Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00 Thank you for joining us. This event is something we kind of put the idea together for when we realized that quantum had this awesome office here with a gorgeous view and accommodates, just a nice intimate crowd of people. And we're like, Oh, we should do some events with them. So the goal is that this is actually the first of maybe kind of a semi-regular series. We can bring folks in, obviously talk to some of our key technology vendors, partners. I think at some point we'll want to do events that are maybe more customer focused and people sharing information about their environments. I'm Nicole, I'm the director of business development and Chesapeake systems. Again, most of you guys know me, I'm basically means I'm a slightly more technical sales guy than average. So today we are obviously partnering with quantum whose offices we're in and levels beyond, uh, levels beyond being the maker of some of the more interesting, exciting enterprise class ma'am slash workflow automations slash it does it all software technology that we've certainly been fortunate enough to encounter and partner with.
Speaker 0 01:06 We also have Scott Morris today from greatest top. Scott's a consultant he's been in the media industry for quite a while. He's going to be speaking to some perspectives as we kick things off with this panel discussion, uh, kind of from where he's at. And as he sees the landscape, obviously will McGrath quantum marketing guru. Is that fair way of saying it marketing? God damn I God, no, just the marketing specialist. How's that specialist worker be. He puts the special in marketing specialist. So he's going to be speaking to some kind of the environments that quantum is technology is being used in. And again, Jason PIR of course, made the Trek out from the other coast, uh, to join us and speaking from levels beyond themselves maker of the reach engine technology. So we thought we'd start things off with kind of a little bit of a light handle discussion.
Speaker 0 01:55 Talk a little bit more about industry trends, not getting super, super deep into the tech side until kind of the second portion where we'll go a little bit deeper and we're going to be getting into some demonstrations of some of quantum technology, their storage area, networking technology, their hierarchical storage manager, AKA complex, interesting archive software technology called storage manager, which my colleague, Jason <inaudible>, whereas we'd like to call them now tango because we have two Jason peas here. And so he's tango and he's Delta. Just everyone knows he's going to be showing off the store next, the storage manager component. And then that is going to lead into Jason per kind of going over the reach engine a little bit, but we're going to start things off a little more light. There will be plenty of portions for interactivity. I'll query you guys for questions. If you do have comments, this panel discussion is kind of going to be broken into three sections.
Speaker 0 02:43 So towards the end of them, uh, we can take some towards the end of each section. So the first topic that we want to discuss, that's obviously something, everyone in this room deals with in some capacity or another is what I think can very, very, fairly, and obviously to be described as just the sea change in modern media that's occurring right now. It's been going on. I think since people got the bright idea of putting videos and rich media on the internet, that's obviously changing an awful lot. Now that the internet is literally everywhere all the time. I like to remind people that if you think your LTE is fast, wait another three or four years to LTE advanced comes out and it's about 10 times as fast as the current cellular data technology standard LTE. So that's changing everything and puts the internet in everyone's pocket or everywhere.
Speaker 0 03:35 I frankly think that the word mobile, which so many people have latched onto is maybe a slight misnomer for what the trend is. I like to emphasize that it's ubiquitous newness, that people crave. Yes, mobility is part of that. And having access to media and technology everywhere you go is obviously part of that story, but it's really just one of ubiquity and people having access to all the information, all the media, everything, every time, everywhere in their bathtub or whatever, you know, cause people kind of are getting addicted to that way of doing things. So speaking to kind of this sea change that is occurring, let's start with you, Jason. Well, you know, tell me kind of where you guys see yourselves fitting in, what this change is that your customers are responding to, whether it's quote unquote mobile, whether it's just the whole over the top internet and how many, just new formats and distribution systems. And I mean it's changing every five minutes.
Speaker 1 04:31 Yeah, no, totally. I mean, I think the biggest thing that we're seeing really is on the delivery and distribution side, right? There's no more of this linear distribution model of producing content, editing that content and sending it out to your distribution point. It's all about sending it out and being prepared to send out to multiple growing consistently growing over the top distribution endpoints. And it's just having more and more platforms that are coming out every day and being able to get things out there more quickly. So the other thing that used to happen is we used to be doing all this stuff manually. So you're constantly having to edit for the different various locations. You're going out through the different regions and different versions. And we're getting into a position where we have clients now that are distributing content to partners in over 140 countries.
Speaker 1 05:21 If you had to edit every single one of those manually, you just wouldn't. I mean, quite frankly, before when they were doing everything manually, they were doing about 20 countries that they were distributing to. Uh, once we implemented automation to them, now they're able to get out to 140 and consistently growing that base of where they can go to. And I think that's one of the biggest changes that we're seeing is just more endpoints, more formats, more changes, more customizing on an end point by end point basis. And that's what people are starting to expect.
Speaker 0 05:49 Does that stop or is it just going to even continue to get more fragmented in your opinion? What are you seeing on the ground?
Speaker 1 05:55 I mean, I think it's, it's actually getting more because the big thing that we're seeing is that it started out a couple of years ago, even where people would start to latch on to some of the primary things like a Hulu or Netflix, and those guys would go out and try and get exclusive rights to be able to get things. And then people started realizing, I don't want anyone to have my exclusive rights. I want people to see my content in as many different possible places as they can so that I can capture those eyeballs. And so that there can be ad revenue and there can be different forms of monetization across the board and as many different outlets as possible. And so I think, whereas initially it was all about how do I get this online? Now it's all about how do I get this online in as many places as possible and as many ways as possible to get as many eyeballs looking in, follow the viewers instead of expect the viewers to come to you. Exactly, exactly. So, you know, when there's a new mobile device that comes out, there's a new format for a mobile device that comes out or a new app that comes out. I want my content there so that the viewer is going to come across me and I don't have to go out and try and get in front of them and all these specific select ways. Sure.
Speaker 0 06:59 Scott, you've been in media for a while. You had a gig at discovery and feel free to quick summarize yourself here as a man of many talents and persuasions and you know, expertise areas, real talent. You're, you're, you're doing, um, a project now that involves bringing some of these technologies more into the governmental space, whether from that perspective or even just taking it further back, you've been in the media industry for awhile. You've understood the business models. You've understood what kind of the traditional broadcast challenges were given all of this change. You know, how do you see that playing out with the type of customer base, the large media corporations and how are they adapting?
Speaker 2 07:40 Well, playing off what Jason said and what you said earlier. I do think that it's becoming ubiquitous. That's what they want, right? The problem is, is that there's no money and making it ubiquitous yet. Right? So they're trying to figure out the different business models. One of the reasons, all the broadcasters, like the Hulu and the Netflix and things like that is because they're taking their old content and sticking it out there when all it was, was doing costing the money in storage before, and now they're actually generating revenue from it. The problem is that's not what the consumers want, right. They're looking to, um, have everything immediately. And there's not a very good business model for that. So that's, what's causing the fragmentation and the modeling. So you're looking at the, Google's looking to do television and breaking down the barriers of the, uh, um, MSLs.
