Speaker 0 00:01 Welcome to the workflow show. I'm Nichold, I'm here with my cohost Jason Whetstone. Hey everyone. And this is episode three Oh two, we'll just call it media silo media silo. And we have a special guest with us as has been the trend as of late. We've got the, what is it, Chi cradle founder, CEO genius behind media silo. Yeah. Founder, CEO. Yep. That about sums it up. Well, media silo is a company, a technology that we've had involvement with for a good number of years now. Um, full disclosure, we are a partner and reseller and integrator of slash with media silo. Uh, but of course we only feature people on our show that we like and we like their technology. We think it's a good fit. Jason, this is one that you've had some very deep dealings, lots of experience with over the years. Um, actually, uh, it all started back in the days of final cut server.
Speaker 0 01:00 Actually media asset management. The company I was working for was looking for a way to uh, show some of their tier one clients. Um, what kind of of footage we had, uh, in store for them. Uh, what we were sort of managing for them. And, uh, we considered building our own front end, our own web based front end for that. And, uh, one of our developers said, well, why don't you check this out? And he showed us media silo and that's, that's where it all started for me. So let's do it this way. Let's, let's let Chi for the sake of our listeners, tell us a bit more about media silo. I'd love to hear, uh, not only kind of the, the summation of, of what various kind of cloud-based, you know, media review, approval sharing many ma'am type tools you guys have, but a bit about the company itself, how you guys came together, the founding process, your own background and kind of the angle that you come to the video and media space from. Sure, absolutely.
Speaker 1 01:57 I missed those files. Get server days, Jason, that that brings me back and reminds me that we've been, uh, that we've been doing this for a number of years. So, yeah. So, so media silo is, is really a, uh, lightweight, um, media asset management and collaboration solution that's cloud based. And we kind of, uh, we developed it out of the need to have a tool for ourselves in a former life. Um, uh, I was part of a production company. We were doing commercial production and, um, at the time there really weren't any tools that worked great with video. And we got to a point where we did a casting session for a big national bank for commercial. And you know, it just took four weeks to get their approval on which talent did move forward with. And it was all because of technology essentially. So we decided let's just write something and build something better.
Speaker 1 02:44 And, and that was kind of the Genesis of media silo. I mean, had you done coding before you've been involved with software development projects or was this just like a bright idea that, you know, turned out to be a lot more work than you? Well, to be honest, my heart has always been sort of split between, you know, video and, and, uh, engineering and software. So in a former life, uh, um, I had started a software as a service company that ended up in the hands of one of the biggest, um, media and entertainment companies, uh, at Viacom. So my background and my heart is kind of with software development and I, and I really enjoy solving problems from a, from a technological perspective. So, um, I'm not really a coder by trade, but I'm dangerous enough to make things happen as many of us are.
Speaker 1 03:32 And over the years, uh, that's just sort of turned into a love for developing web based application to solve problems and workflow problems specifically. So you built this thing and I mean, tell us about the trajectory, cause this was how many years ago, again, this was in 2009 that we really started with media silos. So five, yeah, a little over five years ago now, which is like ancient history in the world of like media technology, right? Yeah, that's right. Wow. It has been a while that doesn't have, certainly hasn't felt that long. Yeah. Well, we just, we just started out building a small tool set that we would, uh, you know, that we gave to, to friends and other producers and said, Hey, you know, try this out. And we had an open registration at some point and, and, uh, overnight got registrations from New Zealand and the UK and all over the place.
Speaker 1 04:22 And we didn't really take the tool too seriously and we're just sort of delighted that somebody was giving us feedback on it. But there was a turning point when we realized, wow, this may be, you know, a much more interesting sort of endeavor for us at this juncture as we were picking up steam. And so in 2009, we released the first version of it, which was back then based on flash and flex technology. And, uh, it was, it was, you know, back then it was rare to have entire applications run in the browser stack. So, uh, we were, we were kind of at the forefront of that. And then the tools really evolved. We're now in the fourth generation of the product. We're kind of getting into the fifth generation. And, uh, it's exciting what has happened over the last few years, you know, in our space.
Speaker 1 05:05 But, uh, but also with regards to what we now can do with, with browser technologies and what's, what place the cloud is taking in this. So, so let's not make any assumptions here about, you know, terminology and things. This thing was born in the cloud, if you will, like a care bear I suppose. Um, unicorn somewhere up there in the clouds. Um, what does that mean? I mean, what exact technology platform is media silo based on? How is it a cloud based application, both in terms of storage and the application layer, you know, break it down for our clients so they understand where this thing fits in their overall infrastructure relative to local production storage and on premise media, asset management and workflow automation and trans coding systems. This thing's like somewhere else. So maybe you
Speaker 2 05:57 Can kind of get a little more specific about that.
Speaker 1 06:01 Yeah. So the, the, the kind of, the exciting thing about any cloud based service I think is that it's sort of turnkey and it's provisioned immediately and there's no software to install. There's no servers to configure. And, and, and that's, that's really the, the main problem is you can get started with a cloud service without really having to do a whole lot or have a lot of technical expertise. And certainly, you know, for review and approval, we all know that creative pros kind of like the, you know, take the path with the least amount of friction. It's five o'clock. You want to get something out the door, you don't, you don't want to deal with help desk internally because you can't transfer a file to a server. You just want a tool that works. And that's where, that's where cloud services really come in handy.
Speaker 1 06:44 And, uh, over the last few years, you know, there's, there's probably, and anyone can probably name five or six cloud services that they're using, but in 2009, you know, we still pretty much lived in a world where a lot of software was installed. You know, final cut server that Jason just mentioned was an installed product. It was on prem. And so we found ourselves as kind of an anomaly in a wide field of, um, of, you know, sort of traditional software, uh, installed behind four walls type of scenario. But what that meant for us was that, you know, we were one of the first users of Amazon as three and they actually wrote up a case study about us. And, uh, we, we started the company just at the right time because we were projecting our storage needs. And that was really difficult. But very quickly we realized that we would need a lot of storage.
