[Music] okay welcome back everyone it's thecube's coverage here in monaco i'm john furrier host of thecube monaco crypto summit presented by digital bits uh media partners coin telegraph in the cube a lot of great stuff going on here digital bits and the ecosystem around the world come together to talk about the next generation uh nft environments metaverse uh blockchain all the innovations going up and down the stack of the decentralized world that will be soon a reality for everybody we have a great guest david lutzkach here who's the co-founder of aftermath islands metaverse which i got a little sneak preview of but david thanks for joining me thanks john great to be here uh we had dinner the other night at nobu it's great to know you get to know your background you've got a stellar uh pedigree um you've run public companies you've been involved in tech media across the board again this is a ship we're seeing like we've never before perfect storm technology change cultural change business model transformation all around deep decentralization crypto token economics decentralized applications metaverse i mean come on we haven't digital identity there was identity which you're involved in take us through what are you working on take a minute to explain what you're working on and then we'll get into it so aftermath islands is is really a culmination of three things uh digital identity the ability to prove who you are because we think the internet and i think everyone would agree the internet's broken you know um nefarious actors bad actors can be anywhere um hacks fake spots so by being able to prove that you're a real person not necessarily verifying your identity but prove that you're a real person um can add a lot of benefits to everyone in the ecosync system second thing is we combine that with avatars nfts and credentials because i'd like to represent myself as a little more buff than i am and maybe a little taller and then the third thing is we put it in a unreal engine so real realistic photo realistic game engine metaverse that requires no downloading it's all pixel streaming just like you'd stream netflix you can stream the game i want to ask because this is i know it's a hard problem because i've asked a lot of people the same question the unreal engine is really powerful and the imagery is amazing like gaming we all know what it looks like it's hard it's not everyone's getting it right what makes it so special how are you guys cracking the code well i think it's our experience i mean we've worked for major entertainment companies major technology companies major sports companies so um as i just use your word because it being i want to be humbled by this but we do have a great pedigree we've also brought great people to the table so having a platform isn't enough we've got great creators and uh we've got great storytellers so we've got the anisiasa brothers one mariano is is a illustrator and former special editor uh project center at marvel and his brother fabian is our storyteller who's the co-creator of deadpool so we've got great people and with unreal engine 5 we've really taken it from the ground up we've looked at it and and we've really combined it with new gpu cloud serving and pixel streaming so that you're so the individual that's that's involved engaged immersed is now really playing it without having to download a graphics package yeah and also you drop some names there and some and some brands i know there's a lot more at dinner we've talked a lot about them you you know all the top creators and again i love the creator culture i mean that's the new buzzwords around but ultimately it's artists people building stuff application developers in the software world movies and film art art and code is kind of coming together it's the same kind of thing media and coding it's like the same mindset you know creative exactly crazy good smart in a good way in the blockchain it's harder because you've got all this underlying infrastructure and stuff to provision and build often created say oh man it's like doing chores it's like i just want to build cool stuff i don't want to get in the weeds of all the tech right this is like whoever cracks the code can unleash that heavy lifting so the artist can like feel good about kicking ass well i'm i'm being a slot a little sly here because we've sort of broken it into three areas and we've used blockchain to book and the platform so we still think that that gaming in the interactive platform has to have centralization it has to have decision making we have a great community um between twitter and discord we have over 30 000 people and we have organizations that have already um spawned um themselves up or spun up to manage our landowner ownership and some of our guilds for some of our professions but at the same time they're allowing us to make decisions based on what the community wants i mean i've heard recently um i don't want to say it's a horror story but it's been difficult that consensus-based models for development have to get consensus and not everybody agrees you still need the leadership i mean you still need sort of a captain on a ship to make sure that the dictatorships are work and well and linux um tried that and they've worked for a while but when they moved over to we're going to make some decisions have an opinion right whether it's centralization it's faster yeah consensus systems can be diverse and time-consuming well they can be political as well i mean you can you can it can become problems so at the front end we've got digital identity and that's all blockchain based and at the back end we have over 20 services including dids and did com which is decentralized identifier communication