>>Hello, and welcome to the cube special presentation of unstoppable domains partner showcase. I'm John furrier, your host of the cube. We got a great conversation talking about the future of the infrastructure of web three, all around domains, non fungible tokens, and more two great guests. Charlie Brooks, with business development of ensemble domains, and Michael Williams, product leader and advisor with unstoppable doing gentlemen, thanks for coming on the cube partner showcase with unstoppable domains. >>Thanks John. Excited to be here. So >>I love what you guys are doing. Congratulations on all your success. You guys are on the leading edge of what is a major infrastructure shift. Web three is being called, but people who have been doing this for a while, know that you see the blockchain, you see decentralization, you see immutability, all these future smart contracts. All the decentralized applications are now hitting the scene and NFTs are super hot as, as, as you can imagine, you guys are in the middle of it. So you guys are in, in, in the sweet spot of what I call the pragmatic pioneers. You guys are to building solutions that are making a difference like single sign-on. You have the login product, let's get into it. What is the path to I digital identity beyond the web, because we know what web identity is, but now that the web is kind of being abstracted away by this new web three layer, what is digital identity? >>Yeah, I can take that one. So I think what we're really seeing is this transition away from a purely physical identity where your digital life or where your, your online identity is really just a reflection of the, the parts of your physical identity, where you live, where you go to school, all of these things. And we're really seeing this world emerge where your online identity becomes much more of a primary. So if you have a way that you represent yourself in the online world, whether that's an Instagram account or TechTalk or email address or username, all of these things together make up your digital identity. So congrats. If you have any of those things, you already have one. >>Yeah. And we see that all the time with link tree people put their link tree out there and it's got the zillion handles. You're right. We all get up to Instagram and everyone's got like zillion identities. Is that a problem or an opportunity? >>I think it's just a reality. The fact that as our identities are spread across all of these different services and platforms that we use, the problem with something like link tree is that it is owned by link tree. You know, if I won the lottery purchased link tree and decided I wanted to change your personal website, John, I could easily do that. Moving to the kind of architecture that we have. And then if T architecture changes that significantly, it puts a lot of power back in the hands of the people who actually own those identities. >>You know, I do a lot of cube showcases with folks rent on my machine, learning and AI, and the number one conversation that they bring up. The number one issue is data. And they say when data is siloed and, and protected and owned, it is not optimized for machine learning. So I can almost imagine, as you bring NFTs to the digital identity, you mentioned you don't own your identity. If someone else is managing the service like link tree, this is, this is a cultural shift. This is an infrastructure software shift at the same time. Can you guys expand more about what you guys are doing with the NFT and ensemble domains with respect to that digital identity, because is that power shifting to the users now? And how does that compare to what's out there today? >>Sure. I think so. Our domains are NFTs, so they are ERC 7 21 tokens. And if you think about the past kind of web two identities are controlled by the platforms that we use, Twitter, Facebook, whatnot. There's a really a lack of data portability there. Our accounts and data live on their servers. They can be deleted at any time. So using an NFT to anchor your digital identity really gives you full control over your identity. You can't, it can't be deleted. It can't be revoked or edited or changed without your permission. And really, even better than information you store on your entity domain can be plugged into the services you use so that you never have to enter the same data twice. So when you go from platform to platform, everything can be tied to your existing domain. You're not going to a new site, kind of entering their ecosystem and providing all this information time and time again, and not really having a clear understanding of how your data is being used and where it's being stored. >>So the innovation here is the NFT is your identity and, and a non fungible token NFT is different than say a fungible tokens. So for the folks out there, that's trying to follow the bouncing ball. Michael, what's the difference between an NFT and a fungible token. And how does, and why is that important for identity? >>Yeah. My favorite metaphor here is baseball cards versus like dollar bills. So a dollar bill is fungible. If I have a dollar and then you have a dollar, we can trade dollars. And none of us is richer or poorer. If I have a babe Ruth and