Speaker 1 07:33 So we had either the choice of building internally, doing a co-location type scenario where we put our servers in a data center and the storage and the data center. But then we happened on this, this Amazon S three service. And back then they didn't, they didn't have anything but as three. That was the only service. There was no <inaudible>, there was no glaciers, there was none of that. Um, and so we started using it. And for a startup it was excellent because we had very low cost we could scale, um, with, with increased demand and it helped us really, you know, get, get our feet on the ground and, and get the product off the ground.
Speaker 2 08:10 Great. So let's take it through, you know, again for folks who may or may not be familiar with media silo and we obviously encourage them to check out your guys' website because it's fantastic. It's very easy to kind of take a look at some of the demos and read some of them. There's a, there's a free offering there that allows you to kind of sign up, check it out, right. How it works. Another benefit of being in the cloud is that you can like, you know, press a button and you know, give them a trial, right? But why don't you take them through kind of where you see the product fitting, what workflow needs does it address? Obviously there's this storage component and it's cloud based off premise storage using Amazon servers. You know, paint the picture for our listeners if you will, Kai, about where media fits in its
Speaker 1 08:56 Core tool set and you know, just where you've seen some particular successes with it for different types of clients. So in terms of the most common use cases, media silo is review and approval and a media management application. So media and media review and approval is kind of at the core of the product. That's how we started out. And today we were kind of a media management system in disguise of collaboration. And what that means is that on on a, on a day to day basis, user may upload files to media silo to share with another group for review and approval, get comments, export those to their, to their, you know, editor and sort of rinse and repeat that cycle. But, but really what, what ends up happening in almost all cases is that as you do that, as you upload review cuts, you realize that you're really building a library of different versions.
Speaker 1 09:51 But you're also building a library of B roll and you're beginning to really start to think of this more as an asset management system. And that's typically how we evolve. So in the door media silo is, is a collaboration and review and approval tool, uh, with mobile apps, with a desktop app, with a browser app. And uh, the longer a production company uses as the more they realize, Hey, this is actually maybe our path to an asset management system. And so as such, you know, that the, the much bigger picture for us is to play a role in what we call democratizing the media, which is making media more visible in the organization and giving more people, more stakeholders ready access to the media, both inside your walls and obviously outside it's as equally accessible to anyone who has an internet connection. Right. And as long as what basically port 80, 80 is open and they can view webpages, they can, they're pretty much good to go.
Speaker 1 10:49 Right? That's right. Yeah. That's another advantage of just this cloud based mindset is that it's all web accessible. Right. So I would say that that, you know, a few years ago when we started, we certainly felt like we were educating the market to an extent because there was a backlash against the cloud and people didn't really know, you know, can we trust this or not? If it's not behind our firewall, is this even safe? And I think this is not to our credit, but just to the industry in general, there's a shift in mindset to where media and the cloud doesn't net doesn't necessarily mean that it's not secure. There's, there's ways to lock things down, there's ways to secure things and once you've come to terms with that, then the cloud really frees you from all the perils of, you know, sort of maintaining an infrastructure yourself, managing ports and servers and all this stuff.
Speaker 1 11:36 Certainly is is like chief among those. And I know a lot of our clients that use services like Vimeo or YouTube, they may have some protections in place. I'm going to ask you Kai too. Can you kind of compare and contrast how media silo works as opposed to something like Vimeo? YouTube, like, you know what, what you're saying. I mean it sounds like I could probably just use like a YouTube account to do that. Yeah, absolutely. So I mean if you look at, you know, Vimeo is primarily a distribution platform, right? It, they do have, they do have tools for uploading your own videos and protecting them. But if you look at the core business of how Vimeo makes their money, it's a distribution channel. So, and we see that across the board. YouTube is a distribution channel. It's not really meant to be a tool set for content creators.
Speaker 1 12:22 It's, it's a certain breed of content creator that you know, distributes directly. But, uh, we're, we're media silos sets itself apart. It's that it's a collection of tools that's really geared towards the video pro. Uh, we understand the workflows that, that make video work and we understand the supply chain of video from when it comes off the camera, when it goes into your logger, to your NLE, to, you know, the cloud for review and approval. So that really, that's really what separates it. You know, on the, on the surface if you looking for just review and approval two worlds, you know, you're, you're gonna find that you have a lot of options out there. But as far as taking it to the next step and really fitting into the day to day workflow of somebody who produces a lot of content and does it professionally, that's, that's, that's our niche.
Speaker 1 13:08 That's how we financed. And you guys have great user management tools and notification tools and you know, all kinds of things that really speak to that. I would say metadata keyword tagging, the ability to import rich metadata through your guys' extensive API APIs. So if you are exporting something and publishing from an on premise, ma'am intermediate silo, this is something that you've been working on lately, Jason, you can kind of spit some of the metadata through to you guys so they can become search parameters, obviously time code based annotations and kind of sub clipping capabilities so people can, you know, not just type a little response for the piece as a whole, but can, you know, have marker and sub clip level annotations to, you know, speak collaboratively with other people on their team about, Hey, this little portion right here needs such and such and this little portion right here needs such and such.
Speaker 1 13:58 And Oh, I like this and know this stinks. And you know, you guys even have like transcription services that are outsourceable through the platform, correct? Yeah, we have a services, yeah. Services integration and transcripts is one of them. And that's, that's what's really exciting about cloud based technologies. I think that we're seeing this, um, this, you know, new push towards API APIs. I was listening to your, your metadata podcast with uh, Nick and, and I think one of the takeaways was that every, every one of your panelists there was talking about API APIs and that's what we can bring to the table. And in terms of a cloud based platform, we can tap into these different APIs and we could bring the services together so that you as a user don't have to go to transcription, you know, to, to transcription vendor and go to an encoding mender and go to media management vendor but find all that under one umbrella.
