furnaces that could burn hot enough to make it. Now that they have cost effective aluminum, or electricity, they could do this. The same situation was like someone like YouTube. They can scale at a level that we've never seen before and was never possible. >> Right. >> So it opens up whole new opportunities of democratization of video. >> Right. >> Absolutely amazing new tools. >> And then obviously cloud, right? Cloud is changing the world. The big cloud providers like Amazon and Google and Microsoft and a ton of second tier service providers. But they're not kind of on the cloud for big assets is speed of light is too damn slow, you know, getting stuff up and down is a pain. And also you know that's where you really wanted a big machine with local horsepower. >> So. >> But now you've got rendering, all this huge stuff that you need massive scale that you're little machine can't do anymore. >> So a big confusion a lot of people have in cloud is they think about taking their current data center and lifting and shifting it to the cloud. That doesn't work. You have to reimagine how the whole structure works. What do you put up there? Why do you put it up there? Are you using a proxy? Are you using some kind of hybrid workflow to maximize and benefit? Because if you're just dumping something up there and expecting to bounce it back and forth, you're right, speed of light and other things are going to kill you. >> Right. >> But there's other ways out there to leverage that. Principles such as IOA. Inner Oriented Connected Architectures. So placing your storage or your centralized data link at an Equinox or some kind of colo facility, where you can centrally leverage it and then working off proxies, most people don't know that when you're working in your color suite, almost all the time you're still working off proxies because you cannot see all those bits or we cannot get all the bits to the monitors. >> Right, right. >> That we have. So learning how to create the proper workflow there is absolutely critical, and will save you a fortune if you know what you're doing. >> Right. >> Or go to the right people to show you how to do that properly. >> So it's really use the best attributes of both as much as you can. >> Yes, you have to figure out how to use the best attributes of both. >> So the other kind of knock on too much tech in this business is sometimes the storytelling gets lost. And I know because I have a personal pet peeve on a lot of these big huge cinematic explosions that they could still have a story. >> Yes, yes. >> So, you know, I think that having a narrative is still so important. Is that lost? Is that enhanced? How do you see that integrating with the tech? >> So, I think it's absolutely critical. I saw Spielberg speaking at USC a little while back and he was like story, story, story. Tech is simply there to empower the story. And if you lose sight of that, you're absolutely lost. It really is the truth. So for example, I have two shorts out right now and one's at Tribeca one's at South by South West but we focused on the story. Although it's an R and D research project, you have to have a story. >> Right, right. >> That's the only way to move this thing forward. And if you don't have that, everything else is lost. >> Right. Now the other great thing that's happened with cloud and keeper storage and all these advanced infrastructure components is now you can keep everything. >> Yes. >> Data is no longer a liability that is expensive to hold and manage and you got to figure out what you're going to throw away because it's too expensive. Now people finally understand, it is an asset. So it opens up all types of opportunities to store it and do things with it. >> And you're seeing a lot of this shift from tape to object and other things like that because they want to monetize this content. There's so many new mechanisms to monetize content between the Netflix and the other distributors Amazon, and everyone else, that they are realizing this is not just an asset for the closet that you might someday use or sell in some broad agreement to some secondary station in Europe, or somewhere else. These are things that you can monetize on a regular basis. But that actually brings you the next problem. Understanding what you have. >> Right, right. >> People get very confused. They assume that there is one film. There's not one film. There's about 120 versions of the films that are released. Between the versioning such as culturally sensitive areas like the Middle East, to different language titles, to different ad pieces or other inserted parts, there are a lot of different versions to run a film. >> Right. >> And so people don't always understand that. >> And that's interesting but the other account of not gone film or video traditionally, from a metadata point of view in a search and a consumption and discovery point of view, is if I search for a picture and I find the one that I'm looking for, I immediately know that's the one that I want. But if I want to find something that's seven minutes in to an hour long video, how do I find it? How do I consume it? How do I share it. That's an age old problem with this media type. >> So, part of the problem there is that we have