and all our services are blockchain based but in the middle um connected to nft's blockchain and everything else and to our teacher identity we have a game or a game platform or a open world platform that is centralized built in unreal engine so that we can make those decisions that spur on individual development it's an architecture it is i mean this is essentially an operating environment exactly you can have the benefits of the decentralized all your data on your identity okay and then have the middle be the playground and built right now that has to get done faster and you're constantly iterating exactly so you need to have that exactly so what are people saying about this to me i think that makes a lot of sense people are very intrigued um we're getting a lot of traction first of all unreal engine in the middle um brands love it because it provides a realistic view of a brand brands have spent you know hundreds of millions of dollars building brand equity and they don't necessarily want a cartoon representation of their brand so brands love it um uh we showed a video here at the monaco crypto summit of some and our videos available online on youtube but we're showing realistic we can create realistic avatars so people are really excited about what we're doing you know david i think one of the things i've had controversy statements in the past that got all the purists going back to 2018 you know throwing tomatoes at me but other halfs like loving it because at that time there was dogma around block change got to be done you know it was slow and gas so why i can use a database now we use the blockchain for smart contracts right which you that's what you want to do you want to have that locked in you want immutability so again this opportunity is to advance faster and not have to get stuck in the dogma but maybe get it back to it later database is a great example i agreed i think i think over time the community will take over the entire platform but i think at the beginning you have to have again you have to have a rudder on a ship to make it go somewhere it's called product market fit exactly you got to get to the market exactly with a product you've got that i want that exactly i mean unreal engine is hard i know what are some of the people you worked with because i think i think what i like about what you're working on is that you are and i think a great poster child of in terms of the organization of a group of people that are pros that want to do great work in a new world with the kind of experience and tools that they had in their old world right faster cheaper better more control when we were there at web one we're there at web two and now with web three we have the ability to fix some of the things that we thought were wrong with web one and two so and move into the ownership economy and and really um for us we've got a great team of people you know around the world that we work with and we're starting to bring in larger organizations to support us i mean our digital identity we're really working with the backbone at ibm and digital identity is very different in blockchain than is crypto and we're working with great people in crypto now we announced today that we're minting our native token dubs with digital bits so we're really excited about that yeah yeah let me ask you a question because i love the fact that you brought multiple ways of innovation again i've mentioned on that with shared experience there different different ride for different waves what have you learned and shared to folks who are going to dip their toe and get on their surfboard so to speak use the california metaphor for both californians what is web3 wave like how's it different from two what's the learnings can you share scar tissue experience observation anything around what you're doing now so they can get insight into this wave well you know web 1 and web 2 were broken i mean you could never go in i think we had this discussion you could never go into an electronic store in the real world write your information down on a piece of paper and expect that you'd walk out of the store with the purchase but we can type in information that is non-verified until i could take my friend's credit card know where they live and use it by using digital identity at a front end we create one user one account that user can have thousands of verifiable credentials around them and hundreds of avatars so i think what we've really learned is the ability to progress in a way that that really puts data back in the hands of consumers and makes them the owner of their identity by starting there we have a world in front of us that is valuable to marketers valuable to brands and valuables to individuals and whether it's education whether it's government services whether it's retail everything can be built on that simple premise that i am myself it's interesting there's a constant technology we're called presence you know you're present at an event you're present at a store you're present and some reality physically and you have credentials around that presence contextually exactly you're saying you can have one nft one digital identity or identity and have multiple identities that have contacts all stored i'll store it in an avatar it's like changing your suit hey i'm going into the apple store i'm now my apple john and and think of it this way um brands can now connect with you and give you promos give you product based on the information that you're willing to share with them about your real person and your avatar becomes your intermediary so your payment information stored within your digital identity and your avatar not at the retail level so this is a concept we've been working on for