Speaker 2 14:53 Yeah. And from a developer standpoint, you know, media silos API is very straightforward. You know, it's a rest API, very easy to use, very well documented. So that's great. So tell us about some of the different types of clients who are using media silo and and again, what the workflow looks like for them.
Speaker 1 15:12 So clients really range from small to medium sized production companies all the way to the big five. So we support anything from, you know, a single user to 5,000 users. Surprisingly though the workflows are pretty similar across the board. So just because we're supporting a bigger company and a bigger footprint, it doesn't necessarily change what people do with the platform. At the core. It is an easy way to upload your video, play it back, share it with people aggregated online and Richard with metadata. Um, but there's, there's definitely some, some workflows that stand out that only a cloud platform can really provide. Uh, an example is we're working with a client that is in the middle of a huge digitization project and they're digitizing a quarter million hours of content and they have no idea how to properly capture metadata, which is, you know, a whole series of sessions in of itself.
Speaker 1 16:10 I know you guys, we've talked about this in the past, but so what, what, uh, what media Sila is doing, it's essentially a platform that allows them to outsource the logging to a group of loggers that are anywhere, right? So instead of outsourcing the whole project, they can now manage their own team of loggers. They have 20 or 30 loggers. They have a web based platform where these loggers can log in at all hours of the day. They're not managing people in a central location where they clock in and clock out, but they're using this a, the power of a distributed platform to, to work together to get a lot of footage logged. Uh, so that's, that's, that's one of the more exciting projects, um, on a large scale, but really on any scale, it's, it's all about managing media, managing metadata, making it accessible.
Speaker 1 16:57 And building on top of that, um, what we're seeing a lot is, uh, an uptake in our API to build things like stock footage, store storefronts. I had a conversation with a production company here in Boston where they, uh, they created documentary for CBS about the red Sox and they, they shot, uh, 90 hours of footage and the finished piece that they, that they licensed is an hour and a half, which leaves them with a ton of footage. And as you know, there's a lot of avid red Sox fans. So they were looking for a way to monetize that content and they said, Hey, why, why can't we just set up a, a storefront? And, um, so we see our platform used for that, for that purpose as well.
Speaker 2 17:36 That's interesting. Very nice. Let's talk about what the model is that people have for subscribing to media silo. Cause again, it's not something you buy, it's something you subscribe to. So what does that look like for, you know, an organization? What are the metrics that they get charged based on?
Speaker 1 17:54 So it's primarily around the number of users. There's two options. We're media silo is storage agnostic. So if you want to bring your own Amazon account, you can, you can do that. In that case, you control control storage and you control bandwidth. Um, and you also pay the, the, you know, the retail Amazon prices or we have a turnkey service and it's primarily praised around the number of users. But I think what's interesting is that that, especially with small to medium sized production companies, we see that there's a real interest in reselling this as a, as a service to their clients. So we, we work with, um, companies that are not traditionally video producers but that have thousands of hours of product testimonial videos or, or product training videos and uh, the production companies that are generating that content and are in a vendor relationship with those clients. They use media silo as a media management system to that origin to that company. So that all of a sudden there's transparency, there's a turnkey cloud platform and now there's visibility into the assets that are available. Do you guys want
Speaker 2 19:00 Kind of white labeling and people to skin the media silo experience? So it's kind of branded around their own entities branding and things like that.
Speaker 1 19:07 There there's, there's customization. There's, there's no white labeling. Um, we did that initially, but we really found that it's actually an asset to accompany to, to know that media silo is behind this because you have a support number to call. You know, you have a chat window that you can log on. So if the end user has a question, it's not the production company that has to answer the question, but it's actually us that, that picks up the phone. Got it. Got it. So is there a difference?
Speaker 2 19:35 Yeah, I think there is. I would submit there is in many ways, but it'd be interesting to hear your response. What is the difference between a ma'am and a workflow automation platform of the sort that people might have on premise in the form of reach engine or cat DV or Emam or you know, even something like advantage or you know, can't demo what have you and what you guys are offering in the cloud, you know, through media silo. Can you compare and contrast and talk a little bit and then we'll probably steer in this direction and talk a little bit about, you know, do these things kind of interface with one another. Do they solve different problems and yet they can kind of be joined as one?
Speaker 1 20:16 Yeah, that's, wow. There's a lot in that question. Yes. I like packing things. Yes. It's like a facet of answers. Um, so I think, I think, um, workflow is obviously very subjective and it's, it, it's very, it can be very complex at the beginning of every workflow is visibility and having a central place from which things can take place. Maybe, maybe the best way to illustrate how we look at workflow is by just kind of explaining how we would integrate with custom, you know, custom workflow, how you could create your own custom workflow. We're very web centric, so the team here, we're, we're 22 people, we have 10 engineers and we're all really avid web developers. We, we look at what's around us and we look at what the web in general is doing when it comes to workflow optimization. So there's services you may have heard of like if this then that or Zapier.
Speaker 1 21:15 Yup. Does that ring a bell at all? Yep. So they have nothing to do with workflow, right. For, for traditional post production use cases. But what they're doing is they're, it's, it's sort of the parallel in other, in other industries, if you, if you want to automatically send a tweet when there's a new file in your Dropbox, then Zapier can do that or this and that can do that. And um, and so this is a really interesting breed of product that we're looking at. So the way we're looking at, um, extending our media management platform is through what's called web hooks. And so when an action is performed in media silo, let's say somebody edits a tag of an asset, then it sends a web hook to a service like Zapier and Zapier then can interpret that and say, Oh, there was an asset update event, which means that I should probably feed that back into my, you know, main asset management application, or I should send a notification to somebody like that.
Speaker 1 22:09 So we're looking at workflow from the perspective of how can we be a piece of the bigger puzzle and integrate with, with services that are starting to revolutionize workflows in areas, not just within post-production. So we're a little bit less specific in terms of triggering a sequence of events directly within media silo and letting you script that though you could certainly do that with the API, but we're, we're steering our customers a little bit more in the direction of what, what is, what is the web doing in general and what opportunities exist with ready-made tools that are not going to cost a ton and that can be customized easily. Gotcha. Now you also have a lot of clients I believe, who are integrating media silo with on premise management systems. Correct. That's our, our most common use case. So I've actually done three of those three different memes.