Speaker 2 08:23 And you're looking at the discovery channels in the world and the HBO is going on to Apple TV and things like that. And so they're, they're trying out different models, but we're really in a nascent phase of this and it's really gonna evolve over time and they're struggling with it right now. And they have big conferences and they talk about it every year. And to your point, as soon as they could put video online, which was 98, 99 something, you know, for, you know, in a realistic way. Um, they've been talking about serving television over IP and movies. You know, there's a great commercial seven years ago where it was this dive hotel and a woman walked up and they didn't really have air conditioner. They didn't have any of this stuff. And he just was like, you know what, entertainment options, the, and he's like, we have every movie ever made in all time and every language, blah, blah. And that, you know, that's what everybody wants. It's just not there. It's funny. You know, we, I,
Speaker 0 09:14 And many of the people in the room probably have had this experience daily for the last several years. You just, you do some quick Google or Wikipedia search on your smartphone and you can kind of end all angry bar debates with your, your friends or colleagues almost instantaneously. You literally have like all of the knowledge of humanity in your hand. And we take that for granted. Now, do you think, probably call it by the end of the decade, we'll be saying things like you remember when you couldn't just instantly access every episode of every TV series ever made and every movie through pretty much every service through a variety of business models and rental or purchase plans. I mean, are we, are we approaching that?
Speaker 2 09:58 Well, I think the technology is pretty close to that. The business models aren't. So whether or not it'll move by the end of the decade is a big question, Mark, right? The music industry is struggled with going on the, uh, per song model, but now it makes a lot of money at it through Apple, right? And, and other services like that, whether or not TV can get there, it's hard. So if it wasn't for the bundled packages for television and movies, discovery channel wouldn't exist, right? Because it would have launched as a service that did documentaries and who's going to pay just for that. Right. But because you also got it with ESPN and all your local stations and your movie channels, then people started watching it and it was able to generate a lot of revenue and create great content. And, you know, they talk about how there's so much advancement. There's this stat that I looked up where today YouTube spending a hundred million dollars on, you know, there's channels to create these channels. And I'm the chief executive from time Warner said, isn't that cute? I'm going to spend $5 billion on content that just this year. Right. So, you know, it's a rounding error to him. So it's big dollars from the technology perspective, but not in the media industry will well
Speaker 0 11:10 With all of this change, that's going on proliferation of formats, of video, of people making more content available across a variety of services. Obviously this goes along with storage needs and archive needs a lot of people as, as Scott was speaking to are now trying to derive revenue streams off of, you know, early eighties TV shows that say people in their mid thirties have some kind of nostalgic association for, and they're having to digitize those, get them out there and distribute them from the quantum perspective, how is this change seeming to play out as people are evaluating kind of their infrastructures in more general terms, but, you know, what's, what are you guys having to respond given this changing environment right now?
Speaker 3 11:55 Well, I think, you know, w what we see as a lot of people that are actually looking at, I mean, you look at somebody like, um, digital Rapids did a report for us and sell, and for every title, there's like 200 different variations of that title. So how do you store that correctly? How do you actually access that correctly? The repurposing monetization of content long tail content, as you mentioned, um, I have a 15 year old son who basically has his community of folks that basically latch onto these old programs and just kind of, you know, talk to people from the Philippines and others. And they actually kind of create a little community from that. So the ability to actually actually bring that content back quickly and getting it to the consumers is a, is a key part,
Speaker 1 12:33 Speed is enormously necessary, and it's changing all the time. And if you can't get to it quickly, you've lost, you're already behind it. And I mean, one of the big things that we're seeing along that lines too, is the big move of clients that we'll talk to that come to us and have a massive library of content, but it's all still sitting on tape. And when it's on tape, everyone's realizing it's not valuable when it's on tape. Cause no, there's no visibility into it. And so that's where the technology is being able to bring that stuff online and then pushing it off to something like LTL, pushing it off somewhere that it's on lesser expensive disc it's on a place that might not be super quickly as quickly as accessible as your high speed disc, but then having mechanisms to instantly recall it when needed, adds tremendous value to the library, because now you can actually search across that entire library that used to just sit on shelves. Yeah. And just to respond to something that Scott said quickly, you know, one of the things I kind of think is that,
Speaker 0 13:32 Okay, maybe they're not operating with the kind of budgets as the massive mega media corporations, some of the people in this room represent, but, um, and then, but we also have folks on the other side of the spectrum in here and who are doing very purpose driven, very targeted content of a high quality. And it seems to me that because of the, the media corpse, you know, being locked into a lot of those quote unquote legacy business models that aren't necessarily compatible with what just the technological landscape is doing people who are getting, who want to create a new media outlet. In some ways I think are at a serious advantage because they don't have to invest in the type of legacy technology infrastructure as the traditional media companies are kind of baked into cause they're so yes, they do a lot of over the top stuff, but they're always kind of also going to be aiming at quote unquote broadcast.
Speaker 0 14:24 And I think a lot of younger, newer media companies don't feel the need to get their stuff out there that way maybe they can get discovered online first and okay, then someone else is dealing with distribution through cable or whatnot. But you know, there's going to be the struggle where the mega Corp's are locked into these models. It's like, why can't HBO just sell you their, their subscription through HBO go directly because they don't have an easy transition plan to get from their existing, you know, revenue generation models, which are largely cable partner oriented to just that direct relationship with the customer. But someone who's starting a brand new media company can basically spend next to zero on putting the content in front of every eyeball on the planet with an internet connection and even a smartphone. And, you know, just has a lot more luxury to experiment and develop these business models without being went to something. So I'll just put it out there. If anyone has any questions, Dawn meek from, from levels beyond what say you,
Speaker 4 15:22 Well, I think we should also talk far beyond just media companies as it relates to digital content and let's stipulate, it's not just video it's audio, it's images, it's documents, it's something that was born digital or something that was scanned from a bed scanner and is now living in something digital. But you know, there's not too many enterprises in the world, whether it's government or education or business that you couldn't make an argument for a need to manage their content more effectively
Speaker 2 15:54 Just to Oh, okay. Just to reiterate for the purposes of the recording that we're making, because this is going to go on the Chesa website cause we to try to embrace rich media.
Speaker 0 16:03 Yeah. Um, but that kind of makes the point, right. What other types of companies can be empowered by these types of, uh, distribution tools and technologies for all types of media files. And that's what Don meek from a levels beyond was speaking to. And, you know, I, I think I've heard this plenty of times, you know, it's not the majority of Chesapeake's business, but some of what we do, um, you know, is working for instance with government customers. And those are very different types of environments from media corporations. But I can't tell you how many times I've interacted with someone who says, well, why can't we just have a searchable, YouTube type thing of everything, right? Like, I mean, if I can do it on the interwebs, why, why can't we have that ourselves? Or, you know, if, if I can upload things into YouTube and they're automatically, you know, generating like, uh, transcripts and time coded, you know, speech to text, whatever, and correlating that with the video, like can't we do that. And Scott, I mean, maybe you can speak to this with some of the types of projects and ideas that you're working on now through a greatest top. I mean, how does some of those non quote unquote media companies see, you know, being able to utilize all of this interesting new tech and distribution technology?
Speaker 2 17:14 Well, you know, to Don's point, I think every company is becoming a media and marketing company because at the end of the day, they're trying to reach customers of some sort. Now in the government space, it's a different kind of customer because they're really trying to prevent things and find, you know, nefarious people that are doing things in the, uh, but any intelligence agency collects and manages more video than any media company in the world. And there are several intelligence agencies out there, right? So, uh, you know, that's a great example. I think healthcare is another great one. Education, you know, discovery did a lot in the education and, and that's becoming more and more video. And especially as more mobile devices are, are out with the students that that's going to become more of the curriculum. And I think that it touches every sector and, you know, as mobile grows and as you have more user generated content or you have more contributor content, you know, it's just going to grow exponentially, which is great for big data and storage and making sure that we can manage all that.
