#22 "Examining the success and future of CatDV" with CEO Dave Clack

Speaker 0 00:01 Welcome to the workflow show episode two Oh six. I'm Meryl Davis alongside my cohost, Nick gold. And today we have a very special guest. Dave clack, Dave clack, CEO of square box. Hello makers of the media asset management system, cat DV. That's great. Love that introduction. You like that? Yeah, it's very cool. We try to pump everybody up right before we break them down. Nice. I thought she'd look forward to that only so we can build them back up in our own form if the Chesapeake rollercoaster. Exactly. That's right. Yeah. It's like training day, which has to peak, but, so, um, welcome. And thank you so much for joining us. I understand you've been doing quite a bit of traveling to get here, but, um, we're very glad to have you here in Baltimore as pleasure to be here. So, you know, we, we sell solely through our channel and so being able to meet resellers directly, being able to meet some end customers directly that important to us as company. Speaker 0 00:59 So I've had a great time so far in the States. Hopefully it's going to continue. How long have you been over here now? So I can, I have about a week and a half ago started off on the West coast, San Francisco and LA, and then heading out to New York later this week. Cool. You're getting it all fed the Olin and you are in Hamden in the, in Baltimore, in our church of Chesapeake. Beautiful. Yeah. It's we're funky. We keep it. We keep it funky. We're like a solid C plus over here. There's no question. So, so I'm going to take it way back. I want to draw back 30,000 foot view. It was probably about eight, maybe even more years ago. I first gained awareness of, of square box and cat DV. It was the very first year I was out at NAB. I had come on board Chesapeake only, probably a year, year and a half earlier in that timeframe. Speaker 0 01:54 And for me the thrust of that NAB, you know, you always kind of go to NAB with something in mind that you're trying to explore, you know, because otherwise you would just lose your mind in the cows. Well, for me that year was when I was first beginning to hunt out media asset management systems. I felt that this was kind of the next wave of the technologies that Chesapeake was going to embrace and make a big part of our, our portfolio instead of offerings. And it was an interesting year because it was proximity group makers of art box still existed as a separate platform before they were absorbed by Apple and turned into final cut server, obviously only to be brutally murdered afterwards. Um, but you know, there was them, you know, couple other platforms I saw, you know, might've checked out, you know, avid interplay or something. Speaker 0 02:44 And then there's this little 10 by 10 booth down there in the South hall. And there's this interesting pair of British guys sitting in it. And one is Rolf and one is Kevin. And, you know, they're like, check out this thing, cat TV, you know, it's kind of a, it's a, ma'am, it's a media management system and I loved it. I really loved it. And let's be blunt. This was cat TV and a significantly more nascent state than it that it is today. And yet I remember really gravitating towards it because it was simple. It was easy to use and it had the tools that people needed to make it a viable media management platform specifically really in a post production environment. Um, and, and, you know, we've, we've known square box and cat TV ever since. And you've come into the organization. What about two years ago? Yeah, because I remember we first met not at this past NAB, but I think the nav before that, yeah. And square box has changed a bit since then. The technology has clearly changed a lot. We want to cover all this territory today, but maybe you can kind of relate yourself and you, and your role there as CEO to, you know, the square box that's been there for a while. And then people have kind of known for, for a number of years now. Speaker 1 04:03 Yeah. Well maybe a good place to start is kind of right at the beginning. So, uh, so square box has been in existence for, I think about 12 or 13 years. Um, cat DV for a large part of that. I think caddy V one came out 12 years ago and Kathy was born out of the need of our founder wealth to be able to find his stuff. So you think back 12 years ago and you think of the kind of technology that was around, you know, Macs and PCs, and if you did something on one platform, it wouldn't work on another, uh, that'd be the kind of the beginnings of digital cameras for stills and a wealth being a great geek. Like many of us are in the industry. He had a big pile of those. And from the video perspective, then a whole pile of DV cameras. Speaker 1 04:47 And so, you know, young family and lots of footage across a whole variety of devices and wealth just wanted to find his stuff. And he couldn't. So he invented cat DV and initially KTV was sold as a share web product, really targeting the kind of consumer or maybe pro-sumer market. And then over time he met some good, good folks and investigated the professional market and added all of the stuff that we've now got in the platform. So all of the collaboration or the automation tools and all the sophisticated video and media asset