not broke down metadata tagging in each of these pictures and these pieces. This is coming. I actually help with ABC help build a tool that created x-ray like Amazon has for production sites, so they could scour and tag all these pieces and begin to say this is an action scene with this character in it, at this point in the movie. That is coming probably a year to a year and a half out. But all of those things will begin to evolve very very soon. >> Right. Certainly a great application for AI. >> Yeah, AI is absolutely hot as well and this is what the studios are trying to get their hands on right now. >> Right. >> People like Netflix have really pioneered some of this work and it originally was to understand how to find content or what people like content like so they could begin to produce content that was relatable to their audience. They've now moved it into things like QC'ing because they are the largest studio in the world at this point. Over 1000 hours. >> Are they the largest studio in the world? >> Netflix is the largest studio in the world right now. >> Wow, I didn't know that. >> So they're doing over 1000 hours I think a season, at this point. >> Amazing. >> But the studios are really trying to, are really doing a lot of work to get their hands on some of this and so there's a lot of really great, high level, private meetings going on that's bringing these industry leaders together. ETC is a wonder place to see that. They talk about these innovations. >> So you're in the middle of it all. You've been doing this for a long time. What are some of your priorities for 2017 and what are some of the things that still just get you up in the morning right now that you're excited about? >> So, absolutely my priorities is going to be cloud. Over the last about a year, 18 months, it's been a massive shift. It was before it was all before no, no, no. And I actually heard this exact quote from somebody at one of the major studios. He said, "It used to be no, no, no, you better have a darn good reason, to now yes, yes, yes, you better have a darn good reason not to." >> Right, to say no. >> Number one, very hot, very on board. The next one again, is VRAR, understanding how VRAR is going to begin to change our lives and produce things. I wasn't originally a big fan of that, I thought of it as kind of 3D, but then I went to USC's VR LA meeting, and there was over 600 students in this group and every single school was represented. Medical, architectural, journalism. These students understand that this is going to touch everybody. I don't know if you ever really got into genuine good content. Someone like a Nonny de la Pena does stuff that touches on more towards journalistic. For example, she did a meeting in San Diego and it's a very terrible rendering but the audio is good and you see a man being beaten from the police and people are calling out saying, "Stop, stop, stop." And you've never felt it so emotionally in your life. This is like bam. It hits you. >> The VR part of it or just that she had great content? >> The VR part of it and the context. >> Okay. >> Of telling a story and what's going wrong with the story. This is going to affect us in a different way and it might not just be they clip pieces for TV shows but it's going to be touching us in a lot of different ways. >> Right. Right. >> Very powerful stuff. >> We talk a lot about the AR. I think the AR piece from a commercial point of view is tremendous too. >> It's absolutely a bigger market. So what's really going to be biggest is mixed reality or MR. MR is going to come in and it's going to fade you between the two things. So, that is really where it's going to meet in the middle. >> You distinctly called out the differentiation between VR and 360. >> Yes. >> How do you split those? >> So when you look at it, if you're looking at 360 video that's a camera rigged stuck in one particular location, it's got 12, 24, 36 cameras all pointing outward, and when you're watching that, you're stuck in a location. You're hostage in more of a traditional film way to what within that 360 scope they want you to kind of be from one spot. When you look at volumetric capture, volumetric capture is the opposite. It allows you to walk around, choose your own point of view, be wherever you want to be within that scene. So, it's where we're going to be going, it's going to be much more like the Holodeck from Star Trek. >> Right. >> Very amazing stuff. >> Alright, well Eric, thank you for taking a few minutes. Congrats. I'm sure you're going to be busy, busy, busy for the next three days so, >> I know. >> So thank you for taking a few minutes with us on The Cube. >> No problem, thank you so much. >> Alright, he's Eric, I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching The Cube from NAB 2017 and we'll be back after this short break. Thanks for watching. (upbeat techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, It's the Cube covering NAB 2017. Brought to you by HGST. >> Jeff Rick here with the Cube. We are live in Las Vegas, California at the convention center. At NAB 2017, 102,000 people, a lot of production people talking about everything that has to do with media and entertainment, and also technology. MET is actually