you have a Hank Aaron, and we swap baseball cards, like we have, we have changed something fundamental. So the, the important thing about NFT is, is that they are non fungible. So if I have a domain and you have a domain, like I have that identity and you have that identity, they are unique. They're independent, they're owned by each one of us. And then we can kind of swap them interchangeably. >>And that's why you're seeing NFTs hot with art and artists, because it's like a property, it's a property issue, not so much absolutely changeable, a divisible kind of asset. >>It is a, it is ownership rights in digital >>Form. Yes. All right. So now let's get into what the, the identity piece. I think I find that interesting because if I have something that's an NFT, it's not fungible. It's unique to me. It's property, my property, my login, this sounds compelling. So how does log-in work with the NFT? Can you guys take us through that, that architecture, what does it do? How does it work? And what's the benefit? >>So the way our login product works is it effectively uses your NFT domain. So Michael dot crypto, for example, as the authentication piece of a, of a login session. So basically when I, when I go and I try to log in with my domain, I type in Michael dot crypto. I sign it with my wallet, which cryptographically proves that I am this human. This is me. I have the rights to log in. And then when I do so I have the ability to share certain parts of my identity information with the applications that I use. And so it really blends the best of the ease of use from web to have just a standard like login with Gmail SSL experience, with all of the security and privacy benefits of web three. >>How important is single sign-on because, I mean, right now people are used to like, seeing things like log with your kid hub handle or LinkedIn, or, you know, Google, apple. I mean, you're seeing people offering login. Okay. What's the difference here from those solutions and why is it make sense for the user? >>Sure. Yeah. The big differences, what we're building is really user first. So if you think about traditional SSOs, you are the product. When you use their product, they're selling your data and, you know, they're tracking everything you do logging in with unstoppable handles, not only authentication, but data sharing as well. So when you log in a domain or owner can choose to share aspects of their online identity, such as first name, preferred language profile, picture location. So this is a user controlled way of using a sign-on, where they are permissioning, these different pieces of their identity. And really apps can use this information to enable new experiences, such as for example, website might automatically enable high contrast mode for someone visually impaired. It could, pre-populate your friends from a decentralized social graph. So what we're doing is taking the best parts of web to SSL and combining them with the best parts of web three. >>So no more losing your password entering in the same data, hundreds of times, you know, depending on other services, keep your information safe. Logging with unstoppable really puts you in complete control of your data. And, you know, a big part of that is you're not going to have 80 plus usernames and passwords anymore. You know, we have these tools like password managers that exist to kind of put a bandaid on this issue, but it's not really a long-term solution. So we're, we're building is really seamless onboarding where everything can be tied to your domain so that you can navigate to different apps in a much more seamless way. >>Michael, I got to get your thoughts on this because on the product side, it's interesting. My mind's kind of connecting some dots if I have, first of all, great convenience to reduce all those logins, right? So, you know, check their little pain, pain reduction. But when you think about what's different, I can now broker my data as well as log in. So let's just say, hypothetically, I'm cruising around some D apps and, you know, doing things and earning reputation or attention or points or whatever, tokens utility tokens. There could be a way for me to control what I own. I'm the product I own the data. Is that kind of where this is going? >>I think it's definitely a direction. It could go say, for example, if I'm a e-commerce platform and I'm trying to figure out where I'm going to place a new billboard, you know, one of the things that I could request from a user is their address. I can figure out where they live, what city they're in that will help inform the, the decision that I need to make as a business. And in return, maybe I give that person a dollar off their purchase, right? Like we can, we can start to build a stronger relationship between the applications that people use and the people that use them and try to optimize that whole experience and try to just transfer information back and forth to make everyone's lives better. >>What's the roadmap on the business side, Charlie, when you see companies kind of adopting it, they're probably taking baby steps or crawling before they walk they're walking before they run. I mean, I can see decentralized applications in the future, whether it's