a long time i think we're talking about dinner but i want to bring this up for you for you to come and get a reaction to is that if what you just said is true that means if i'm the user and i have power to control my data the script flips now i'm brokering my data to the brand exactly not the other way around exactly or some intermediary i'm in control exactly and i could demand based on what my contextual relevance is to the brand and the brand is willing to pay for that because if you think about it today um social media unfortunately is plagued by fake accounts you know and issues and and so brands are spending all this money and they're getting slippage and breakage and that's spent if they know your real person they're more likely to want to give you an incentive to engage with them because it's a one-to-one transaction that creates value that's a great point you mentioned twitter earlier look at elon musk uncovered all the bots on twitter um and if they ever did the facebook i'm sure there's a ton of different accounts on facebook but you know it's out there these walled gardens have nefarious bad actors man it's not truth isn't what's the truth i mean gaming has this right now it's like you're anonymous you can go down or you got to go real name so we've got a hybrid you can do anonymously verified so because we use biometrics to verify that you're a real person so you can stay anonymous but we know you're a real person because your biometrics belong to you well david great to have you on thecube you got a great insight and experience thanks for sharing thank you john uh what's next for you guys you want to put a plug in for what you're working on you're looking for people funding more action what are you guys doing right well we've we've self-funded to date and we're we're finally going to be releasing um opportunities for people to engage with us in tokenomics and that's why we've we're working with digital bits but we're also looking for great people and great partners we're creating an interoperable open um uh world where we want to bring partners to the table so anyone who's interested reach out to us all right david guys thanks for going on thecube all right more coverage here on thecube we're all over this area going back to 2018 we brought thecube to all the events been covered on siliconangle.com since 2010 and watching this wave just get better the reality is here it's a metaverse world it is a decentralized world happening to everyone monaco crypto summit here in monaco thanks for watching we'll be right back with more after this short break you

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

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

>> Narrator: Live from Las Veags, it's theCube, Covering NAB 2017. Brought to you by HGST. >> Welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCube. We're at NAB 2017 with 100,000 of our closest friends. Talking all about media, entertainment and technology. The theme this year is MET, cause the technology is so mixed in with everything else that you can't separate it anymore. And we're really excited to do a deep dive into kind of the customer, or not the customer, excuse me, the consumer side of this whole world with Yves Bergquist. He's the project director, Data and Analytics Entertainment Technology Center at USC. So Yves welcome. >> Thank you, thanks for having me. >> So when I was doing some research on your segment, really interesting to see that you're involved very much in trying to figure out what people like to watch how they like to watch and get a bunch of data because now the choices for the consumers of media and entertainment are giant, like never before. >> Yeah. There's a, very very basic question that I think not a lot of people in media and entertainment can answer. Is that why are people watching your stuff? And they have sort of surface level answers, but there's ways that the content out there, that we watch, resonates cognitively with us, that is really important, is very fundamental in how we consume media and entertainment. And even the decision making of why we decide to go watch a show on Netflix, or play a mobile game, or watch a Youtube video. Why do we make these specific choices? What drives those choices? All these questions don't have a lot of really good answers right now, and that's where I, where we're focus all of our work at ETC. Is to really understand people's drive to entertain themselves or decisions to entertain themselves at a very deep level. And really understand how various narrative structures in film and trailers and brands and advertising resonate with people at a cognitive level. >> So it's pretty intersting, it really goes with the whole big data theme and the AI theme. Because now you can capture, collect, measure data in ways, and consumption in ways you couldn't ever do before. >> Yeah, that's a good point. So, you know, there's three things that are really impacting the media and entertainment industry and every industry, really. It's, number one, the ability to think in systems, right? We used to think about problems in a very sort of siloed manner, right, we think about a problem in isolation with other forces. Like we look at the flu in isolation with the environment that we're in, so like that. There's another way to look at things, in a more holistically, it's a system called systems thinking. And the ability to think of audiences as a system, just like your body's a system inside a system, right, is really revolutionizing the way we're looking at entertainment and media. The second thing thing is the availability of data, just there's an enormous amount of data out there. A lot of it is unstructured, but there's, the