the theme this year. Media, Entertainment and Technology. The three are linked together in a way that they've never been before, And we're really excited to have someone really with the content side and the tech side as our guest, it's Justin Simmons. He's the director of technology at the Sundance institute. Justin, welcome. >> Yeah, thank you. >> So everybody knows the Sundance Film Festival. There's a lot of press every year, a lot of cool movies and independent movies. But you're really on the IT side. I wonder if you could explain a little bit. People don't know probably there's kind of an IT story behind Sundance. >> Yeah, I mean when you've got an event that's as big as the Sundance Film Festival, and really the eyes of the world are on it for that period of time, there's so much preparation that goes into it, because you have one shot to get it right. So we really start planning as soon as the festival ends. Sometimes we have multi-year projects. And there is a lot of technology behind it, from websites, to big flash sales, to all the photos that are collected, and all the video that's collected during the event. Also, a lot of people don't know about the Sundance Institute is that we have a year-round program, so we have about 30 lab or educational events that happen year-round all over the world, and those are also generating more media, more files that need to be stored and saved and tracked. >> So what's interesting is back in the day when storage was so expensive, and media was so expensive, storage was actually a negative, it was a liability. Now everyone's finally figured out that data's an asset. You've got to store it, there's ways to store it, you need to get the metadata to make it accessible. So that's really changed the dynamic of the way that people look at keeping all these assets. >> Yeah, I mean we saw really unfortunately a lot of times people would say, don't record it because we don't know where to put it. And it was really frustrating from a technology perspective to hear things like that. Now it's, "Capture everything." >> Jeff: Right. >> And what's happening in such a compressed period of time like that, it is all about metadata and all about workflow to make it efficient. Because if you get behind, it just keeps growing and growing and growing. >> Right. There's a great quote from Sable, from NFL films from back in the day, and he said, "How did you know "to get that in slow motion, that shot?" And he said, "We shoot everything in slow motion, "because you just don't know when "that great play is going to be." So it's a very different mindset to capture everything. So I wonder if you can explain with that mindset, and now you have 4K and 8K and Ultra HD, and tremendous amounts of gear here. How do you attack it from your role? How do you put together a plan that you can capture and manage all this content? >> So for us the first step is really getting the digital asset management system, and incorporating that digital asset management system into the workflow as much as possible. Like I said, you can't be happening behind. If that work's happening behind, it's just never going to get done. So putting the digital asset management system in the center of the workflow was extremely important. And now that we've got a great digital asset management system, we're using Reach Engine by Levels Beyond. We're looking at ways that different things can plug into that and automate as much as possible, so that when the work's being done, when the scenes are being shot, that metadata's captured and it goes right into the system, and everything flows into storage, into archive, into preservation. >> So you're populating metadata in real time as stuff's being shot. You're not doing it kind of after the fact. >> Yeah, there's a couple of different things going on. One is with photos. Everyone's got badges around their necks, so we're shooting their badges at the festival, and then right at the ingest, those cards come back from the photographers, all the metadata gets tagged in it right then, and it all goes into the digital asset management system. They're selecting their target photos from that set, and then it's off to being posted on the website for press, it's being incorporated into video. And then for video we're using Prelude to tag things in real time that's going right into digital asset management system, and then using Adobe Premier, in conjunction with the digital asset management system, we're able to make sure all the metadata that's done during the editing process also stays with those assets, because we have 35 years of history at the organization, and we want to make sure that we're keeping that indefinitely. >> Jeff: Right. >> So there's no point we're like, well, we don't need the 1988 festival anymore. >> (laughs) And then how's cloud impacted your world, and added a new asset class. The knock on cloud before, one of the knocks, especially for film and video, the assets are so big, right? And the speed of light is just too damn slow, some would say, for moving this stuff around. That said, you can put a tremendous amount of capability and compute and store and power at the hands of anybody worldwide, consistent distribution. So how