FinTech or whatever, having new kinds of marketplaces that take advantage of the paradigm where the, the script flips to the user first. Okay. So I see that. How do people get started now? What are some of the success momentum points that you're seeing companies do now with unstoppable? >>Sure. So a lot of web three apps are very sensitive about respecting the, the information that their users are providing, right? So what we're doing is I'm offering different ways for apps can touch with their users in a way that is user controlled. So an example there is that a lot of web three companies will use wallet connect to allow users to log in using a wallet address, an issue. There is that one person can have hundreds of wallet addresses, and it's impossible for the app to understand that. So what we do is we use login, we attach an email address, some other pieces to a wallet address so that we can identify who a unique user is. And the app is able to collect that information. They don't have to deal with passwords or PII storage. They have access to a huge amount of new data for an improved UX. >>It's really simple to implement and maintain as well. So one example there is if you are a DFI platform and you want to reward your users for coming to their site for the first time, now that they can identify unique user, they can drop a token into that user's wallet all because they're able to identify that user as unique. So they have a better way of understanding their customers. They enable their customers to share data. A lot of these companies well ask users to follow them on Twitter or discord when they need to provide updates or, you know, bug bounties, all these different things and log in with unstoppable, lets them permission, email addresses so they can collect emails if they want to do a newsletter. And instead of sort of harvesting data from elsewhere and kind of forcing people to join this newsletter program, it's all user controlled. So each user saying, yes, you can use my email for your newsletter. You know, I'm supporting your project, want to be kept up to date with bugs or bounties or rewards programs. So really it's just kind of a, a better way for users to, to share the data that they're willing to with dApps and dabs can use it to create all sorts of incentives and really just kind of understand their users on a, on a different level. >>How has the development Michael going on the, on the smart contract side of the business, you know, theories has always been heralded as being very developer focused. There's been great innovations. Just, you still got, you know, gas fees out there. You still gotta do some things. How is the development environment, how are the applications coming? Cause I can see the really, I can see the flywheel kicking in as a developer, Frank gets more streamlined, more efficient, and now you've got the identity piece nailed down. I just see a lot of kind of dominoes falling at the same time. What's the status on the dev side? >>What's your tour? The fascinating thing about crypto is how quickly it changes. You know, when I, when I joined Ethereum was pretty reasonable still for transactions. It was very cheap to get things done very fast. We've looked at last summer that things went completely out of control. This is a big reason that unstoppable for a long time has been working on a layer two and we've moved over to the Pollyanna, our primary source of record, which is built on top of it. The area of course, I think saved well over a hundred million dollars in Gaspe is for our users that we're constantly keeping an eye on new technologies that are emerging, weighing how we can incorporate those things and really where this industry is going to take us. You know, in many ways we are, are just as much passengers as the other people floating around the ecosystem as well. >>Yeah, it's, it's certainly getting faster every day and seeing a huge uptake on a theorem. I heard a stat that most people at the university of California, Berkeley, 30% of the computer science students are dropping out to join web three companies just goes to show you this cultural shift and you can see a lot more companies getting involved. So I got to ask you Charlie, on the biz dev front, how are companies getting started? What's the playbook? Are they putting their toe in the water? Are they jumping in full throttle? What's, what's the, what's the roadmap. What's the best practice for people to get started with unstoppable? >>Absolutely. You know, we're lucky that we get a lot of inbound interest from companies web two and web three because they first want to secure their domains. And we do a ton of work on the backend to protect trademark domains. We want to avoid squatting as much as possible. You know, we don't think that's the spirit of, of weaponry at all. And certainly not what the original intention of the internet was. So fair amount of companies will reach out to, out to us to get their domain. And then we can have a longer conversation about some of the other integrations and ways we can collaborate. So certainly visiting our website and several domains.com is a great starting point. We have an app submission page where asking, reach out to us, even request