Speaker 2 18:16 It's great for media asset management, because that's big. It needs to be ubiquitous, which it isn't right now, especially I think the reason we talk about media companies is say they have a lot of money and they generally create a lot of the media, but they also have a lot of legacy systems, whether it's home grown or things that were years ago and they they're very slow to change. And so there's a lot of opportunity in that space, but you know, the government, you can probably argue it's a little slow to change as well. One of the ways I like to look
Speaker 0 18:43 Got it is yes, there is a media industry. Yes, there are the creators. Yes, there are other consumers and the traditional media landscape, if you will, no matter how that content is distributed, but video is becoming something in the distribution of video, that's becoming so ubiquitous and so easy. And so essentially free that it's transforming into being just a generalized mass communications, medium above and beyond just pre-created rich content that people consume for entertainment value video is as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. So I guess if you're doing between 30 and 60 frames a second, you know, that's a lot of words that video can just communicate for a variety of purposes. And it's so easy to put the stuff in front of whoever you want to put it in front of now, for whatever purpose, you know, yes. People want to mimic those technologies and systems that they see emerging out of the more traditional content industry.
Speaker 0 19:39 So let's segue and talk about the architecture a little bit. You started to speak a little bit to the segue from the legacy architectures to kind of what the modern operating environment is to deal with this, this plethora of, of media that we're trying to put out there for a variety of purposes. Jason, I'll start with you. You guys know I've, I've, I've heard you guys, first of all, freak out when people describe reach engine as just a ma'am, cause it's a lot more than that. And I'd like you to maybe speak to a little bit of what your guys' key technologies do do to help foster this, this modern architecture, this technological architecture. But, you know, maybe you can speak just a little bit as well too. You know how people are, are architecting things and using technologies like your guys' reach engine to allow them to flexibly deal with this ever changing media environment and what the tool does. What is the software doing to hasten this?
Speaker 1 20:36 Totally. So one of the big things is that really, like you said, we are not just a man. I mean that term, I think has gotten thrown around in a lot of places and tends to just it's, it's tend to just got watered down over time, way too much. And what we see is that we're almost more of a video and media operating system and that something that we actually have multiple applications that sit on top of this engine to be able to allow you to basically empower your content organizers and content creators, to do a lot more with every type of content, whether it's images, whether it's audio, whether it's video, even your documents, everything goes into this one centralized system and having it there. Yes, you get great advantages in being able to search it and being able to tag it and add metadata and get really in depth results when you're searching across all of your content versus the old school, just having a hierarchical library of folders and files.
Speaker 1 21:37 But beyond that, that next step that's actually even almost more important is this ability to then automate those processes that people are doing every day, whether those processes are just on the basic delivery and output of content, or if those processes get incredibly in depth on the ingest side of things, where we have people who can ingest content and automatically send things out for phonetic indexing and bring it back already tagged with tons of metadata. That's specifically related to the points in time within video, or do this, uh, automated processing of documents where we can actually send a document out for doing OCR recognition and pulling back all the information on the document. So that, that becomes searchable. Um, all those kinds of things, all kind of feed into this system and then being able to keep it simple so that people can set it up for the pieces that they need and organize all this content in one place, and then be able to categorize things together into groups to then distribute out again to every different kind of platform in every different kind of way, but having that flexibility.
Speaker 1 22:43 And that's the, one of the big things that we're seeing now is it's the flexibility is the key. If we came to you and said, here's your distribution? So you can send to Hulu and you can send a Netflix and you can send a Roku. Well, that's great for those three things. But what we're finding is more important that we say, here's the tool set. And yes, here are a couple of things that we've built with this tool set that are incredibly powerful of how you can get your content out there for video, for audio, for images, but you have the tool set. So with the tool set through your integration partners, through us and through your own people on your own teams, we empower you to build those tools that we don't even know you need yet. And that's the key is having an ever expanding platform. That's giving you the tools to build the future of your business, of how you're going to be able to work with your content, whether that's on the ingest, whether it's on the organization or whether it's on the output. One of the things that caught our eyes at Chesapeake when it came to our first times to kind of evaluate the reach engine technology, is that, you know, the architecture
Speaker 0 23:46 Of the software itself is quite different than a lot of other it workflow automation technologies we've encountered in that. You know, so a lot of your guys' environments you'll have all these systems called them little circles that for various workflows are patched together. And, you know, sometimes it's twine and bubble gum and scotch tape that are holding these workflows together. And sometimes it's fairly well orchestrated, but it's lots of little lines between lots of little systems. Your guys' software is, is truly more of like an enterprise services bus for media, and it's on a services oriented architecture. Can you speak a little bit to like truly under the hood, some of what differentiates reach engine and how it kind of can act as kind of that central orchestrator of all of these other various workflows that it's kind of acting in the middle of and helping to coordinate?
Speaker 1 24:38 Sure. So, yeah, so it is, um, I mean it really is an enterprise engine. It's something that was built in the enterprise space and really focused there at a point where, um, its initial inception really was the reach engine application, which sits under the hood of all of our applications that we deploy out there, which for a long time actually had no specific front end because it was all a hundred percent customized to the unique needs of some of our larger first enterprise clients. And then basically what we've done is be able to fine tune and hone it down so that we now have that packaged product. But what we're doing is being able to orchestrate all these different third party systems and being able to communicate back and forth between them at the deepest level of their API APIs. We always say we do, we stay as far away as possible from integrating with someone through some kind of a hot folder kind of mechanism.
Speaker 1 25:30 You know, we don't like sending something over here and just hoping maybe we'll get something back. And we really believe in communicating and everything at the deepest level so that we integrate through our workflow engine normally and build these workflows to do everything from even our own basic ingest and exports and a lot of the stuff that happens within our system, but also when we integrate with any external partners. So when we're integrating with your storage, for example, uh, we communicate with quantum, we have very deep integration into their APIs. And so when a piece of content moves back and forth from one file system to another file system, we're not just making a copy. We're actually using the internal calls directly through the API to do things at a level that we know is the best for the file system. So we're going through that level throughout the technology and any partner we integrate with, um, to be able to always make sure that we're communicating at that deep kind of level to keep that integration tight.
Speaker 0 26:30 And that, that allows for a level of scalability. I think, especially as this media environment is just proliferating outside of anyone's control. You know, it gives you a platform on which to build when you realize, Oh, I need it to suddenly handle 20 as much content.
Speaker 1 26:44 Totally. So not just scalability, but also just over time, you know, one of the big thing about not having everything built in, you know, there are people out there that would say, well, why don't we have a, transcoder built in why don't we have, you know, our own pieces of some of these things built in. And the answer is because we don't want to be doing that. We don't want to go out there and try to be our own transcoder and compete with the transcoder industry. That doesn't make any sense to us. We know some trans coders are great at these formats. Other trans coders are better at other formats and tomorrow, maybe both of those companies are gone and there's someone else who's come in. Who's better at all of it. And so we've always designed this system to be very open in that way, so that as technology evolves and changes in all those different processes you're doing with your media, you can bring in that new technology and switch out the old stuff and continually drive forward into this new stuff.
Speaker 1 27:35 A good example of that actually is one of the things that we use, uh, for searching through the metadata content of our system. We had a really powerful search engine. We always have had a really powerful search engine with a reach engine, um, studio one dot two that's, uh, going to be released in the very near future here. Uh, we actually found an even more powerful search engine to be able to embed it into our system. So we swapped out the old one. And now we have a new one though, that we've built into this system and it's empowered us to do things that are just so far beyond anything we've ever seen before, where we're searching literally across, across more than a billion data points, bringing back 700,000 results in less than a second. And we're able to do that because of how we design an architect, this system, because we can be able to go in and say, look, you know, here's a new piece, here's a new partner.