Speaker 1 23:02 You should talk about this. No, but this is a really good point because the existing ma'ams are either in place for a long time and there's a high cost in switching those. Uh, we're, we're certainly not trying to replace a traditional dam system that's, that's not our place. Um, there's a lot of complexity in building something like final cut server or a North Plains. But I think what we do a lot of is be the transparent layer to that media and be the flexible layer that can be, you know, the sort of consumer friendly and that goes, goes back to democratizing media. So you have media in different locations. Let's say you're a company that has three offices and you're storing media in those three locations. You're trying to paint a picture, you know, have it have a single place to go when you're searching your, your media. And uh, that's hard to do for most asset management platforms. So, you know, we work with cat TV a lot and uh, that's certainly use case that comes up a lot there. You've got different cat TV catalogs or, or installs in different locations. There's no easy way to then bridge that and create one simple, you know, search query that retrieves assets across the board. So that's, that's a use case we support quite frequently.
Speaker 0 24:13 Yeah, that's one, that's one of the things that I love about media silo is, is the flexibility. I mean at the very basic level, you know, to get media to media silo, you pretty much upload it to a virtual FTP server, which is, that's, that's the, I mean that's the most basic level of integration, but then you can extend that with the API to doing, you know, metadata trans, you know, transfers and um, you know, queries and all kinds of different things. So that's, you know, one of the things I love about it, Jason, you mentioned earlier that one of the projects you did had to do with exposing media to clients of the organization that you did the, the integration between the on premise, ma'am. And I think that it started as a funnel cut server and then you ended up kind of redoing the media silo integration around cat DV.
Speaker 0 24:58 Once final cut server died and they had moved over to that. And so it was a way of, again, on the cloud without preventing, you know, presenting any barriers or impediments to the clients, give them a site that they can go into from any computer to review stuff that the company was working on for them. Absolutely. Was the other use case. I know what it is. It was different. And that's a different kind of use of media silo in some ways. Maybe talking about as opposed to the review and approve. Yes. The more recent one without mentioning maybe the client by name, but, uh, we probably will do a full on, I've actually studied soon. I've actually done, uh, two different clients with this use case, which is they, they wanted a place that they could upload their media to so that, um, TV stations or radio stations could access the media, you know, very simple form of distribution.
Speaker 0 25:49 It's gotta be controlled though. We only want certain people to be able to get this media. And this is so those broadcast entities have access to versions that are of a high enough quality that they can then downcast quality media. Exactly. Not necessarily are not talking about 4k here, but we're talking about broadcast quality media. And, uh, in, in both scenarios, uh, the reason that this, that media silo was chosen was because the client, um, was kinda struggling and fighting with our it internally about, well, we'd like to have an FTP server so that we can send, you know, FTP links to, you know, our radio stations and TV stations so they can download the media. And I remember in the second case, I had already done this for, for another client. So I said, well, why don't, why don't we just do media silo?
Speaker 0 26:30 I mean, it's, you know, it's kind of a perfect solution for this and it's better than FTP because it gives someone a very nice rich based user interface where they can view the media directly if they wanted to enter any annotations notes or things like that. Yep. They could. And, uh, in this particular, uh, the second use case here, we're using media silos notification system to notify these broadcasters that there's something available for them. So they get a notification, uh, essentially the, the way the workflow works is the user within their ma'am just selects, uh, you know, a clip or a video that they want to upload to media silo and that's, that's pretty much all they have to do. They select it, they push it up there and uh, the broadcaster gets a notification, Hey, here's something for you to download that that will be broadcast.
Speaker 0 27:18 So instead of a push based system where the content creator has to take the act of, of, of pushing something to the other party directly, whether that's a server, you know, whether it would have required setting up in a spiral link, you know, high speed public internet, you know, accelerator filed transfer accelerator technology on both ends of things, which is potentially infrastructure heavy, capital heavy, you know, and, and again, forcing a lot of, you know, interactivity between the client and then the end broadcaster in order for that broadcaster to get ahold of the things to put to air, so to speak. This kind of inversed it in a sense. Right, right. It made it a self service system. Exactly. That allowed the broadcaster at their leisure to go through search, get access to the broad castable versions of assets that you know, threw up what a push button action and pretty much on this man, pretty much a right click, you know, send, send to send to partner via media silo.
Speaker 0 28:17 Most recently was with reach engine that we did. That's right. Yep. And, and uh, the other, the other thing that's great about this is, um, with a product like reach engine, you have so much flexibility with the workflow develop, you know, the, the workflow tool to be able to, um, let's say you've got three different broadcasters all expecting different trans code settings, you know, for their, for the media that they'll be broadcasting. You know, you can push all three different transcode versions to different projects and media silo give your broadcast or all the different contacts. Usually the sales guy, the, you know, there's a bunch of different people at each broadcast organization that need to get notification. So you set them all up as users and you give them access to the different projects and then you know, when they get a media, they get a notification that works great.
Speaker 0 29:01 Is metadata getting passed as well? And what are the types of metadata that that client has chosen to pass through that, that separate corporate entity, the broadcaster would, would want to have and be able to search on an media silo? So in, in this, in this case, no, there's no metadata being trans transferred in, but there could be via the API. Um, also I believe media silos final conserver integration still works. Um, last I checked it did, uh, and we parsed, we parse a XMP metadata and file it. That's right. Yes, absolutely. Um, so if you're, if you're in, if you're use, um, a prelude or use a premier and you're, you're editing any metadata that automatically gets sent along and read.