a grant. We have a grant prop, a program to help developers get started, provide them some resources to, to work with us and integrate some of our technology. >>We have great documentation as well on the site. So you can read all about what it takes to resolve domains, if you're a water and an exchange, as well as what it takes to integrate login within softball, which is actually a super easy integration as well, which we're, we're really excited about. So yeah, I'd say check out the website apply for our grant. If you think you're a fit there, then of course, people can always reach out to me directly on Twitter, on telegram email. We're very reachable and, and we're always happy to chat with projects and, and learn more about what they're doing. >>What's the coolest thing you've seen going on trial with your partners right now. What's, what's the, what's the number one use case that's cool that people are jumping on right now to get in and get some, some, you know, some success out of the gate. >>Yeah. Maybe, maybe gamefied kind of played, earns huge. It's blowing up. And the gaming community is really passionate, vibrant, just expanding like crazy same with there's all this cool new stuff you can do with defy where no matter, you know, how many, how, how big your kind of portfolio is, you're you're able to stake and use all these interesting tools to kind of grow your book. So it's super exciting to see and talk to all these projects and, you know, there's certainly kind of an energy in the community where everyone wants to onboard the general public to web three, right? So we're all working on these school projects, but we need everyone to come over from web to kind of understand the advantages of defy of game fi of having an empty domain. So I'm lucky that I'm kind of one of the first layers there of, of meeting new projects and kind of helping them get access to more users so that they can grow along with. >>Yeah. I remember the early days of Bitcoin and Ethereum, we were giving it away to give the, the community manager was give a, give a Bitcoin to someone that was when it was, you can actually give a Bitcoin to someone what's the, what's the word of mouth or organic viral. I won't say growth hack because that's got negative connotations, but what's the community's way of putting forth the mission for unstoppable. Is it just more domains you guys have any programs got going on? Is it give it away? I'll see you, you can get domains on your site, but what's the, what's the way to get people in gray shaded in and getting comfortable. >>Yeah. So much of what we do is really just all of that, to all that question, to answer that question, we spent a ton of time and energy just on education and whether that's specifically around domains or just general led three, we have a podcast which is pretty exceptional, which talks to what three leaders from across the space and makes the projects that they're working on more accessible. I think we passed over a hundred episodes, not too long ago. There's a ton of stuff that we do that other people do. If anyone has questions, I'm happy to talk about resources. >>Yeah. The part I think you guys are up to one 17, but that's a deep dive that you guys go deep on the podcast. So that's, you know, where you go in, what else is new on digital identity? Where do you guys see the future going now that you get the baseline identity with the NFT? It makes a lot of sense. Create innovation. Good logic makes sense. Solid. Technically what's next. >>Yeah. I think that's really boils down to the way that the internet has grown. Doesn't really feel like the way that the internet should be like our data shouldn't live in these walled gardens controlled by these large companies. Like ultimately people should be responsible for their own identity it's they should have control over the things that they do online, the data that's shared or the benefit of that data. And so the world that we are working towards is very much that where we are giving people the ability to be paid for sharing their data with companies, we're giving applications, the ability to request information from the people that use those applications to improve their experience. We're really just trying to make connections across the ecosystem, through these products to enable a better experience for everyone. So whether that's the, the use cases that I mentioned already, or maybe viewing reviews on something like Yelp or Amazon that just confirmed that the person that you are looking at is actually a real person, not some bot that's been paid to to the loader review. Like the, the interesting thing about these products is they're so universally applicable, applicable. There are so many different games that we can try to plug them in. So have >>It's a great example. It's double-edged sword. You can have a, a metaverse image and have pre-programmed conversations with, with, you know, liquid audio and the video application, you know, or it's a real person. How do you know the difference? You, these are going to be questions, you know, around, around who solves that problem. Now this is time for bots and is it time not for bots? We all know what happens when you get into the, you