good thing about entertainment and media is that it drives passion and drives conversation. And anything that drives passion and conversations get very rich in data. And the third thing that is impacting the industry is machine living and AI. And the ability to really look at all of these data points across the system holistically in a very intelligent more semantic manner. And make sure that you're measuring the right things. For a very very long time the media and entertainment industry has been measuring the wrong things. And it's really now catching up very very fast and making sure that it's measuring the right things. For example, how do we measure how specific narrative structures in film resonate with people cognitively in a way that translates into the box office? Is there a specific character journey that resonates better in an action movie with males versus females. How does that matter for how a story's being told? Where do you innovate in script, right? Interesting point is the entertainment industry is very unique in that it has two major problems. Number one, its clients, its customers are absolute experts in the product. Because if you're 25 or 35, how many movies have you watched? Thousands of movies, right? So you're an expert in movies. >> Jeff: Certainly the ones you like. >> Exactly. If you're 25 you haven't bought hundreds or thousands of cars, right? So, but on the other hand the supplier of the content doesn't know as much of the customer as the customer knows about the product. So you have two problems. You have a really really really highly expert client, and, but you don't know a lot about that client as a studio, right, or a network or a media company. So that's very very unique distinct challenge that they're starting to get very very smart and very advanced in thinking about. >> The other thing is, that I see in the movie industry and I'm no expert by any stretch of the imagination but it seems like the compression pressure is huge. The budgets have grown to be giant. And the number of available weekends for your release are small. And the competition for attention and eyeballs around those weekends, it just seems to really have a really high kind of risk reward profile that's getting more and more extreme. And is that driving people more to kind of the known? Or is it just my perception that they're taking less risks on modifications from the script or modifications of kind of the norm especially around these big budget? I mean just the fact that you've got version 1,2,3,4,5,6, pick your favorite theme seems to be a trend that continues and gets even more, I mean Superman. How many Superman movies are there, or Spiderman? >> So you know, that's really interesting right? So the very natural tendency of the media and entertainment industry is when it doesn't know, as I was mentioning, it doesn't know as much as it could or should know about who its audience is. The tendency is then becomes to just take less and less risk in telling stories exactly the same way that's why you see a lot of really really formative very formulaic movies. What we're trying to do is, and the challenge with that is that, again you have an audience of experts and so if every single movie looks like the same one, look like the other one, you're going to have a problem. People aren't going to go see, going to go gravitate towards another kind of entertainment or some of your competitors. So you have to know where do you meet peoples expectations in a movie and where do you innovate? Deadpool is a really interesting example. Deadpool has the structure of a basic superhero movie but it has a lot of innovation underneath that. And so for the studios knowing where do you stick to the formula and where do you innovate in telling a story when you make a billion dollar movie, is going to become more and more interesting. Because if you innovate too much you're going to turn people off. If you don't innovate enough, you're going to turn people off. So we actually have some research looking at the mathematical definition of why we think certain things are interesting and certain things are not interesting so we can separate. These are the things you need in your movies, this is some aspects, if you go back to Deadpool, there's some aspects of Deadpool as a movie that are very traditional to the superhero genre. And a lot of other aspects that are very very innovative. So you have to innovate in certain areas and you have to no innovate areas. And that's a real challenge, and so that's why we're really applying our work to looking at narrative structure in storytelling at ETC is because that's where a lot of the revenue opportunities and the de-risking opportunities are. >> And it's interesting before we went live you were talking about thinking of storytelling and narrative as a little bit less art and a little bit more science in terms of of thinking at in terms of algorithms and algorithmically. Because there are patterns there, there is data there. So what does some of the data that you measure to get there? You mentioned earlier that in the past people were measuring the wrong thing. What are the right things to measure? What are some of the things you guys are measuring now? >> Yeah, so you know, it is still very much an art, right? It's making it, making art a little bit more optimal, and optimizing art is what we're doing, but it's, it will remain art for a very long time. I think for, and since we're at NAB, sort if in a broadcasting environment, I think a lot of the measurements and systems that have been in place for decades now are looking at demographics. And demographics, whether you're a male or female, Your age, your ethnicity, or your income, used