management that we've got in the product. So I think it's a nice little story, you know, and, and, you know, for a large part of cat D V's existence, people were saying media asset management, what what's media, asset management, you know, I don't need this stuff. You know, I mean, folks were really only just moving to, to file based workflows. Whole lot of stuff was on tape. Speaker 0 05:40 Maybe asset management really just kind of reduces it all down to a buzzword that makes it sound goofy and superfluous when, I mean, we're huge believers in it. Right. But you're right. Like people like media, asset management. Oh, it sounds so amorphous. Speaker 1 05:56 Um, and I think, you know, Speaker 2 05:58 It's, it's fair to say for the first few years of the company's existence, it was a product trying to find a need because folks didn't realize at that point that they needed a tool to help them find and reuse their content. You know, over time people have started put, sounds in place and said the sand was going to solve all their issues. Uh, and you know, I've got myself a 40 terabyte tat sat and how am I ever going to fill a 40 terabytes sand like that? And now today it's like, Oh yeah, exactly. I did that yesterday. Uh, and so, so folks are realizing that they really do have a problem, you know, and we, we've tried to look around and try and find some research to try and quantify some of this stuff. And there's a, there's a couple of surveys that we use in some of our marketing that, that show we'll try to quantify how much time and money people waste, uh, looking for media. Speaker 2 06:47 And you know, some of the numbers that are in some of these surveys show that the average media professional waste $8,000 per year, uh, on finding and looking for media that an average media professional take that takes about 64 attempt to find stuff in a week. And they only ever find it, uh, 60 odd percent of the time. So, you know, more than a third of the time, they don't even find what they're looking for. You are giving me heartburn like you are giving me heartburn. I'm just sitting here thinking, I mean, cause these are all things that in my professional career I've I can imagine and like always think about, and it's such, um, it's such an interesting thing. When you, when you think about how could this such, it's such a critical part of the workflow. It's like the backbone in many ways to really what is required to get a return on investment. What's required to give a deliverable out the door, you know, like how, how have we basically gone 10 years with our heads in the sand? Speaker 0 07:44 The problem is, is that the, the speed at which things went from videotape based workflows to tape less and just file based was so quick in the scheme of things. And I think people in, in post and, and loggers and folks like that, like somehow thought that literal paper cuts and spreadsheets at best of log notes, or somehow going to carry them through in this era where we're now two to three to four orders of magnitude of just more media that every individual involved in production and postproduction is dealing with in a hands on way at any given moment. And like, I don't know if the industry has done a particularly good job in, in always showing people that this is the modern equivalent of organization that you always did, and you always realized was integral to your workflow, but this is the new version of that. This is the 21st century's version of log notes and paper cuts and that kind of stuff. Speaker 2 08:53 Right. You know, what's interesting. I just, as an aside for Speaker 0 08:55 That is so even today, um, when we visit our clients on a regular basis, I think certainly part of the front end of the conversation about something like cat DV as well, do you have the resource and the wherewithal within your organization to make this sort of a thing work, right. You know, there's not even necessarily, and it's coming, but there's not even necessarily like a full consideration for the skill set and the, and the body, the, the salary of somebody who basically runs the ship of media asset management within an organization. Well, I think it's crazy that in a lot of colleges in their communications and video programs, you know, most of them probably don't even train their, their students to use a ma'am. And it's like, it's a highly marketable skill, right? We've got a program Speaker 1 09:47 Going on in the States, which is just in its early stages, but we are, uh, we're being taught as a module. And one of these film school, um, university courses, because, uh, and in fact, they came to us because the, uh, the folks running the course recognize it's a critical part of any media workflow these days. And, you know, it's not just that we have to manage more media it's. We have to get it out in so many different formats, um, uh, for the internet, as well as further traditional, uh, mechanisms and the time requirements and the kind of turnaround, the demands are so much faster than they ever were. And no one's got any more money. So the only way you're going to be able to survive when, when there's more demand for more content and there's less time to do it, and there's less people to do it, it's to be able to reuse and repurpose the stuff