Speaker 1 28:25 Here's a new thing that we want to integrate with. Let's build that in and scale. And then to that point, so we design our systems so that things like our application servers are all clusteral, um, and the transcoding farm can be because it's third party, it can be as big as you want. So we have clients that are running everything off one or two servers and doing very small things. And I have a nice inexpensive footprint that they can get into the system. And then we have servers running transcode farms of over 45 encoding nodes, transcoding more than 700,000 pieces of content a month. And pushing that content out the door through the same reach engine platform. And because it was really tested and honed in that enterprise environment, we know it can handle 90% of the people that we're talking to because we go to a lot of companies and, you know, they'll, they'll say, Oh, we have these huge needs. But when we evaluate them against some of the things that we've done in our history, we know that the system can handle it. We know we've, we've already gone after some of the biggest challenges that we could find in the industry first to really build out the flexibility and, and tune out the system to make sure that it's a case. I was going to say, you know, speaking on scalability, you know, you guys are in the
Speaker 0 29:42 Storage business basically to summarize it, but that's a lot more it's storage area, networking technology, which, you know, as StorNext is, is an inherently scalable clusteral type of file system. You guys are dealing with ever growing kind of archive concerns of your customer base, whether it's tape, whether it's this new product you're going to tell us a little bit more about later called lattice a more of an object or object storage approach to storage needs, speak a little to the, on the storage side of things, how this, the architecture seemed to be evolving and the, and the challenges that your guys' client base, you know, seem to be wrestling with as they realize again, these needs are just spiraling essentially out of control.
Speaker 3 30:23 Yeah, I think, I mean, interesting story. When in 2007, I believe it was at NAB there. I was with a server vendor back then, and we were doing some video on demand for the Wynn hotel when resort. And it was opening up later that month. And we were at NAB early in April, and I was able to get a tour of the wind and secretive, you know, get behind the scenes. And so one of the things I wanted to see is it will show me the video on demand. I mean, it's all HD brand new concept HD. So I get up in the room, they already have three HD TV sets for the suite. So, well, let me let's look at the content. It was pink videos. There was, um, you know, previews for movies, but there was no content. And then you read, um, Wimbledon.
Speaker 3 31:02 Um, I was reading a story the other day and they basically had the number two 15 tennis player there. And on her fingernails, the hem of her skirt was stamped Sony HD, ultra, you know, the new 4k workflow, something like that. And the whole gimmick was, you know, you can, if you have a four K TV, a $10,000 Bravia TV, you can actually see, make out a fingernail. So 4k workflow is a really, you know, come into the home. And if you're not really working on a flexible storage infrastructure that can handle not only the speeds that a NAS device can provide for, you know, lower definition type of quality, but also
Speaker 0 31:39 Okay. Workflows, I think it puts you at an, at a disservice talk a little bit again, from this perspective of the modern technology architecture for media environments and, and say something along, you know, speaking to tears because you know, a lot of your guys' technologies inherently have this approach of let's assume that it's not just one big blur of, of, of storage, but that we have this approach where we're using in concert, multiple tiers of different types of storage technologies to achieve different objectives with these media pieces files as they go throughout their life cycle, life cycle. Um, you know, how, how, how do you guys see that range of offerings that you guys have is fitting into that technology landscape that's compatible with these challenges of today?
Speaker 3 32:27 Yeah, not, not all content is created equal. I mean, for a period of time, if you look at the store, the life cycle of your content early on in the cycle, you may actually need something like an SSD technology for very high performance or even a fiber channel type of discovery of technology. Once the project is done, the ability to actually not store that equally, but maybe at ages, maybe you have a policy that says, you know, and no longer necessarily need this on high performance storage. It's great to be able to put in the hands of your users to be able to, or, or your administrators to be able to say, okay, if nobody's touched this content for 30 days, 60 days, move it to a cheaper storage. Uh, but still you want the ability, like you mentioned before to be able to access that quickly.
Speaker 3 33:07 So you don't want to take away from your editors, the ability to actually see that content and pull that content back. So a lot of the work we've done is actually integrating with vendors like levels beyond and be able to provide the API is to be able to pull that content back as part of your content search capabilities, workflows like the UFC, where they basically have a centralized archive and the ability to actually search for pieces that content based on time codes handed off to the editor saying, when is Aries just the segment of that rapid and say quick time or MXF and hand that to the editor to get access to that quickly. So the ability to actually do that from a centralized archive, but also in a way that's actually decreasing the cost of storing longterm content long tail content is pretty critical. Scott you've again, been with some large media organizations throughout the HD transition as a lot of these more file-based it oriented workflows are evolving. Did you see any stumbles along the way choices people made about their technology environments, either that were legacy or they were kind of stabs at what they thought a modern architecture ought to look like?
Speaker 2 34:11 I think they're still making mistakes. I don't think it's just, you know, back when HD was transitioning, I think that they, they struggle with digitizing content. You talked about that earlier. They struggle with how to make it accessible easily. I think, you know, storage solutions like yours, you know, improve that. I think that, um, but going back to something that they were talking about earlier, all these different file types are eventually just digital content and being able to manage it, you know, across that, bring it all together as the most important thing. And no one's really pulled that together. And that's partly because the application layer isn't there yet. So while you can do it on an orchestration layer, the, um, the purpose built application for tying the video to the article, to that, whatever it is, that all these things in the workflow, the specific workflows for each industry, with each segment within each industry, you know, it's very complex.
Speaker 2 35:06 And so even within a single media company, they have different ways of doing it internationally versus the U S which is always a disaster. And then they, they have segmented content. They ended up buying content from different producers of the same content from different producers, things like that. So being able to manage all that from end to end is, is critical. And I think that, you know, the struggle that media companies have or any industry has is, is that these are big monolithic problems, and you have to be able to break it down into bite sized chunks. So whether it's you have a one, you know, a hundred different repositories, they have to layer an orchestra illustration layer on top of, and then be able to build a workflow specific to the way they're trying to access and use that content. I mean, that's a big project and it's one that will be around for a long time
Speaker 0 35:54 Things. I, you know, I see things going in a slightly positive direction, for instance, you know, these guys and some of other ma'am vendors or whatever, you know, for instance, Adobe has created this technology within premier pro, which allows for you to kind of have a panel, which is your gateway into this whole other platform through the editing app. Right? And so you can now start to get the power of that rich backend system to the point at which an editor is just having to do the rough manipulation of that content before it gets distributed and have a way of pulling content out of it, publishing back into it, that round tripping. So, you know, but that's very new it's as you said, it's very nascent that that level of integration throughout, you know, all aspects of this workflow from production to post to distribution to archive is actually really starting to get tied together.
Speaker 2 36:46 Well, think about the media companies are trying to evolve that are like the old school ones, like Ganette, the post Tribune Hurst, things like that. As they're trying to look at this, or there's a specific workflow that they have for creating their magazine content for creating the newspaper content for doing things with their local stations, you know, or broadcast television. And they're tied into, you know, these other media companies, there's such a specific workflow for hitting images for a magazine versus handling images for a newspaper that they literally have different systems to do that. And so they can't even share content. So being able to break down those barriers is key. And I think that it's very difficult process though, and it's very big and, and the metadata management and everything else around that is, is such a, uh, astronomical number that it scares people to death.