have you guys integrated a cloud strategy in what you do? >> So we went really aggressive on cloud about 2011, 2012. And we ran into the limitations really quickly. The speed, and the cost when you start going at scale. This started to impact us. But there was areas that cloud was really successful, like our frontend web servers, we could just scale them up, during that event, we really need this kind of extreme performance for just a couple days a year. So being able to spin up 30 instances of the web server, bunch of database, have a million people a day hit that. That's great. Where we've struggled is on the media and entertainment side, to make cloud cost-effective when you're going really big with storage, and then also getting the performance that we need. So we've pulled that back, more of the media storage from the cloud, but where we're going to continue to use it is on collaboration. So now I'm sure we're not unique in this, but we've got creators and collaborators that are everywhere. And the content's being created all over and everywhere, so we want to use the cloud to capture that content, and we also want to use the cloud to help collaborate with whatever editor, sound mixer that we're working with. I also think cloud has now become increasingly important to the independent film community. A lot of these productions have small budgets, and they're looking to be as effective as possible, so they are collaborating globally, and so they're going to cloud. And I think it's going to be really interesting over the next couple years to see what solutions come up really targeted towards the independent film community that make it accessible for these productions. They're going to be around for a year or two They need a solution to get back up. They need to collaborate, and it all needs to happen very quickly, and for a reasonable cost. >> Right. Right. And what about on the distribution side? So it used to be you went to the movies, and then you got it on Netflix, or you DVR'd it, or TiVo, but now there's so many ways that people are consuming media, whether it be a social media like Twitter or Snapchat or Instagram, versus YouTube and Vimeo, those types of platforms. How are you kind of addressing the multi distribution opportunities within the assets that you guys have? >> So we do a lot of livestream, we do a lot of YouTube, and we've been doing that for a long time. But what we've seen recently over the last couple years with the filmmakers themselves is a real shift toward using, doing electronic delivery for large digital cinema packages. So these DCP files can be 100 gigabytes plus, and we just started seeing people really adopt digital delivery for those in the last couple years. So the Sundance Film Festival comes in kind of at the beginning of a film's life. And what a lot of these filmmakers are hoping to do at the festival is get distribution. So from there, they're able to now take that DCP file, they're not shipping hard drives, they're not shipping film prints, and they're now taking that through the distribution path. And it's not something the institute's directly involved in, but we facilitate that where the industry comes to meet with these independent film and independent artists. >> Okay. So last question before I let you go, what are some of your priorities for 2017? >> So my priorities for 2017 is preservation. So we've been doing a lot of work around organizing our files and our media, but we didn't have a really effective way of preserving the content. So we had just a bunch of big file servers sitting out there, and we had a replicating thing between them, and so I needed a solution that would actually take those files that would be integrated into the workflow, and actually protect it. So that's where we're working with Western Digital as official provider to help us actually protect and preserve our digital media assets. So using our digital asset management system with Reach Engine as part of that workflow, we're going to have the files that are sitting on our production storage but then another copy is going to be put onto the HGST object storage. So, and there the preservation is at a level that I haven't seen on any other device. It's using erasure encoding and splitting the file into multiple parts, and now that file is far better protected than it has been in our current systems. So that's a big priority for us, to get that going and really get these assets protected and preserved. Because like I said, we're planning on keeping these indefinitely. >> Right. Right. It's so sad the stories you hear coming out of Hollywood of an earlier time when it was all on the film, the film wasn't properly protected, so many of these great films didn't survive, or only pieces of them survived, or they've got bits and pieces that they're trying to restore. I'm glad that era has passed. >> Yep. >> All right Justin, well thanks for taking a few minutes out of your day. I know you're busy, you're conference-hopping, and thanks for stopping by. >> Justin: Yeah, no problem. Thank you. >> All right. He's Justin Simmons, I'm Jeff Rick, You're watching the Cube from NAB 2017. We'll be right back after this short break. Thanks for watching. (digital music)