Speaker 1 29:42 Yeah. So totally doable. Easily doable. Or are you chasing it? You're just, uh, you, you, you said something earlier on that I thought stood out and I think is worth talking about a little bit because you, you said that they had a, this use case started out where they had a problem with their it department and they wanted to do something they wanted to, you know, upload their clips. And this is something that we hear a lot. I think we're sort of in the middle of this revolution, not just within media and entertainment, but when we're looking at software as a service in general, it's changing how software is sold and it's changing who is the decision maker behind, you know, making these buying decisions. And it's really the creative pro that is more and more front and center of deciding what tool set is used in an organization.
Speaker 1 30:27 It's no longer a central it that says we're implementing an asset management system, but it's the user that says, I have a problem. This is my pain point. I need a solution. And more often than not, it user will choose a tool that is either a freemium tool or is inexpensive. And that just gets the job done. So, you know, something like a Hightail or a Dropbox or maybe even a Vimeo or something like that. And this is really fascinating because it's, it's it, we see it everywhere. And I think, um, you know, for us that means that, you know, we just released a desktop client of, uh, of our quick links app, which, which lets you just, you know, drag drop, send clips to, to other people and, and, and have this nice review and approval context with it. But, uh, this is really driving a whole new generation of products.
Speaker 1 31:16 The fact that as a creative pro, I can now go out and for a few bucks a month procure a tool that gets around it and that gets me the solution. Right? And so I think this is important for two reasons. Hey, is the creative pro is an, a, has an incredible amount of power and control over choosing this tool set now. But I think from a central it perspective, and it doesn't matter if you're a 20 person company or you know, 5,000 person company, I think it's important to know that as long as you can, you can combine those two strategies, which is the company's overarching strategy to get a handle on asset management and secure things and you know, have some control over where assets are and at the same time not be in the way of the creative pro needing to get their work done. Then you have a winning combination and we see this everywhere. You see this with base camp, you know, where teams just go out and for 20 bucks a month get a project management account. And we see this with various tools around the web. So I just thought that was worth mentioning because we definitely see a ton of,
Speaker 0 32:17 And trust me that when, uh, when the creative professional goes back to the it department and says, don't worry about that FTP server, we solved their problem, we're going to take care of it another way. The it people are usually like, great, you know, we're relieved. We don't have to, you know, set up this special thing for you now with open ports and all kinds of special considerations and analytics and all that. You mentioned earlier that there used to
Speaker 2 32:39 Be security concerns about using the cloud for storage of proprietary assets. And I think a lot of the situations we find ourself in having someone push something up to the cloud media silo and allowing very granular access to those assets amongst a very self selected group of people through that, you know, robust platform, Amazon, you know, they've got their security experts looking at everything 24, seven right. To us that represents a much higher level of security than opening up all sorts of aspects of your own infrastructure to let people into a self hosted system that now someone could theoretically slip into and then, you know, have run of the place, you know, from the it infrastructure perspective. So yeah, to us, I think it's actually president presented itself as a high security option to put things out on media silo. And I've seen that, um, over the years.
Speaker 2 33:32 Um, you know, I, like I like we talked about earlier, I, I started working, uh, you know, with, with media silo very early and you guys is, um, you know, development and I've seen, you know, the sort of development over the years of how you guys have been concerned and responding to your client's concern about security, password, protecting quick links, um, being able, uh, requiring, um, strong passwords for users, all that kind of stuff. It's, you know, it's gotten, uh, in my opinion, very much, uh, very much secure. You know, Kai, you were mentioning some of the other kind of online software as a service collaboration tools. You mentioned base camp a moment ago and that's kind of an interesting segue. I wanted to bring this up. We obviously have a lot of different levels of collaboration that take place across production, post production, distribution, broadcast, et cetera, right?
Speaker 2 34:24 And review and approval of media is a very common type of collaborative activity that takes place in this world. As we were talking about a moment ago, being able to distribute your media as a content creator and pushing it out to the distributor broadcaster. Very, you know, important collaborative act of getting the thing that you've produced out there. There's a lot of other types of collaboration that take place in this space though. Like project management, management of project files that you may be working on, versioning of project files, not the media assets necessarily, but you know, the premiere project, et cetera, you know, the final cut 10, whatever they call it these days, the library or whatever. Um, you know, uh, your avid project, the paradigm, you know, you've got versioning, you've got checking in and checking out, you know, Adobe themselves. So they're anywhere platform again, which is a very on premise type of technology build out despite the fact that it kind of turns aspects of your facility into essentially a private cloud.
Speaker 2 35:28 But they've got this collaboration hub that's part of anywhere to start to handle some of these other collaborative workflows that take place around the project and the types of people who might be involved, the producers, the editors, you know, AEs, you name it. Can you talk a little bit more about maybe some of what you guys have going on either currently, what some of the vision is about where you think your platform can start to step into some of these other spaces that involve the collaborative tasks that happen day to day in post production broadcast and how, you know, maybe that would fit into the existing set of offerings. Any thought about additional offerings? Again, I just find all these needs, I mean I can't tell you how many times farmer's wife, which from what I gather is a kind of slightly not loved, you know, FileMaker based database for actual production and postproduction, you know, management tasks. But again it's a, it's a FileMaker database that you run on premise and a lot of people just rely on it cause it's kind of what's out there. If you guys looked at this stuff, and I mean maybe you can hint at what's either out there or what's coming or what you guys have thought about that.
Speaker 1 36:42 That's a great question. Ask. So I think you have to, as a company you just have to conserve, understand your, you have to understand your, your focus and the problem that you can solve. We've looked at extending media silo to do more in the production space, you know, to deal more with project management to deal more with sort of exhilarate information that's not pertinent to the assets. And I think we've just, we've, we've honed in that the problem we want to solve, the problem that we see and we hear about every day is, is, is removing friction in for creative pros, making it easier to get review cuts to the users, making it easier to distribute the files, to put them in a central location to enrich them with metadata. So the direction that we're going is really to, to look at the creative pro, the individual as our main use case.