you've already got to make high quality, new programming Speaker 0 10:37 And automate the hell out of as many processes as you can. So you're freeing up the human bodies that you do have to do things that require a human body. Speaker 1 10:46 Yeah. You know, I've been with some folks this week and, uh, just hearing the stories of how they do their trans code simply to keep their various systems happy with the right footage in the right format at the right stage, they seem to have like a halftime person whose job is simply babysitting a process of, uh, getting the, the high res camera of stuff, transcoded into pro, and then maybe getting it <inaudible>, it's not a complicated workflow, but it's taking a person half of their working weekend Speaker 0 11:15 And a workstation and all that other stuff. Right. You know, that's another workstation that somebody can't use for, I don't know, like cutting the work, Speaker 1 11:22 These folks are using an edit station. Yeah. So it's not even, it's not even just a, a PC with a good amount of kid in it. It's, it's a whole work environment for you. Speaker 0 11:31 So this has been kind of the landscape that's evolved over the last decade or so. And this has been the same period of time that that square box has been there and very actively involved. What's the rest of the story as far as how they developed as a company and the underlying, you know, cat DV product line. And then how does that relate to you coming on board and what's your background with, with role in the company and, you know, how, how did you get folded in here as the CEO along the way? Speaker 1 11:59 Yeah, absolutely. So as the company was getting bigger, um, welfare found that realized that he needed some new skills on the team that he didn't have. Loaf is an excellent technician and a product visionary, but at the same time recognized the firm to be successful, needed some additional leadership, you know, uh, someone to be able to work with resellers and distributors and customers to get additional insight about where the market was going and to work with other vendors, uh, to ensure that cat DV existed as part of an ecosystem. And so a large part of my role at cat DV is, is clearly working with our, our sales and distribution channel. But the other big part is working with our manufacturer partners. And in fact, we spent a big part of effort in the last year, refining our marketing relationships. So when I talk about marketing relationships dead easy for me to go out and do some handshaking, again, a nice press release and some contracts and NDA signed with a, with a partner who sits in the, uh, the asset in the ecosystem somewhere. Speaker 1 13:00 Um, but that's kind of useless. You know, customers need to have confidence that cat D is going to work and marketing is just the very start of that process. So we've put a big kind of effort. If you look at the cat DV website, we, we launched that about a year ago and we've been adding content, you know, two or three articles a month, which is so how to do some really cool stuff with cat DV. When I first joined square box, I was told that cat DV is one of the best products for integration with other third party hardware, software and services in the business. I said, great, how do we do that? And I said, Oh, you got to talk to one of these three individuals in the world that can do this stuff. And they said, I said, well, there's one in this continent. Speaker 1 13:42 There's another one in this continent. There's no one in another customer like, great, well, that's not really going to scale, is it? And so in what we're trying to do is to share kind of best practices and some of the kind of technical detail with our resellers and customers at not only to show people how to use cat DV, but to really build confidence that we're part of this ecosystem. And, you know, frankly, when folks buying cat DV, they're buying best of breed. They're not going to the kind of one stop shop they'll, they'll sell you your likes of avid. That'll tell you everything you could possibly need for your thing. This is your focus, right? Exactly. So what we do the software play. Yeah. It is Speaker 0 14:18 Specifically, you know, the ma'am and automation, componentry integrating with other things, you know, in a proven fashion. Yeah. And you've got, you know, I would say, is it, is it fair to say maybe outside, uh, outside of interplay, just cause they've been around a while, and obviously Avids in a lot of shops, but you know, other than them, you guys probably have the, the next largest number of users, Speaker 1 14:43 Where's he going to interplay? Really? So, uh, so you can buy cat evil, a hundred dollars from the website and many people do. We've got to ask top version exactly. Standalone cat DV, very cut down. But you know, dad used for, you know, your wedding videographer, you're kind of hobbyist at home two and a half thousand folks have that in terms of our enterprise sale through our channel. We, uh, I think just, just after Christmas we hit 900 enterprise customers. And at last count, that was a bigger than, than the, than the interplay number that I'd seen. Congrats. So yeah. I'm sure I have, it'll come around and say, actually, we've got bigger, but that's based on the data