to predict what you would watch. It doesn't do that anymore, and if you have kids, you know like me, you watch the same thing that they're watching, you're playing the same video games that they're playing. I think there's a new way to measure things more cognitively and semantically and neuroscience is starting to get into the issue of why do we think certain stories are more interesting or more appealing than others. Why do certain stories lead us to make actual decisions more than others? And so I think at a very very basic level you have to unpack this notion of why do people go see this movie? And it's a system, you know, that decision happens in a system where some of the system is demographics, demographics aren't going to go away they're still predictive to a certain extent. But it's also, you know, cast, it's also who has recommended this movie. And what are the systems of influence in driving certain people to see a movie? And all these things, and of course, what we're focusing on, which is storytelling and narrative structure and how that, sort of translates to making decisions to see this movie. A lot, you know, we're still in the infancy of measuring all of the system in a very scientific granular way, but we're making very very quick progress. And so even things like understanding the ecosystem of influence around why certain communities are influenced to go see certain movies by other communities and what happens there, right. So I'll give you an example, we did, we pulled months of data on Reddit about where supporters of Hillary Clinton and where supporters of Donald Trump would engage on that topic. Are they talking about that amongst each other or are they really going out there and trying to convince other people to vote for Trump or to vote for Hillary Clinton? And we saw some, two radically different patterns. So pattern number one, the Clinton people would mostly engage with each other on Reddit. So that's cool and that has very little value because you're not being an ambassador. On the other hand, the Trump people were engaging far outside of the Trump subReddit and trying to convince people to join the movement, to donate, to vote for Trump. So we think there's a model there that can be ported to the entertainment industry, where if your fans, if your fan base is mostly engaging with each other it has less value than if your fan base is really going out there and really trying to get other people excited about your movie. And why do certain people get excited and how do your fans, what argument do your fans use out there to convince others to go see your movie. All these things we're looking at, and it's brand new world now for media because of all of these data points. >> The systems conversation is so interesting because it's not only the system, but the individual. But it's like you said, it's all these systems of influence today. Look at the Yahoo reviews, the Rotten Tomato reviews, you know, what are there, Reddit, you know, as a system of influence, who would have ever thought? >> Yeah and we're getting it, we're going into a world very quickly, we're going to be able to understand entertainment and storytelling and narrative and it's cognitive power almost on a neural network base. In looking at what kind of neural network in our brains get fired when we are exposed to this type of character, or this type of storyline, or this type of narrative mechanics. And so this is a really exciting time. >> The other thing that's interesting, we talked again a little bit before we turned the cameras on, is about the trailers. Because that's kind of the story within the story. And depending on your objectives, and the budget, you know, they can make all kinds of number of trailers, in very different way, to approach or to target very specific audiences. I wonder if you can get into that a little bit. >> Yeah so, you know in the media and entertainment industry decisions have been made, and if you think about it it's amazing that the media and entertainment industry has made so much money, so I think it's a testament of the enormous creative talent that's involved. But, you know, especially for trailers a lot of the decisions about trailers are made sort of looking what's worked in the past in a very sort of haphazard way. There really isn't a lot of data and analytics and science applied to, hey what kind of trailer, what structure of trailer do we need to put out there in each channel for each target audience to get them really excited about the movie? Because there's many different ways you can present a movie, right, and we've seen, we've all seen many different types of trailers for many different types of movies. What we're doing, and nobody's really worried about hey let's analyze, for example, the pace, right, the edit cuts, the structure of the edits for the trailer and how that resonates with people. And now we have the ability to do that because people, you know, we will count views on YouTube for example, or there will be a way to measure how popular a trailer is. So what we're doing is we're just measuring everything that we can measure about a trailer. Is it a complete story? What is the percentage of the trailer is the main character in? What is the percentage of the trailer that the influence character is in? We're looking at cast. Does a trailer with Ben Affleck, you know, work better if Ben Affleck is a lot in the trailer, or not a lot in the trailer? And what kind of trailer types work better for specific genres, specific target audience, specific channels? So we're really unpacking that into a nice little spreadsheet. And measuring all the things that we can measure. And the thing about this is, if you think