Speaker 1 37:32 And what would they try to try to do. And at the same time, look at what kind of role can we play in the larger gender, you know, in the larger organization. So can we solve a distribution problem for the editor and also security problem for the enterprise so that you know, sort of there's a, there's a top to bottom and bottom to top approach and that's what you'll see us focusing on. But that also means that we're looking at ways that we can make videos smarter and we're looking at ways that given that we have sort of an API first mindset that we can consume other APIs to make video more relevant. So, you know, I'll give you an example. If you uploaded a file, we currently will create wave forms, we'll create sprites, we'll create different proxies, different, you know, we will transcode the video in different formats so that if they ever get requested on a, on a mobile device that requires a specific codec, you can play it back. What if you could also by default in a run a phonetic search over it? Or what if you could do automatic keyword tagging with every asset uploaded and what
Speaker 2 38:36 Kind of impact would that have in your organization if that happened on aggregate? You know, it's not the individual clip you upload that maybe it needs all this information, but if you use a tool like this and your team does over a period of an entire project and the end of the project, you try to find that one clip or that one outtake or you know, the, the uh, the, the piece of B roll that got discarded and we make it a little bit easier for you to find that. I think that's sort of the mission that we're trying to be on and the problem we're trying to solve. So if I'm, if I'm Chi Priddle, am I trying to forge, you know, B2B relationships with people like Nick Cydia or maybe even Amazon mechanical Turk service and things like that so I can keep offering more and more things that are possibly cloud oriented and, and you know, just bring added value to my clients of media silo.
Speaker 2 39:26 Is that kind of sounding like your perspective? Am I being fair? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I think we're, we're totally embracing the technologies that are out there, the server services that are out there and we wanted to make it easier to to put them together and could consume those. And I think that's exactly the role that a cloud man should play is bringing together the best of breed tools and consolidating that under one simple to use interface. Can I, can I give you a free idea please. It's just, it's, it's a need I see out there and frankly out of, I think of all of the software technology vendors out there. There's certainly the ability probably for some of the ma'am or dam vendors to do this and some of them are kind of in this space. But frankly I think as a cloud based service it makes a lot of sense for you guys to look at as well.
Speaker 2 40:16 Maybe it's something you're working on. Heck, maybe it's a feature of the, of the platform that's there that I'm just not as familiar with. Let's say I am, well, you know, we, we handle of course a lot of backup issues. For our clients, right? We built sands, we build NAS is tape libraries. We build big ass. Big ours I just said are by the way listeners, Oh wait, we're not on the radio. I can say whatever the F I want. Um, we build, you know, all of these storage systems and we build backup systems that can, you know, are typically oriented around, yeah. A whole volumes worth of media files. We build these systems out to handle, you know, changes that may occur in the largest volume of the data you're dealing with, which is the raw media. Cause you don't really have to worry about re rendering stuff cause as long as you've got your project file right, can we render and yeah.
Speaker 2 41:06 So you really need your project files to be well-maintained and backed up and you really need your media files to be backed up and well-maintained and preserved. Of course. And with those two you can constitute pretty much anything you need to just to rerender. And we can build all sorts of systems that like let's say with daily level of granularity can back up, you know, any new or changed raw media files that have landed on your primary production storage volume. And so you can flip over the Frankenstein switch and say, you know, we're going to go to tier two for today. You know, that's our backup volume and it's a yesterday's version of the data. And you know, in a lot of cases that day level of granularity for the raw media is perfectly acceptable because of just the volume that they may ingest on a day by day basis is not great enough where the loss of a day's worth of that stuff is a big deal and they can keep, you know, the, the, the media that came in from the field, you know, around a couple of days so they can re ingest it if they need to and you know, they're back up and running very quickly.
Speaker 2 42:09 The challenge tends to be with project files and we're like, well yeah, I mean you know you're going to capture daily level granularity of your project files if they happen to be on that shared storage volume as well. And frankly it's not always appropriate for those project files to be on the shared storage volume that often is used for media storage purposes. Sometimes it is, sometimes it's not. I would love to see, cause you could kill a couple of birds with one stone here, you could have an offering, call it project silo, I don't know. And let's say it's a panel inside of premiere pro, it leverages Amazon's web services and what it is is basically a web based repository for the project file itself that you're working on inside of premiere. And you hit it exclusively through a panel built that you guys would build out in premiere.
Speaker 2 43:02 Right. And what it would do is capture maybe with hourly granularity changes in deltas to project files that you're working on. And I don't know if that can be automated or require someone to push a button or whatever, but it would give someone the ability to not only know that they're capturing kind of more granular, you know, versions of the project file is it change as it changes. And of course that can happen many times throughout a day. But they also know that that's being backed up to the cloud. It doesn't cost a lot of money because the project files are small. It's convenient because they can grab those project files again from wherever they're sitting on the planet as long as they're on the web. And it's, it's kind of, it could be both a versioning and a project file version and check-in, checkout kind of platform and a cloud based, you know, kind of disaster recovery platform for your editorial project files.
Speaker 2 44:00 Is that something that, you know, you guys have given any thought to? It just seems like there's a need there. And while some of the on premise ma'ams can do that, I see just a whole lot of value of having that be a cloud based service. So what you're talking about is like, are you familiar with GitHub? Yeah, sure. So it's like a good hub for your, for your project files. I think that's a really good way of describing it. But it sits within premiere and you can access it from there and you can look at your history. Maybe you can even see a list differences. Yes. Yes. You're reading my mind, man. I like it. You know how they pitch movies in Hollywood? Like apparently the way they pitch movies, it has to be like something meets something and has a baby. So you know this, this would be like your premiere panel and get hub, you know, got together and had a baby and it would be this new thing.