that I've got right now. So yeah. And how did your personal path cross with square boxes and what was your background if you've been doing this stuff a while, or is this so, so often I'd go way back. Speaker 1 15:34 And that really helps when trying to steer a small organization and grow a small organization because of the whole pile of trust that exists out of the gate. And so Ralph and I had worked in other businesses, I think three or four of the businesses and the past. And we, we, so we knew each other, we trusted each other and we had that relationship. My background's not in the industry. My background is in technology consulting and technology leadership, I guess. And that's taken me to a whole heap of interesting, uh, domains. So, uh, most recently I was working in the city of London on a financial, do we ever T as exchange, I'm doing some really cool stuff with high performance computing and just having to crash the global economy. I mean, it's not actually no difficulties here. Folks look for a pivot in my career. Speaker 1 16:19 We were the good guys. We were the good guys trying to try to prevent all that nastiness happening. But, uh, so you know, the good guys very rarely went well. And that kind of brings me on to why I, why I've joined. Squibble, that's a neat internet. I need, tend to lose thing. Uh, yeah. So, so, uh, Ralph talked to me about the opportunity at square box, what he needed and that kind of fit the kind of stuff that I do in the way I like to work. Um, you thought that the media technology industry was going to be a breath of fresh air. Well, yeah. You know, you meet some dead interesting characters in this business and it's been, it's been a blast so far, but you know, the stuff that really turned me on to cat DV and made me think that it was worth joining so small company, but with big aspirations, with great growth trajectory, some great customers. Speaker 1 17:10 And then when I looked across who was using cat DV and where we could take it to make it even more useful, then there was a couple of angles I could see, you know, our history was in the kind of typical post-market. And, uh, we had a great following and a set of folks that we like cat DV in that market. But then I could see, uh, another set of folks, uh, in just in, in industry and in other organizations that just have video. And so we have customers in some of the biggest churches in the world, or we have customers in adult entertainment, we have customers in documentary and nature and politics. I'm curious what the metadata schema of the adult entertainment, uh, cat DV database. Yeah. It was quite comprehensive. It was, we had a support ticket in recently, uh, and we had to take a look at their, at their, at their catalog schema. Yep. Everything you could possibly imagine. And then some more, I think it was wow. Yeah. You're going to distract me here Speaker 0 18:12 Being on the East coast, we just don't have that, that segment of the industry to cater to Florida. I try to avoid Florida, no offense to the Floridian clients we do have, Hey, Hey, if there's anybody who works in a adult industry in Florida, we're happy to engage you as a client. Wait, wait, wait. We have folks. So all over the map, you know, it's just, we, we enable all forces equally. I consider us like the Swiss and world war II or whatever. Right. So, so you're in all of these different places. And I mean, what you're saying really relates to this, this vision that I have myself of, you know, video. Yes. It's, it's, uh, it's, you know, it's a product, there's the entertainment industry, you know, we just had the Oscars a few nights ago. Clearly there will always be very highly professionally produced content that is a product unto itself or, or a means of selling advertising or whatever. But yeah, but it's something else has happened that the accessibility of video and video technology has really turned it into just a mass communications medium, along with the rise of the internet. There's no, I mean, if you write people and you may be like this podcast record audio, or use audio recording technologies for marketing purposes, or just communication or training, or what have you, I mean, video is now just an inherent part of what you're doing to communicate. And so it's not just the entertainment industry or the post industry. Speaker 1 19:47 Yeah, absolutely. And anyone, and one of the marketing team, you know, we have, we tell customers, financial customers, insurance customers, yeah. A whale load. You have several railroads users, you know, so, so folks and media media, isn't just for marketing, a whole heap of this stuff is for training and education. So one of our biggest financial customers has an obligation to be able to demonstrate they've trained their customers to be competent to buy their products so that we don't get too much more global meltdown. Um, and they use cat DV to be able to, uh, look after and distribute this content to their end consumers as a matter of compliance compliance. Exactly. Speaker 0 20:26 And if you ever get the sense that they're really doing a bad job of that, you know, on the DL, let me know who they are so I can start shorting a lot of things. Speaker 1 20:33 Yeah. Okay. Um, there's another whale word that, uh, that, uh, we