about the amount of money that's involved in making these decisions, you know if you're a studio and you're spending 3,4,5 billion dollars a year in marketing expense, and my work can make it even 10 percent more efficient, that's like half a billion dollars in savings. >> That's a real number. >> That's enormous right? So it's a really exciting time for media and entertainment because there are all these things on the horizon to help them make better decisions, more data driven decisions. And really free up creators, because if we can tell the people who tell the stories in film every, you can innovate so much more now because we've, we know that we've boiled it down to a science, and we know that in this, if you have these four or five things in your script, everywhere else you can innovate, go nuts. I think it's going to free up a lot of creative talent. We're going to see a lot more interesting movies out there. >> The other piece I think, I mean obviously a trailer for a movie's one thing, but take that little genre of creative that's purely built to drive behavior and that's a commercial. And I always joke with my kids, I watch a lot of sports, and there'll be a car ad and I'm like, just think if you're the poor guy that gets the assignment to make another car ad, I mean, how many car ads have been made, and you've got to think creatively. But the data that you're talking about, in terms of the narrative, what types of shots, the cutting, based on the demographic that you're trying to go after for that specific ad. That must be tremendously valuable information. >> Yeah it is really valuable. So you know, our philosophy is that everything is story. You're tie is a story, your haircut's a story, you're cereal's a story, your cars, everything. We make decisions based on the narratives that other other people tell us and that we tell ourselves about how to represent the world. Simply because the universe out there and the reality out there is too complex for our brains to really represent as it is, so we have to simplify, compress it into a set of a behavioral script that says, okay I'm, it's sort of an executive summary of their reality. And though that executive summary is a story. And so it's especially powerful in driving how what we buy and how we consume things. And so, I've build a platform that looks at, that extracts very very structured data from conversations about what is the narrative structure about a specific brand. You know, is it focused more on, you know,emotions? Is it focused more on ethics? Is it focused more on the, sort of the utility of the product? And trying to correlate that to look at what kind of narrative structure's around your brand? What kind of story around your brand, drives more sales? And so that's really really interesting, in sort of understanding, again, that cognitive relationship between stories and how efficient they are in driving specific behavior. That is exactly what my research is about. >> Yves, we could go on all day, but unfortunately we are out of time. So thank you for spending a few minutes and dropping by. Fascinating conversation. Alright, he's Yves Bergquist from USC, where all the film stuff's happening. I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCube. We'll be back NAB 2017 after this short break. Thanks for watching. (uptempo rock music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas. It's the CUBE. Covering NAB 2017, brought to you by HGST. >> Welcome back to the CUBE live in Las Vegas at the NAB show. We're having a great day so far. Very excited to introduce you to my next guest, Kevin Baillie, cofounder and VFX supervisor at Atomic Fiction and the CEO of Conductor Technologies. Never a boring day for you with those two titles, I can imagine. >> No, I like to joke that I like to make sure that I always have the most exciting job in the world so I had to pick three to make sure that I never have a down moment spoil that, that day >> Wow, I am impressed. So you just spoke at the virtual NAB conference last month on the visual effects in the cloud, power, and control. Something that I found very interesting was that six years ago, you were kind of on an island going "I have this hunch about cloud." Tell us about, what was that hunch, why did you have it, and what has it generated so far? >> Yeah, yeah, that's a great question. The hunch was less of like, "Hey cloud looks like a great opportunity." It was more of like knowing what wasn't working in the industry as it was at that time. There were all kinds of companies that were kind of like having financial troubles or having a hard time delivering projects, tons of bankruptcies and just really sad stories everywhere. And we looked at the market and said, "There's a ton of work here, this doesn't make sense." Some of the best entertainment is being made right now and it all relies on visual effects, what's wrong? And the further we broke down the problem, the more we realized that like fixed infrastructure within a market that naturally ebbs and flows, it just didn't, there wasn't a match there. So, through that problem, we looked for solutions and cloud was a very obvious one at that point. So we just made the jump. >> And tell us about Atomic Fiction versus Conductor Technologies. Chicken, egg, which one came first? And how are they collaborating together? >> Atomic Fiction came first. It was almost seven years ago at this point that we started Atomic. And we looked for any kind of a way to use cloud. We started using an AWS directly, we then used a tool called Zync. And as we grew, we found that the needs of the company were changing so radically that nothing that was out there could actually keep up with our pace of growth. We