know, the game of manipulation, but also it can be helpful. This is where you gotta be smart and identity is critical in this future. Charlie, what's your reaction to the future of digital identity? I mean so much to look at here on the trajectory. >>Yeah. You know, I think a big part of it is data portability, right? If you go to a site like Instagram, you're giving them all this content that's very personal to you and you can't just pack up and leave Instagram. So we want a future where most of these apps are just kind of a front end and you can navigate from one to the other and bring your data with you and not be beholden to the companies that operate centralized servers. So I think data portability is huge and it's going to open up a lot of doors. And, and just going back to that thought on kind of cleaning up web two for a better web three. When I think about the Amazons, the Alps, the Yelps of the world, they're all these bots are all these awful fake reviews. There's a lot of gamification happening that is really just creating a lot of noise. >>And I want to bring kind of transparency back to the internet, where when you see a review, you should know that that's a real human and blockchain technology is enabling us to do that. And certainly enough, two domains are going to play a huge part of that. So I think that having an experience where, you know, and trust the people that you're interacting with is going to be really powerful and just a better experience for everyone. And there's a lot of ramifications with that. You know, politically speaking, we've, we've all seen all the issues with kind of attacking communities and using bots and fake accounts to kind of hit people's pain points is it's kind of sad and, and certainly not something that we want to see continue happening. So whatever we can do to kind of give people their digital identity and help people understand that this is a real person on the other end, I think is huge for, for the future of the internet and really for society as well. >>That's a great call out there. Charlie cleaning up the mess of web 2.0 web two. Well, actually I was, it was 2.0 technically now web three is no nos 0.0 in it, but, but I saw on our listen to the podcast with Matt, this recent one, and he had a great metaphor that went back to when I was growing up in the internet, you got IP addresses, right? And the mess there was, it was, you couldn't find what you want to look and no one could remember what to type in. Cause you can type in IP addresses in the browser back then. And then DNS came out and then keywords that's web. Okay. Now that mess now is fraud. Misinformation, bot manipulation, deep fakes, many other kind of unwanted kind of time to innovate. And every year, every time you had these inflection points, there'd be an abstraction on top of it. So similar thing happening here is that you guys see it too. >>Yeah. I think we're going back to some of the foundational architecture of the internet DNS and really bringing that forward about 30, 40 years in terms of technology. So loading in some work cryptography and some other fancy things to help patch some of those issues from the previous versions of the web. >>Yeah. Awesome. Well guys, thanks so much for coming on and the spirit of our tick talk, you know, I'm only summarize this. Can you guys give us a quick tick tock moment, short comment on, you know, where this is all going, whereas log-in single sign on mean and what should people do to take steps to secure their digital identity? >>Sure. I'll jump in here. So it's time for people to secure their digital identity. That great first step has gone on several domains and getting an entity domain. You know, you can control your data. You can do a lot of cool different things with your domain, including posting your own website that you own forever. And no one can take it away from you. I would certainly recommend the people join. Our discord, telegram community is check out our podcasts. It's really great. Especially if you're new to crypto web three, you know, we do a great job of sort of explaining all the basic concepts and expanding on them. So yeah, I'd say, you know, the time is now, so to get your digital identity and start embracing web three, because it's really exploding right now. And there's just so many incredible advantages, especially for the user, >>Michael, what's your take? >>I mean, I put not, I've said it better myself. >>Like we always say, if you're not on the next wave, your driftwood, and this is a big wave it's happening. It's pretty clear guys. It's it's there, it's happening now. And again, very pragmatic implementations of solving problems. The sign-on the app integration. Congratulations. And we've got our cube domain too, by the way. So we're we're I think we're good. You know, so we've got to put it to you. It's appreciate it, Charlie, Michael, thanks for coming on and sharing the update. Okay. This is the cube with unstoppable domains partner showcase, shout for your hosts. Got a lot of other great interviews. Check them out. We're going to continue our coverage and continue on with this great showcase. Thanks for watching.

>> 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)