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