had all this customized pipeline that we couldn't find a way to like get it into the cloud. So we built our own and that was called Conductor. And after, I think we were working on like Game of Thrones and The Walk and had just started on Deadpool that we realized it was working so well that we decided to spin it off as it's own company and make a go for actually turning it into a product that could help everybody in the same way that the cloud had helped Atomic Fiction. >> Fantastic, one of my favorite movies is The Walk. I was looking at your website and you think as the viewer, "How did they film this?" You know, this day and age, so much is CGI. Talk to us about what realtime cloud rendering is. How does it enable a movie like The Walk or Deadpool to have that awe inspiring, jaw dropping reaction from the audience? >> Well I think a large portion of bringing that jaw dropping reaction to the audience and that level of realism is being able to run productions in the way that they want to be run. And what I mean by that is, let's take a movie like The Walk where you have to recreate 1974 New York and the Twin Towers, and all these different lighting scenarios. That means we have to build every building, every rain gutter, every hotdog stand in the street down to exacting detail, and that just takes a lot of time. So we spent a ton of time, probably the first three quarters of the schedule just building the city, building the city. And we couldn't render anything at that point And it wasn't only until the very end of the show that we were able to say, "alright, now we have New York is there, let's just put it on the screen." But that takes millions of hours of computing to get that done. The Walk for example, it used 9.1 million processor hours of rendering. That's over a thousand years on a single processor to get it done. So if we hadn't had the cloud, we would have had to been like, "Oh what can we render first "so we don't bottleneck at the end of the schedule?" And really kind of like trying to bend production into the box that we, of fixed infrastructure that we have. But with the cloud, we don't have to do that. We can say, we can go as big as we want to at the very end of the show and get it done if that's what makes sense for the show. Because that's what makes sense for the show, the creative just ends up being that much better. The same was true for Deadpool, the same is true for Star Trek. These movies, they just sort of, you want to craft love into the beginning part of it so the stuff you generate at the end is as beautiful as it can be. >> So is cloud really freeing production from being able to operate in the way that it needs to operate? >> Yeah, yeah, exactly. Because the traditional model is, a visual effects company builds a data center and stuffs it full of computers. In best case, with like three weeks lead time you can like rent a bunch of racks of computers and like shove them in a closet somewhere and get your project done. It ends up being expensive and painful. You need a big team to man all that stuff. Whereas with cloud, we can say, "Hey, I need a thousand computers three minutes from now." And boom, a thousand computers spin up out of nowhere. And the great thing that we've done with Conductor as well is we've gone and negotiated per minute software licensing with Autodesk and the Foundry and IsoTropic and Chaos Group. All these big software vendors in the industry. So not only can you get compute by the minute, you can also get all the software that you need by the minute, right. So you can have three thousand nodes running Autodesk to Arnold, and you, but you run it for 42 minutes and you only pay for 42 minutes of three thousand licenses of Arnold, right. So it's really transformative from a flexibility standpoint. >> And the cost model really flips it on it's head. >> And by the way, the artists get the result back faster. Because you can scale up so big and get the result back to them so quickly without any cost penalty, they see the fruits of their labor while the ideas are still fresh in their head, which is like a huge, like, intangible benefit which has real economic benefits. >> Absolutely, one of the things and themes that we've heard of today is that speed is key. Absolutely critical to whatever is going to happen or whether or not on a shoot, a vision changes direction. And without having the power of the cloud to facilitate something on a dime, there's delays, which all adds up to economic impact. >> Yeah, and you know, back on one of our earliest projects rendered in the cloud, Flight. The Robert Zemeckis movie with Denzel Washington. That exact thing happened, where it was like at the very end, he, Zemeckis realized that he needed this extra set of like a hundred visual effects shots. And if it hadn't have been for the cloud, we would have had to say, "No, sorry we can't do these." "We have to find somebody else to do them." But because the ability of the cloud to accommodate that last minute creative epiphany, we were able to actually do the work. So it really is truly transformative and allowed us to bring in, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars of extra revenue that we wouldn't have been able to do otherwise. >> Absolutely. In terms of some of the public cloud providers, tell us who you're working with on that end. >> Yeah, so we're working with Google right now, using Google Compute Engine on the back end. And we're actually moving forward with Microsoft and Azure. Adding it as an option later in the year. So, hopefully at the end of the year, we'll be able to support all the large cloud providers. And be able to say, "Hey, Studio X. "We know you have an affinity for Google right