were talking about this week and they use theirs for all their health and safety videos and all the health and safety legislation health around that kind of a mechanical engineering exercise is really important and effect it's folks lives at risk. If you don't get this stuff and they use the regular rider of the train, I absolutely back that up. Cat DV saves lives. I love it. Kathy sidelines, you know, actually some of the, some of the things I really like, we, we are, we're quite big in the charity sector. So Greenpeace Oxfam save the children. There's a lobbying organization that we're working with and they do a whole lot of citizen journalism. They equipped their field journalists with a whole lot of covert recording equipment, go to some of the most dangerous places in the world, smuggle a whole lot of content back out and then use cat DV for their, their governance process to prove this content is legitimate. And it hasn't been faked, which is a very difficult thing to do. And then they send it on to associated press and CNN and BBC, and they get about three. They get about three, three pieces of news syndicated globally every week, Speaker 0 21:44 Cat TV saving lives and keeping the world free. Speaker 1 21:50 Hi, I quite like that. It's indeed. I mean, it also, it also helps folks to make money. I think that's the other one that was in parentheses occasionally a desirable byproduct. Right. So I have question for you about, um, the naming origin and sort of the name of KTV as it stands now. So TV that is digital video, right? The DV, or what did it say? A log? So these days, so cat DV is all about cataloging your digital assets or digital video. So that's kind of DV with a lowercase D and a lowercase V. But if you go back to the kind of history, it was the, it was a file based capital D capital V format that came off the tapes that Russia was trying to manage. So that's the history and we've kind of repurposed the name a little bit as a, as the industry has matured. And so have we. Speaker 0 22:39 Yeah. And I think catalog is I run into a little more often with, with British firms who are in this space, you know, spell properly. What the is that like a U E kind of thing going on? I'm baffled it's all right. You know, it just doesn't matter. You know, so cacti V is interesting because there are, as you're speaking to so many different modalities in which someone might use it, and it's, it's, you know, one of the things I really like about the way that you guys market it and sell it is that you can, if you choose to really take a, all a carte approach to creating, or in our case selling or recommending a cat TV solution to someone, and, you know, I need this many seats of this module with this particular user interface, and I need one of these, that's the automation engine Adelaide, this capability, and I need to support these few, you know, and you can really piecemeal it very specifically around your organization's requirements, but to be blunt, when we often have, you know, gone into an organization, that's just beginning to embrace this technology and to, to on day one, launch a ma'am and automation solution for them, that's going to do exactly everything they're ever going to want it to do. Speaker 0 24:00 Like for years ahead, that's impossible because people start to only start seeing the light of what it can even do. And so you guys also have these bundles, which I adore because there's a few of them where I can say, you know what? This gives you a nice assortment of the capabilities of the overall solution that meet your headcount requirements today, but we can easily scale that pretty granularly moving forward. It has enough of the other core modules where even if you don't super emphasize their use today, they're there for you ready to go ready to scale. And again, we can scale those elements up granularly as well. So, yeah, I really liked that approach. I think it works really well for a lot of our clients. As you said, you can start with the desktop version for a single individual. And the other thing I love you can start with that, build catalogs, generate your metadata schema, be tagging the heck out of things. And you can literally take the metadata that you're generating with that simple desktop version and scale up to the enterprise version of cat DV and ingest that metadata along with the assets. And now it's a, it's a work group or organization, or potentially if an enterprise level, and you didn't waste any time or effort or energy previously, even when you were there, just experimenting with it. Speaker 1 25:20 That's right. So cat DV operated at a variety of points in the market. I think at a hundred dollars, we are the cheapest ma'am in existence. So we start, we can start small. And then, uh, then the, the kind of data formats can scale with you. And so Kathy doesn't really run out of legs. So there were some products that if you make the wrong choice, they'll get to a certain scale or size or distribution or camera format or whatever it is that you suddenly find it doesn't do it. And then you're left with a decision about, well, I better just move to a new product with cat DV. Then you can start with one seat. Some of our biggest customers did that. Um, and then grew up to hundreds