Speaker 1 37:38 Yeah, I think, you know, from our perspective, this is why one of the biggest points that we've really been focused on with our software is the flexibility, because we know that we can't just go out and deploy, you know, here's the 10 workflows of how you work with content and it's just going to work for everyone. The reality is we can say maybe here's 10 workflows to get started with in this vertical. And here's another 10 for this vertical and here's another 10 for this vertical. And then on top of that, we're always going to anticipate that you're going to have some custom workflows that are going to be built through this engine. And we can give you the tools to make that as easy as possible so that you're not going out just writing one off scripts, writing code and doing all those kinds of things.
Speaker 1 38:21 I mean, some of the other previous systems that I've worked with in the past, at least, you know, they have the ability to go out and call some external script. And so people have people, they hire them. You have people writing these little scripts that are doing these one off little pieces. And unfortunately it's just something that's not very scalable. You lose visibility. You're not sure what's happening anymore. And there were a lot of problems that were inherent to that. And so by building a workflow engine where we're, we give you visibility into every step of that process. So from a management layer, you're able to see, Oh, when I communicated to the transcoder in this piece, I got back this specific era of this kind of transcoder on this kind of media. I know exactly what's wrong. I can go in and tweak that.
Speaker 1 39:02 And now it'll never happen again. I can put logic into that workflow to say, Hey, if you come across this kind of media, next time go here. Instead of this place, go use a different transcoder. And I think it's that, um, having that ability to implement that logic into the workflows and then have the ability to separate all my image processing workflows from my media processing workflows and all my image, content and content for my graphics departments completely separate from my video departments. So that when a person logs in as a graphics user, they're not even seeing anyone else's content, they're not even seeing anyone else's workflows. They literally can only see the stuff that's contextual to them and their department and what they're trying to do and what they're allowed to do with that content. And what we're finding is giving that kind of contextual limitations for different user groups has been a huge piece and being able to simplify this process and get the tools out there that people need across the board.
Speaker 1 40:02 When I had actually worked previously with a lot of other systems, when I first saw the depth and breadth of what is possible through the region engine platform, it's one of the things that's a key differentiator in my opinion of a lot of the platforms out there. So we have a really strong rest API that you can be able to access all the different elements because we're a web application on the front end. We're actually using our own API is to be able to communicate back to our source application. There's no client software to be installed on any of the systems everything's happening through a web interface. So that's the first layer of the API. And then the second layer is these workflows. I'm talking about whenever we're talking about building a workflow, all of these workflows are built within a very simple workflow system.
Speaker 1 40:47 That's a written in XML and it contains basically workflow steps that have logical transitions from step to step. Those are the two primary API APIs. And through that, you can literally do almost anything you can think of, um, because there's all different kinds of steps and the new steps are constantly coming. And, um, the key place you go is within the application itself in the admin section, you can actually go through and see over 25 workflows that come built into the system, including how we do all of our default imports and exports and all of our default media management kind of within the system. It's all there in viewable. So the administrators can actually go in and just export something. So you could literally just export our ingest process, export our export processes and see exactly how that was built. So we give
Speaker 0 41:34 You a roadmap to be able to design this stuff yourself. So none of what we're talking about here from the technology infrastructure infrastructure perspective, whether it's the hardware, the storage systems, the archive systems, the very rich video operating systems software, that's driving it all. You know, none of this stuff is, is free. I might argue and remind some people that it's actually a pretty good darn deal compared to like buying an HD cam sr decks, which you don't have to do anymore. So you should buy more Sans from us. Darn it. But, but, but it's still not free. It comes with a cost. And I think a big part of that cost that people struggle with in, in, in media organizations or any organization embracing media is the cost of learning to do things a new way, both at an individual level, but an organizational level.
Speaker 0 42:26 I mean, it's a new way of thinking if you will have been dealing with file systems and hard drive icons and folder structures, and maybe trying to wrangle some file naming conventions out of your creative staff, you know, okay. Taking that and then saying like, no, no, no, no. Now we want to abstract that all away. We want you to use this web browser user interface to interact with a proxy of your media and everything's metadata driven now. And it doesn't really matter from your perspective which directory it's in anymore. If you're like, Ugh, you know, there's, there's a lot of change management issues within a media organization that go along with that. So what is the value prop then? I mean, if people are having to make both, you know, capex expenditures, there's, uh, there's going to be OPEX to keep software under maintenance, have the right staff who comes from this it background versus more of the traditional broadcast engineer background, and then the costs associated with getting people to use it in a way that it's actually empowering, you know, well, what is the value prop? What what's the, the end game? What are some examples that you guys have run into a folks were making that investment both in time, energy and money has paid off and allowed them to do something new.
Speaker 2 43:37 It becomes a little bit of a chicken and egg because it's hard to quantify that because a lot of the workflow stuff is, is, you know, I was having this conversation earlier that, um, you know, trying to say how long it takes for people to search for stuff and, you know, calculate by hourly rates and all that stuff. It's very hard to quantify. It's hard to get at. If you make it easier to use the content, you know, can you take advantage of market changes quicker? You know, is there opportunity costs and revenue and things like that. It's very hard to quantify. So you really have to look at an end to end process of saying, this is what it's worth. And you definitely end up in a chicken and egg because the business is just worried about doing the business and they don't come up with new ideas until you enable them to see these things. So once you start putting some of these things in place and they're like, Oh, you may not can do this. And then they come up with 10 new ideas on how they can leverage the content or how they can distributed faster or, you know, take advantage of things. But you really, you know, it's very hard to quantify. It's, uh, especially in the beginning to, to determine what the, what the value is.
Speaker 0 44:38 I think some people are kind of taking stabs at it, right. And just saying, well, let's see if we can calculate an ROI for making this investment. And, you know, it takes some educated guesses. Will you guys, as you have probably encountered yourself, I certainly know I've run into it once or twice trying to sell people on the value prop of a well thought out system of both high availability, storage, disaster recovery, backup, a fully well-executed multi-tiered archive. That that is the proper way of engineering and archive. And as I like to remind people, archive is really a process more than a tech decision you make and implement at a given moment in time, it's choosing to do an archive system. The system is this thing that will always be evolving for forever because the tech is always going to be evolving. So archive is really an ongoing commitment to always be evolving, how you deal with media files, et cetera, over their life. But how do you guys find people are responding to this? You know, I have to make an investment in doing this the right way. You know, sometimes people have to learn through catastrophe,
Speaker 2 45:47 But that's every wave of technology, right? I mean, you have to do it. It's always a bit of a leap of faith when you're talking about, I, you know, when I was at discovery channel, the president of new media came in and said, Hey, we got this new tool, check it out and see if we can ever use it. And it was the video iPod. And everybody was like, Oh, you know, but we didn't know how we're going to use it. Uh, but you know, it's a way to get the things out there. Every time you're looking at changes in technology, it's always a leap of faith because you can't quantify ROI until you're looking at
Speaker 0 46:13 Some random guy. I met once, you know, halfway intelligent fellow came up with an interesting idea called COI instead of return on investment. It was cost of inaction. And he's actually in here right now. It's Chris from, ABPs kind of put this idea in my mind about, um, you know, a good way of looking at it. What's the cost of not doing things the right way. This media is valuable. There's a man hours involved with the production of it in the first place. So that has a hard tangible cost associated with it. Yes. Okay. You're going to have to make some guesses about future revenue, generation possibilities, but if you design something wrong from a storage perspective, how much is it going to cost you when that blips out of existence? So you don't have the recall with the, you know, the instantaneousness that you need.