now, "but on the next project maybe you need "a very specific GPU type." Or there's a company in China that needs to do some work and Google isn't there. Now Azure is your thing, right. So, I think that the world of cloud providers competing against one another is going to be really beneficial for everyone in our industry for sure. And we want to be there to facilitate a little bit of like, choose whoever's best, right. >> Right, giving you the ability to really be like agnostic on the back end. >> Yeah that's exactly right. >> So as we look at these massive resources that studios are generating, creating such interactive films, what are some of the precautions that you see and you can help them mitigate against leveraging the power of cloud. >> Well, one of the benefits of cloud is you only have to pay for what you use, just like electricity, right. One of the downsides of cloud is you have to pay for what you use, right. So, if you're not careful about the render you put in the cloud or the simulation you put in the cloud, or how long you keep data in the cloud, things can get really expensive really quickly. So, one of the things we did, and this is actually why we kind of spun Conductor off as it's own company. And we just raised our Series A round of funding back in December to build the team out, because a lot of this stuff is really complicated, is one of the big efforts, in kind of a post funding world for Conductor, is on analytics and being able to use data to help people drive production better. So you know, in the very beginning, we have cost limits where you can say, "On this shot, I don't want to spend "more than a thousand dollars." Or, "I never want this artist to be able to spend "more than fifteen hundred bucks a day." But in the future, I think that there is kind of like cloud buzz-wordy things that actually come into real play here where we can use machine learning to detect when things are taking too long and alert people. We can tell people how much a render is going to cost before they even submit it maybe. We can use computer vision to check for bad things happening in the middle of a render before a human ever has a chance to lay eyes on it. So there's all kinds of stuff we can do with data to help mitigate some of the downsides of cloud and hopefully only leave people with like great insights to help them run production better. >> That's fantastic. One of the things that really interests me is the machine learning and the artificial intelligence. To be able to look at whether it's a broadcast outlet or a film studio, to be able to take a look at and evaluate the value and additional revenue streams that can come. But also, in your case, maybe even leveraging AI and machine learning to make certain processes faster thereby lowering costs. >> Yeah, we can actually make proactive suggestions based on, like, you know, thousands or millions of data points and say like, "Hey if you tweak this value on your shading rate here, "you're going to end up with a great visual "and not spend any more time, or actually spend less." So things like that and then also working together with production management systems. Like the guys at Autodesk have a product called Shotgun that deals with schedules and artist assignments. And they can have all the schedule information. We have all the sort of infrastructure information. If we correlate those two data sets together, then we'll be able to actually proactively tell somebody when we think a shot is running behind schedule. Or a shot needs more optimization. And I mean, there's all kinds of things that we can use just purely using data and a trained machine learning model to actually help people run their entire business better, not just an individual shot. >> Right, well, six years ago, when you had this hunch, you said there were some skeptics around there. One, you must feel pretty validated by now, but are you kind of one of the go-to guys, go-to companies of this is how to do it properly? These are all of the advantages, economic advantages, etc, that we can provide? >> Yeah, I think that there were definitely people that told me I was absolutely crazy when I first got started. Some of them are actually using Conductor now, so that's kind of like good. >> That must feel good right? >> Yeah, it's a good validation point and they had a lot of reasons for thinking that we were insane, cause we kind of were. But we just sort of believed deep down that it was going to work. So, yeah, I mean now, I think we're in a great position to help people. And for me, and you know, this is always like a thing that I sometimes get a hard time for, but I'm so passionate about this industry moving into the cloud that I'm just as happy to talk to somebody about how to do it maybe on their own if they're trying to do it on a small scale. Or what our competitors might be doing. Really, through that, I've kind of, we've found a space where we don't really have any competitors yet and we're breaking new ground. Really servicing the sort of medium and enterprise scale customers, and that kind of flexibility and scale and security that they kind of need. So it's sort of interesting in this, in a way, this sort of like selfless, just being excited about cloud has helped us to find a market that we can really and truly add insane value to. >> Wow, that is fascinating. Well, your passion for it is evident. Thank you so much Kevin for joining us on the CUBE. >> Yeah, thank you so much. >> Have a great time at the rest of the show and we'll see you on the CUBE sometimes soon. >> I always do, thank you again. >> Excellent, we want to thank you for watching. Again, we are live at NAB Las Vegas. Stick around. We will be right back.