of seats and, and thousands of sometimes of web users without having to massively redesign your workflow or massively redesign the metadata that you're recording. Speaker 1 26:08 And so I think for us, I think it leads us in a unique position of folks often ask us where we fit in terms of competition. And we still aim to be the most cost effective media asset management solution. There are some products that are kind of very simple and do overlap with us at the low end. Those kinds of products is kind of simple to make a simple product looks simple. I guess our challenge is we've got a powerful product and we try with that with our interfaces to hide away that complexity. It was interesting. You said at the beginning, you know, I think we have some, we have some cool interfaces and over time we'll have even more cool interfaces for, for engaging with cat DV. Now you mentioned there might be instances where a user sort of finds a limitation within a media asset manager. Speaker 1 26:56 It may be related to a Kodak. Yeah. Now I know you guys are working on a codec support. Forward-looking correct. Completely. So one of the things that folks like about cat DV is that we try to handle whatever inbound media you throw at us. And, uh, and so that's really cool for lots of people. They don't want to have to say, Oh, I've got to drive for the staff. I'm just going to ingest it and then wait for a day before I can actually take a look at it. They want to take a look now and they want to be able to start sorting and logging immediately. And we don't folks like that. So we're doing a pile of work to improve that. And there'll be some great announcements around that at NAB, but we find that even with some massively high end products. So we're in a, we're in a piece of work at the moment where a customer has got completely fed up with their dialect system. Speaker 1 27:44 And so Dilla is at the ultimate other end of the market from our site app, mouth mass, in terms of cost, you know, have you got a million dollars? I always seem to hear it followed by the phrase. And yet someone is totally sick of it and pulling their hair not. And so, so the key reason that this customer is considering a move is that they can throw a pile of formats at cat DV and we'll try and play them. And we've very successfully do in the vast majority of cases. Whereas, you know, for the, for the kind of interplays and for the dialects of the world, there was some real lockdown on the kind of formats you can work with. And there's plenty of trans codes going on to make that stuff work. And in the lower cost part of the market as well, you know, a lot of these products are based on it. Speaker 1 28:25 We have to transcode everything to H two, six, four, to be able to do anything with it. We take a different approach. Folks, folks don't naturally work with Dalits favorite, uh, Kodak or average, favorite codec, or HT 64 folks shoot or video cameras. And we try and handle video learns it literally this past week. Someone I know who was just playing around with the Dalit system is a little consulting gig. And he tells me, Nick, you have to lock the system to a frame rate. And I said, well, what do you mean? You have to lock the system to a frame, right? And he's like, it won't handle footage that isn't in the standard frame rate of the system. I'm like, Ooh, I didn't know that one big, terrible FCP timeline right there. I know right from days of your life. And I'm like, but it's your ma'am. Speaker 1 29:14 You may be having to deal with many different types of formats and whatnot, probably by design, by virtue of design. You should. So back to your back to your point though. So some of the stuff that's going to be coming from cat DV 11, uh, is going to include some new player technology that will increase the number of formats that we can play natively. But more importantly for me then it, it gives us an architecture where we can plug in new players, as new technologies come out, we're watching with interest. We've always been one of the close partners of Apple. In fact, when final cut 10 came out, we were the first folks to be able to share metadata between final cut seven and final accounts, the first, even before Apple. And they recognized that too, they, they, they like us and we like them. Speaker 1 29:57 So we're watching with interest. Uh, what's going to happen with the new macros and, uh, final cut X 0.1 and native 4k workflows. And what happens with that? All that technology is available to us now through the API that Apple provide with final cut X 0.1. We're not, we're not there for cat DV 11 to do a plugin for that stuff, but the door is open for that kind of integration. And we're watching with interest, you know, who uses these kinds of native 4k workflows and how does this hardware work out and how do you get stuff to it? And it looks very cool sitting on a desk, but you know, what, what about the rest of the storage and the networking and the, uh, the archive. And, Speaker 0 30:35 And again, one of the things we always look for in developer partners are folks who, yes, there always need to be features and new features and things that make people's day to day moments of their lives easier. Um, but paying also attention to that architecture side