Speaker 2 44:53 Okay. What you're talking about is like the, it's like the perfect mashups scenario, right? That's exactly how we're viewing the space. It's, it's taking, uh, you know, taking elements from, you know, web development and merging it with the video production world. I mean, that's the stuff that we live and die for. So here's an idea. You guys build what I just said. I'm a great idea guy. Right. But yeah, execution, that's for all the much smarter people I work with. Like that guy right across from me right there. You know, we'll let them, but how about you build this, you, you drop me like a little credit in the splash screen. Compliments of Nicole, you give me no more than 25% of the gross revenue. I'll sell the hell out of it. But, but you, you get the idea and 75% of the profits. Yeah, no, I just say that Nick could sell ice to an Eskimo.
Speaker 2 45:44 That's not true. I'm not even a sales guy. I'm like a consultant, a bit of credit here to Adobe as well because you know, without, without the possibility of building panels and plugging into that ecosystem, you know, these ideas wouldn't be, wouldn't be possible. And that's, that's another direction that I'm hoping that we'll see our industry go is more towards embracing collaboration and interoperability and being less about, you know, proprietary stuff. Well, we know that there was a big video company that's now, you know, not as big and prominent as it used to be that um, you know, kind of very much never really took that approach even if they paid it lip service over many years, but it tended to be a very siloed look at things. And you know, I, you know, you're, you're, you're talking about this future where it's like you're almost, you're building your own application layer, right?
Speaker 2 46:37 As a user, you're defining what workflow you need. You're picking and choosing the pieces of the technological ecosystem out there, you know, Oh yeah, I like cutting in premiere, but I want to do my project management in this platform and I want to do my medium asset management with this one and I want to do my archive with this and I want to end yet I want to have kind of a unified interface. I want it to be streamlined and I kind of want to build my own platform and tools out of these multiple vendors options. I think Apple was kind of in that direction originally with final cut, you know, through seven. Adobe seems to be moving in that direction as well. But, but seriously, in all seriousness, run with that idea about the cloud based project backup and management and check in, check out and versioning and our clients will eat it up.
Speaker 2 47:26 We have actually, uh, experienced people using Dropbox. People for our Dropbox is what they're using. Dropbox is what they're using because the files are not real big. So they're just kind of throwing them on a Dropbox just to get them. And it's like, it's like, okay. I mean, good manual way of doing it. But if it was through a panel in premiere actually did kind of more concrete version control with checkin checkout processes who go and make some money off of that one, Kai, just send me, send me a harmonica Christmas card or something in an edible arrangement. The downside to this mashup world is that the, you know, the ability to monetize these things is also infinitely harder, right? Sure. Yeah. Because it's, you know, it's accessible and you can build it and $10 a month per user. Don. Yeah, I think that's a good idea. I like, I like your thinking. We Sue you. I won't Sue you if you take the idea. We're putting this on air. David, make sure to include this in the edit. I said that media silo could have this idea. So when you launch it, it just has to be called Nick Gold's project silo.
Speaker 2 48:42 We have to hold off broadcasting this podcast before, before that gets released. Oh yeah. Because we don't want everyone else to steal my awesome, right. I mean obviously obviously I put it out there. You guys are probably in a better position than anyone to execute on all sorts of new ideas that come your way. Right? Or where is it? What, what's it like? You know, cause you know, I think, gosh, you guys have this platform that you know, you can spin up VMs and do whatever you want really quickly. You mentioned having 10 developers and are you guys pure HTML at this point? Are you using any other third party frameworks? Well we, you know, we, we use, um, enterprise Java for, for our backend stuff. Sure. And then on the front end it's all, it's all HTML five Java script and uh, and, and certain JavaScript frameworks.
Speaker 2 49:30 But yeah, it's all pretty pure web style. So I'm not a coder. Right. I think about what I just told you and I'm like, she should be able to spin that up in like a couple of days. Right. I mean, what's it like as you guys are evaluating roadmap and you know, having to decide, I mean, is a lot of your development being driven by user requests? Do you guys have a strategic roadmap that you're trying to do to, to build the platform into this thing you have a vision of, I'm curious what, what drives both the day to day activities and that's a, that's a longer term goals. That's a great question because it really is like there's, there's, there's, you know, there's no shortage of ideas. There's, there's good ones and there's bad ones. Yours is, yours is certainly a better one, but there's no shortage of ideas and that, that, that makes it sometimes hard to focus on, you know, what, what do, what do we do? Um, to give you an idea, when we started out, you know, even just, even just a year and a half, we were processing maybe you know, a thousand or, or 2000 hours of video a month
Speaker 1 50:28 And we're now doing over 30,000 hours of video a month that were, that, that are being uploaded and then need to be processed. And uh, and so the, the scale changes also what you're focusing on and where you can add the most value. But, uh, you know, we tend to listen to our users and, and tend to pay close attention to what the needs are of the market. You know, we, we released the premiere pro panel as one of the first vendors to have an off the shelf solution that didn't need any customization. You can download it, install it, and all of a sudden within your premiere panel, you have access to all the media. You can import the media, you can send quick links from it. So we kind of jump on these opportunities sometimes because we feel there's momentum behind something and we also want to support it.
Speaker 1 51:11 You know, we're big fans of Adobe for pushing this forward and I'm giving them feedback on their APIs and, and hope, hopefully making this a better place for, for everyone so that we can develop software and solve problems. Um, you know, that, that haven't been solvable. But it is, you know, we on a tactical level, you know, we, we sit down here and we look at the different opportunities and we, we do short sprints where we get together and say, let's find a solution to that. So I'll give you an example. The, um, a few, few months ago, we started on this, on this logging project and started to explore using a browser based approach to decentralized logging on large scale. And so we spent a week to build a prototype to just see if it was possible to build an interface. And we share that with sort of our, our trusted customers and we get feedback.
Speaker 1 52:04 And if we feel like the idea has any kind of traction and there's also a commercial opportunity here, then we pursue that a little bit faster. But there's also other ideas that kind of die along the way just because there's not enough support. The opportunities big is big enough. It's just cool but not really, you know, useful to a large amount of users. So it's sort of weighing the balance between how can we add the most value and how can we produce a tool set that is in line with our, our overall mindset. Yeah. It's, do you ever just bust out the magic eight ball, you know? Well, shake it up if you don't like the answer. You know, sometimes, sometimes, sometimes you have to, but uh, that's why talking to customers and, and being part of the conversation has always, is always valuable. Anything in particular, you know, either current or potential users should look for in, in terms of your developments that might be coming out.