Speaker 0 46:59 So maybe you can take us through we'll just from the storage and archive perspective in the workflows of change. I mean, you can't go back to film and you have your data protection copy on film, right? I mean, if everything's HD S allow you basically pulling in content, you're ingesting it quickly and you want to save that content and cameras are always running. So it's cheap to obtain content, but how do you protect that data? How do you actually re preserve that data for a long periods of time? So even in other industries, we do a lot of work in the genomics industry and that space there, they have, these sequencers are generating like two terabytes
Speaker 3 47:30 Of content. They don't, the scientists don't know if they're ever going to reuse that content. So do they, do they save it anyway and then wish they'll ever be able to get, get access to that. So a lot of people are airing on the, on the side of, let's just kind of save everything and then find out ways to manipulate that later. I mean, that's where a product like reach engine can help being able to access that content, categorize that content, capture the metadata for that content and be able to, are you guys finding, I know we do, certainly, you know, that may be people approach it in phases, you know? Okay. Maybe we've been literally operating off of FireWire hard drives. Now it's time to look at a robust work group, enterprise storage environment. Yeah. And we know we got to think about archive and the longevity of this stuff, but we're going to, you know, is that sometimes, I mean, most I'd say 60% of our customers just implement the fast file system for workflows and having a flexibility, flexible lockup architecture.
Speaker 3 48:22 So you can actually have your X and connected into a single environment. Your windows Linux box is kind of connected to this single environment. And then the other 40% will actually add archive later. So getting the infrastructure right first is a key start. And then actually deciding on what technology to use to archive. The thing about quantum is we allow you a lot of choices in what you choose. So on the archive layer, you can archive to disk, you can archive to tape, you can archive to a new object storage, what we call forever disk archive. So we have a lot of different choices. So it gives you the flexibility to kind of decide, you know, I'll start with this and then I'll add something later. Is there something different that you guys see when you, when you go in into a media environment that has a massive amount of media data, and they're adamant about archive, like the think of an example of an organization that you guys have your tech in that is just very oriented around the archive thing and are just doing it in a way that you would describe as like the right way to do it, right.
Speaker 3 49:24 What's fueling that with that type of an organization. What are they seeing as the ROI on having made that investment? I think scalability is a really key key piece. I mean, when we talk to the people like Turner and others like that, they want to be able to not only scale in the amount of content they're ingesting, but how quickly you can retrieve that content. So they, you know, there are some customers are as that'll be running four or five different servers, just pulling content back from their archive constantly to F to be able to propagate that to a news Bureau search or something like that. So the ability to actually create archives where even if you're using something like tape making it part of your active archive. So I think that the, the, uh, scalability both in the, the size that they can grow to and how quickly they can actually pull their content back, are people looking at tape from perspectives of, you know, power cooling, relative dispatch, it's really a cost type of play. I mean, nobody likes the latency of tape and a lot of people would want to get rid of it, but it still is the best cost effective solution out there for you. And it gives you the ability to actually evolve tape. If you really do want to just put something
Speaker 0 50:28 On the shelf, and if you ever do need to retrieve it, make a query, get an operator alert saying, Hey, this T this content is actually sitting on the shelf in such and such iron mountain and be able to pull it back. It's basically the cost of an LTO. It's easy to geo isolate it. You can send an LTO tape out in a truck or put it in someone's pocket or their man purse. If they have one, which I do, um, you know, pretty easily, right? So, you know, it gives you that level of flexibility as well, that a lot of these other mediums don't, who knows by the end of the decade, when we're all sitting at home on our gigabit internet connections, you know, maybe that'll change the equation a little bit. Jason, what do you see as driving some of your client's willingness to invest in the scalable centralized, you know, media, software, technology, architecture, you guys speak to your relationship with UFC a lot. I, under the impression they use it a bit as almost a licensing portal for a lot of their content with their content partners. Maybe you can speak to how, yeah. This class of software shirt meets some useful needs, as far as your internal efficiencies go. But like, what are some other possibilities? What are, what, instead of looking at it as a pure cost center, how can these types of technologies maybe evolve into becoming new profit centers? Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1 51:41 No, totally in the UFC is a good example. I mean, one of the big things is really all about accessibility before they had a system in place. Everything lived on tapes and they had a massive tape vault and when someone needed something, basically they just hired UFC fanatics. So they'd say when, so, and so have that one kick and someone said, Oh yeah, I was on this show and they'd go pull a tape and search for it and find it and do something, which as you can imagine, isn't very scalable. So, you know, the big ROI for them was, and what they kind of really saw in the beginning was by getting all this content online, by getting everything tagged down to that in individual kick and punch, and every little point that happens within a fight, being able to have all of that information around that data and then having it all there in viewable, in a proxy format so that after a period of time, in their case, basically after any contents come onto the system, over a period of two months, everything gets pushed off to LTL.
Speaker 1 52:38 And then being able to have the ability when someone calls him and says, Hey, I need this fight. That was from two years ago, or I need footage all about these two fighters. And they've both been fighting for a number of years to be able to go in and quickly search for that content and pull it up and instantly have it ready and be able to send it out and have all those workflows in place meant. Number one, massive cost savings for them in a very real sense of being able to get prepared for shows a good quick example that they, uh, that they mentioned to me a little while ago was they were down in Brazil getting ready for a fight. And the night what they do is they fly down to Brazil and they take hard drives with them that they've already gone onto our system beforehand and searched for content, found all the stuff they wanted and took it with them for what they were going to cut for the jumbotrons they get there.
Speaker 1 53:25 And the night before they had to switch out one of the fighters. So now they don't have any content for this other fighter cause they had no idea that they were going to even even use them. So the old way was they would get on the phone to Vegas, have someone go into the library and search for all the content, make a couple of tapes and then fly that person on a private jet, down to Brazil to hand off the tapes as fast as possible, and then go in and capture them and then start editing. Well now they were instead able to just log into reach engine through a connection, get onto the fastest satellite internet connection or whatever. And in that connection they could find, go in and just search the repository, find stuff that might've been living on. LTO, find stuff that might've been living on high speed disc.
Speaker 1 54:05 It didn't really matter. Add a bunch of clips to a collection within reach engine and export. It all goes across high-speed transfer mechanisms, things like a sparer, Signient all arrived to their desktop within a couple hours. They had everything that they need it save them tremendous amounts of money, one or two of those trips. And you paid for your retention rate. Yeah. So needless to say, they were incredibly happy when they started to realize that. So, I mean, that's just one little example, but um, you know, it, it comes back to, it's all about having that accessibility, knowing that your entire historical library is at your fingertips and not just at your fingertips, but also at the fingertips of the people that you want to allow it to. Another good example for them specifically was they signed a deal with a Fox signing deal with Fox and Fox says, well, you know, we want to have the entire access to the whole historical library say, great, you'll have it.
Speaker 1 54:57 In two days, they sent him an email with a login that logins restricted only to the content that they're allowed to access the guys at Fox can instantly log in search through the entire historical content library find absolutely anything that they want and export content directly to the formats that they need and exactly the place that they need. So obviously kind of those, the whole analytics engine driving back to the UFC folks, Hey, these guys grabbed this content for this delivery channel that we're tying into our invoicing system, you know, well, so it's all tied into the licensing. So the number one, they only had access to search the stuff they were allowed to get their deal. From what I recall was something about specifically the title card fights. So they didn't have access to a lot of the non-Title card fight footage. So their login simply restricted them to only search the content that they had access to.
Speaker 1 55:42 So again, instead of having to go through an entire library and make a bunch of tapes and ship a bunch of content that then on the other side, Fox would have had to actually receive that and store it and organize it on their own, uh, to be able to, to manage all of that stuff. Instead, someone goes online, creates a new user forum, sets up the permissions of what they're allowed to access, sets up the information about what their cost is for anything that they use sends out an email for the person at Fox to be able to log in. They log in, they access everything they need. They export it to the formats they need. And it's a self service model. And that same kind of self service model again, is how they were able to expand their distribution because they're able to have that ability to say, okay, if you want to use our content and you want to license our content, here's the amount you're going to pay for our content.
Speaker 1 56:28 It's all attached to your user. You come into our system, you find what you want. You send it to the places you want. Certain users have the access and authority to be able to make those purchases and others don't. And they're just able to go in and self serve and find the content that they want. And that's the name of the game. Being able to do that self service model so that you can allow your clients and your partners to come in and search your repository instead of you having to constantly make stuff for them, enables you to fulfill their request quicker and to be able to fulfill more people's requests. So you can expand your reach out to as many different places as well.
Speaker 0 57:02 There's another scary, possible future shaping up, came up in conversation yesterday. Uh, when I was visiting Thomson Reuters about what possible new revenue generation models, a metadata driven media workflow technology allows for, you know, some of you may know, you know, Netflix pays an awful lot of attention to what people like. And, uh, you know, they have incredibly rich analytics as to what we're all watching on Netflix. So you've gotta be watching appropriate things. And there's this company that some of you may have heard of they've actually been around for a while. They do, uh, basically Saifai B movie type stuff. And I think they started off largely for producing content for these Saifai original B movie, you know, sharp verse killer Gator or whatever. But so Netflix has an arrangement with these guys and based on the analytics of what people are actually watching within certain scifi horror genres, they're now taking that metadata and dictating to this production company, what types of stuff they think the average or Netflix viewers of certain stripes are going to want.
Speaker 0 58:14 And so they're actually producing content around these metadata driven analytics. So a story hit a few days ago in the, in the media about one such thing that's on Netflix now that we can all watch called was it shark NATO, which is because people were really into sharks, as we all know from discovery, shark week among other things. And people love watching tornadoes rip stuff up. And they're like, okay, we think that because these queries are coming up, if we combine the sharks and tornadoes, this is going to be a hit. And of course the thing probably cost like $10 chocolate produce. And so, you know, who knows what the year of 2025 will bring when all of your stuff is tagged with metadata, maybe it'll be computer algorithms creating our reality TV content. Scott, take a look down the road. It's it's, it's past the flip side of the end of this decade, the business model stuff, you know, there were trials, there were tribulations, some major corporations imploded, some little guys, you know, college humor.com is now rivaling comedy central, you know, all of this great new reality, right? What do you think kind of the world of that type of media landscape looks like as far as how are people making money and how did these types of infrastructures that were really just starting to evolve tip back today? Now you led to that landscape. I mean, to a little
Speaker 2 59:39 Well visioning, you know, and that's, that's what everybody's wondering, right? It's somewhere between e-commerce and advertising and how it all ties together. That's why we brought you here to tell us exactly what's going to add. I'd be, I'd have a lot more money. If I, if I knew that answer, the, um, people are already doing that with a lot of video, right. You know, whether it's, uh, identifying objects and tying it to e-commerce, there's a great company that just launched called TouchCast. They've actually come up with a way to be able to, um, create, uh, HTML five and JavaScript apps inside video stream. So you can actually incorporate the eCommerce right into the stream itself. So it can be a, they have a broadcast version for sports center and, you know, the sports center that's coming out this fall, the guys are going to be interacting directly with being able to draw things and pull up Twitter feeds and be able to have everything live.
Speaker 2 00:32 And then when you watch it later, it'll actually still be pulling the live Twitter feed about whatever happened and things like that. So you can actually get really creative with business models. So I think it's evolving every day, but at the end of the day, it's about who's going to pay for the content who's going to pay for the items in the content who's going to pay for the advertising. That goes next to it. I mean, there's not, you know, that part of, it's not rocket science, it's just the nuances of how they're going to do that. And it's specialized. And it's amazing because you know, marketing companies are so geared towards that, that as you walk into stores, video is going to pop up on your thing, give you an advertisement, give you coupon and things like that already happening. Um, but it's going to evolve and it's going to become more interactive and it'll become hopefully less of, you know, in your face and more about things that you want to see and do. And that's where that's, where I'll get really immersed
Speaker 0 01:23 Noticed is that like, let's all look at reality TV, right? It's obviously a big thing. I think it's like the majority of content. One of the things that allowed for reality TV as a genre to exist, that I've noticed in working with a lot of companies who produce it is the shrinking of the video camera technology. So they can throw bunches of them into an environment. In the case of something like big brother, which was using the building for media, for production server to do a lot of the ingest for the original German version, it was these massive much lower price storage and ingest systems for multi streams of video. So in some ways, this changing media tech landscape enabled this, this genre to not only emerge, but kind of dominate. And yeah, it doesn't cost Jack to produce compared to like, you know, game of Thrones or whatever. And there'll always be a place for that, you know, highly produced content, but just this changing media tech landscape allowed for reality TV to kind of take over right now there's whole television channels completely devoted to it. It's the year 20, 20, right. 20, 25, whatever, you know, can you think of what might be like a kind of new form of media that people are consuming just based on what we kind of think some trends are about the landscape that you think,
Speaker 2 02:37 Well, it'll be different form factors that you're, that you're pulling it in, whether it's holograms or, you know, something through wearable tech, but the, uh, it's already starting to do that. Right. I, you know, you look at companies like Videolicious and montage and, and Magento and things like that. And you already have almost like a little mini editing tool suite at your disposal and these mobile devices. So I can shoot a couple of clips of, uh, you know, this room and tied all together and do all the production things that you would normally do in a studio and then post it. And it could be something you could start advertising against instantly. Whereas before that was weeks of planning, thousands and thousands of dollars to get it done a whole crew of people. And I mean, you're seeing that happen today. So it's really going to be more about the, um, how they're, how people are ingesting that content interacting with it. I like the idea of the holodeck or something like that, but we'll see.
Speaker 0 03:29 So I'm going to open it up just for a few minutes, for questions from the audience comments on any of the subjects directed at anyone, just ideas that you want to throw out. <inaudible>
Speaker 5 03:38 Jason, all you guys tagging <inaudible>.
Speaker 1 03:47 Yeah. So there's a number of different ways actually. So number one, first off, as far as what you can tag, you know, yes, you can tag a, put metadata tags on a video itself or on a piece of audio or an image or document whatever. But yes, you can also go into a video or into a piece of audio and be able to tag just a specific region. So you can create clips basically almost like sub clips within the video environment, right? So you can create these clips and then those clips can inherit metadata from the master video that it comes from, or they can have completely, um, their own unique metadata as well. And it's a big thing because, you know, in the old world kind of way of doing things, we'd use to actually capture things from tape once upon a time and, you know, capture individual segments, even because we didn't want to capture the whole thing and then go through.