Speaker 1 53:02 Can, can you talk a little bit about the desktop application that you mentioned? So we actually have a ton of stuff that's that's about to be released. Um, we uh, are very close to releasing a major update which has project level permissions. It sounds like a mouthful, but what it does is essentially, uh, right now when you're creating a project in media silo, you're able to assign a user to it, but that user has an overall role in the system and a certain set of permissions like they can upload, they can download, they can edit metadata and it used to be that it was global for any project. Do you have the same kind of permission? So we're just rolling, rolling out an update that lets you set that on a granular level. So you may have access to viewing assets in one project but not downloading.
Speaker 1 53:48 And in another project you have full access. That's huge guy. And that really, that, that changes everything fundamentally, if you will. That's sort of the difference between Dropbox and box. Right? Dropbox is sort of you said basic permission and in Dropbox and Dropbox is basic permissions and inbox. You actually have granular controls and for the enterprise that's really interesting, but it's also great because the second feature that's, that's piggybacked on this is project sharing. So you'll be able to invite somebody from another production company on a project. So if you're collaborating, you've got a visual effects studio and a post house, they can now be sharing the same projects and their own media silo account, which also means if you're a freelancer, you could be, you know, you could have a list of shared projects in your media silo account and have it all into one roof.
Speaker 1 54:35 Um, so that's a big update that's coming out. We're, we're also, uh, improving our encoding farm, so we're starting to generate a lot more information about files. And I have to be a little bit hush about that because we're finalizing some, some negotiations, but I'm expect to see more on that fund. And then we just recently released, uh, the desktop app. Um, and that's really exciting because it's a tool set that looks very familiar to anyone who's used Hightail or Dropbox. The only difference is that, you know, you can upload a file, you can walk away and when it's done uploading, it'll send to the list of recipients and you get the full media silo quick link experience without having to log onto a browser. It just sits in your desktop and it, you know, it's sort of your companion app for, for sending rough cuts.
Speaker 1 55:23 Gotcha. That's really slick, really slick. Well you guys sound busy, so I think what we'll do is probably let you get back to being busy with making all of this cool stuff. And again, the thing I want to just encourage our clients because I mean frankly, you know, we have a handful of people we work with who use media silo. They all universally love it and rely on it daily. But I have to say it's one of those things that, I mean, I'm kind of baffled as to why like 95% of our clients aren't using it like actively in their workflows because it's just, it's that much more refined over trying to shoe horn, you know, YouTube or Vimeo into that role. It's a lot slicker than giving someone an FTP login. Um, you know, if you've ever struggled with sending large email attachments and things like that, no more problem there. So it just seems so incredibly useful. We've described a few different, you know, very different use cases in terms of review and approval from clients,
Speaker 2 56:24 Passing things along to broadcast distribution partners and giving them kind of a self service gateway. I encourage everyone to try it. And you guys again, let's be specific about this. You guys make that pretty easy. What, what can our listeners do this afternoon tomorrow to check out for themselves? The media silo experience.
Speaker 1 56:46 We have a free trial on our site that's free for two weeks and um, you can choose from three different account options and you can also bring your own Amazon credentialed. So if you want to be the master of S of storage and are not afraid to, you know, do a little bit of configuration work on, on Amazon and is three, then you can choose that option as well. But yeah, it's a free trial. It's turnkey, you sign up and you're able to use it right away. There's no risk. You can cancel it any time. And um, yeah it's, it's, it's very easy to use.
Speaker 2 57:21 Well we would definitely encourage our clients to get in front of it. Please keep us looped in on any of your experimentations. We probably have answers for you. Again, we are a reseller and you can act as an intermediary there but you know, it's been great to have you on pick your brain. We've known you guys for years. We've been doing more active projects that involve media silo like lean that's only going to accelerate with more and more people having on premise ma'ams. I think it actually, if anything makes it more obvious to them quickly why they also need something in that overall solution when
Speaker 0 57:55 People get into the ma'am space and that you know that have never been there before. How fast their minds move to like how else could we use this? Like what are the, what are all the potential applications of this? Once they start realizing like, Hey, here's all of our media and we can find it and we can like share it with people. Then they start thinking like, how can I show my clients this and all that kind of stuff. So that's when we really, that's where you guys come into the picture. The
Speaker 2 58:19 Systems we work with are, you know, very clearly production asset management systems, right? They are, they are geared both in terms of their look, their aesthetic, their tool set, the technology itself, how you access it to the set of users inside your Gates who are touching the full Rez media every single day on their production storage. A lot of those platforms, it's a very distant thought as to like, let's put a really nice outwardly facing package on it to get it in front of clients to get it in front of our distribution partners. You guys are just like the slot in drop-in way to answer that question. So I see much more activity with you guys as us and our clients move forward with all of that fun stuff. They just go to media silo.com right? That's right. Media solid.com awesome. Kai, it's been a real pleasure talking with you. We can't wait to get this out there and uh, looking forward to much further adventures. Yeah, same here. Yeah, we look forward
Speaker 1 59:22 To working more with you guys as well. And if it wasn't for integrators that understand, you know, the whole workflow spectrum, it'd be a much more difficult space to be in. Awesome. Thanks so much guys. We'll speak again soon. Okay. Take care and thank you to our listeners. This has been another episode of the workflow show. Take care of one.
Speaker 3 59:44 The workflow show is a production of Chesapeake systems. We welcome your comments and suggestions for upcoming episodes. You can email
[email protected] that's workflow
[email protected]. And if you'd like to talk with a member of our team, of experts about your particular digital media workflow needs, email
[email protected] that's pro
[email protected] or call us at (410) 752-3406 that's (410) 752-3406.