Speaker 1 04:33 And by the time you did all that, no one wants to tag anything. It just gets to the editor and the editor does some tagging the NLD, maybe. Well, now what we're doing that it seems to be a lot more efficient. And a lot of our clients do is you can capture everything full as the video. So you don't even need an editorial system to do that anymore. You go through something like a pipeline box from Telestream, or, you know, a number of the other utilities out there, all your content comes in and now the tagging and the logging can happen on any computer anywhere within your organization or outside your organization. If people have secure access, anyone who has a browser can go in and create those clips can add all that metadata. So the cost of that workstation has now reduced to anything that can get online pretty much, and all those tags and all those clips then be transferred
Speaker 0 05:18 Automatically into the NLE, into the different workstations. As far as automatically tagging things, we integrate with things like phonetic indexing engines to be able to automatically create metadata. Timecode specific to when someone's speaking, breaking it into three word or five word chunks. So you can actually have clips created with all the stuff that's spoken. We integrate with things like being able to pull all of the embedded metadata out of something like a DPX image sequence or opening XR, or basic Photoshop images or TIF images, any of those things, when they come in, we can automatically extract all of that metadata and make it all visible. And then at the same time, when you send it out somewhere, reimbursed it all back in. So there's a tremendous amount of ways. And on top of that too, when you're dealing with something like images in the image world, everyone tends to work with kind of the standardized metadata fields that have been created.
Speaker 0 06:12 There has been a lot of standardization there, so we can automatically generate those as needed in the video world, not so much, right? There's some standard technical metadata fields, but as far as content is concerned, it's always a hundred percent custom because it's about you and your business in your contents. And so all those fields can be created very quickly and easily by your, your own local admins and tweaked and create your own different types of fields. And one of the things I'll say is that I think one of the very next of these symposiums that we do is going to be looking at some of the very interesting technologies that Chesapeake has come across, including visual recognition software from the guys that nerve here, sitting in the front. And if you're interested in that, pick their brains away afterwards, but you know, and how these search tools that go into the phonetic audio information, the visual information allow you to do very interesting types of searches and then kind of publish the results back as metadata into your media asset management system can work. So stay tuned. And I think that's going to be one of the next events we do. And mr. Listening,
Speaker 4 07:13 It seems that partial file restore is still a really challenging thing, not just with video, but across lots of different media players. You know, I'm curious like what, there are any thoughts, like I'm not even putting on necessarily what the determining factor to the partial file restore. It's a big need with clients.
Speaker 0 07:33 I'm going to reiterate the question just for the sake of the recording. So this was a question or a comment from a Chrysalis Anik from audio visual preservation solutions, a very bright bunch of folks who are very dedicated to studying the issues of how to create your archives manager, archives, metadata. I have to plug you guys
Speaker 4 07:51 Exactly what I say.
Speaker 0 07:53 So, so, and, and the question is about like, you know, moving beyond the file as the logical container of organization in some of these modern workflows, a good friend of mine, very smart software engineer type, you know, we were joking once I was telling him a little bit about the kind of these database driven approaches to managing the information. And he's like, Oh yeah, dude files are so nineties files are so nineties and, and, you know, biggest really the database and having a much, much more, I call it a multidimensional view of the information is obviously where many industries have already gone. And I think the video industry is kind of playing catch up to most other industries that have very database driven workflows already, whether it's customer relations, you know, shipping packages around the planet, you name it, databases have already proliferated those worlds. We're just catching up. But when you have information you want to glean that isn't directly analogous to a particular file sitting on a tape or a file system. It's a portion thereof. You'll how do technologies like partial file restore, you know, take that into account.
Speaker 1 09:04 So, yeah, so I, and, and I can address that, you know, that's actually something that UFC had a, was a massive use case for it, right? So, and their workflow, what they're doing is for every fight they're normally capturing approximately six hours of content across 22 cameras in one hour chunks. Uh, about two months later, all of that stuff's been moved off to LTO. And normally a couple of months after that is when those fighters have another fight and they need access to little pieces of all of that content. And the last thing they want to do is restore six hours of content across 22 tapes to go look at it, right? So of course, number one, being able to search across all of that stuff and its proxy format that stays alive on your sand or on your nest, you know, is one of the number one pieces, right?
Speaker 1 09:49 So you're always able to search for that content and view all of that content directly in the interface within reach engine. And then when you find the content that you want. So you find that one kick that you want, you're able to go in and you create a clip around that kick. And that clip is all purely metadata. There's no actual media being generated. Of course, when you create a clip within a timeline on our system, once you create that, now you can say, okay, I need to export that to this destination in this format. The best part of PFR is when you don't have to touch it or think about it PFR is a complicated system. And it's something that's normally driven in the background. So when we communicate with PFR our end users simply see I'm creating a clip for this file. Maybe it's online, maybe it's offline.
Speaker 1 10:35 I don't know. It doesn't matter to me. I'm just creating a clip and I'm going to send it to this destination in this format. And then when, as soon as I execute that command region engine automatically engages the PFR automatically cuts out just from that time code end point to that time code outpoint and only restores that piece through the store, next storage manager, API APIs, and being able to communicate directly through that, to pull back just that piece of information in LTO, and then convert just that bit of the video into the format that you want it to be in and deliver that out.
Speaker 3 11:12 You point out future technologies. And one thing we were careful about is when we, when we do move from say tape to say an object based storage technology, where you can actually store in theory, trillions of objects out in the ether sphere, it could be your own private cloud. It could eventually be kind of an Amazon style public cloud. We're not quite there yet, but the object storage piece of it we've paid particular close attention to actually making our API APIs that you use for that folks like, uh, levels beyond use for accessing our tape archives to also work for object storage. So even our PFR API as well. So when your media asset management content management application goes to pull that data back, you're actually getting it from say an object based archive versus say a tape-based archive quicker latency, because you're not dealing with the tape head spinning up, grabbing the content, but, but also gives you the scalability of, you know, growing into the petabyte range for your archive.
Speaker 3 12:06 So I'd like to thank all three of these guys for joining me today for this panel discussion. Uh, it's been a lot of fun. Interesting. And again, I hope to be able to kind of continue these chats and maybe three years from now, we'll be like, Oh man, were we wrong about that? So thank you very much, guys. Uh, we'll Scott and Jason, we're going to take about a five or so minute bio slash refueling break. And then when you guys come back, we're actually going to get more into some of the nuts and bolts of these technologies and show you some demos of how the storage platform works. Our reach engine works and, uh, hopefully enlighten you on a little bit. So thank you very much. And thanks again, guys for joining us.
Speaker 6 12:44 Okay.
This special episode of the The Workflow Show features a panel discussion from our afternoon-long symposium held on July 17 with partners Levels Beyond and Quantum. The event was held at the NYC offices of Quantum.
The topic of the gathering was, "Advanced Video Workflows for Today and Tomorrow." We deliberately set it to be a "think tank," with our audience populated by a select group of clients, prospects and consultants - all interested in learning more about MAM, workflow automation and storage / archive options.
The thrust of the opening panel conversation was to discuss, from a "30,000 foot view," the current state and future of advanced video workflows. Chesapeake's Director of Business Development Nick Gold moderated the panel which included Jason Perr, Solution Architecture, Levels Beyond; Scott Morris, Digital Content Consultant / Founder, Greatest Top; and Will McGrath, Strategic Marketing and Technology Partnerships, Quantum.
We believe you will find the discussion to be most insightful and beneficial.
(l-r) Scott Morris, Nick Gold, Jason Perr, Will McGrath
Remember that you can always listen to episodes of The Workflow Show in iTunes.
Show length: 1:12:50
Show Notes:
Digital Rapids
UFC
TouchCast
Videolicious
Montage
Majisto
Telestream (Pipeline, Vantage)
NerVve Technologies
Want to discuss your video workflow challenges with us? Email our ProSales team or call us at 410.752.3406.