of things, and maybe making investments in development time, in things that are going to allow your product to, to be viable to the client three or five years from now. So they don't have to look at a wholesale replacement of their platform, but the platform itself is going to gain levels of sophistication and modernity that, that allow it to work in the world of five years from now and not just today. So <inaudible>, I like it. I was a goodie. I want the college stuffs. So, so we've talked about that. And that's obviously taking place in the, in the main cat DV, you know, user interface application that people are interacting with, but obviously Captiva has these other components. Speaker 0 31:36 One of them, I always loved the name, the worker node, you know, it's, it is, it is a hammer and sickle exactly. Right. I feel like that's like brought to you by Joseph Stalin and the, in red we could do with the branding on that seriously, man, seriously, although now might not be the right time crane stuff, but, but, uh, but with the worker node, this is of course cat TVs, automation, component automation, and the automating of workflows that a human should necessarily need to be involved with every step of the way that other main portion of a ma'am system. In addition to the search and tagging technologies, of course, tell me how are people using worker node and especially in some of these more complex or scaled out environments, because it's something that we know how to work with very closely. We've done a lot of very interesting integrations between worker node and transcoding software platforms, worker node, and you know, other types of notification systems, worker node, and archival software. And so, you know, there's a lot of things that you can plug into cat DV, and a lot of the times these, these things are happening through worker node. I'm curious just to see what you've gleaned from use cases, as far as like just some neat stuff that your clientele are doing with that. Yeah. Speaker 1 32:55 And that absolutely. So DV work in node. We tried to design the cat DV worker a bit like Microsoft Excel. It kind of gets people coding without knowing their coding and the cat DV work nodes gets people doing some pretty complicated scripting and workflow design without kind of realizing they're doing it. Um, the Academy working out is one of the, one of the many API APIs that exist around cat DV. So you can control cat DV using the worker node, changing metadata reporting and such like the workload can control other stuff. It's got a load of hooks for command line integration and XML integration with other staff. And then it adds to things like our list API for further automation, integration and new user interfaces and our server API, which lets folks extend the functionality inside cat DV and cat DV is web clients. So we've got a big pile of these API, the work, a really important one. Speaker 1 33:50 So stuff that people are doing with the worker node. So KTV is a great transcoder, but at the same time, if some folks have other investment in other hardware or software technologies or have particular speed requirements, then our transcoder might well not be the right thing for them. And so we've got some tutorials up on the website that just expose some of these, uh, these integrations. So we've got one, uh, for integration with episode and other ones, uh, with transcodes with redline while the web tools, another one for transcoding with FFM peg. And we know a load of folks have integrated with their hardware based transcode is mainly using the XML integration. You drop an XML that says, I want to transcode these things in these formats, put them in this place. And then, you know, this is your typical integration with a hardware. Speaker 0 34:39 And so they're building those, those trans code profile. XMLs in cat DV using one of the tabs, maybe that they've customized for an asset. Yeah. And then have like a push button automation to send that XML to the transcoder along with the asset in code these parameters, maybe even like encoding some of the delivery location information and you know, one push button publishing, which is 20, 25 different steps that are all happening. And a user just has to check a checkbox. So JPL, Speaker 1 35:12 Well, NASA used cat DV to catalog the history of space science for the world. And, uh, my, my major was in physics. And so that is just so cool for me to be able to say, Speaker 0 35:21 Yeah, of course, it's only like the last one 50 years versus like just the history of the world, which is like, <inaudible> Speaker 1 35:29 Hey, I'm you, you can't, you can't this NASA man. Uh, Speaker 0 35:32 So at what they do when they start flying man spaceships, again, I'll be a little nicer. Speaker 1 35:38 Oh, you can, you can dig out that afternoon astronauts suit from back in the day. We love NASA. We love, uh, so, so, you know, they have, so the history of space science, uh, in cat DV, you can go into cat DV, know voyages, leaving the solar system. I've left the solar system now, but you can say, show me stuff about Voyager and it'll show you it being built. It'll show it passing, come the major planet, uh, any footage that was made at the time. And so it's a hugely valuable thing, what they do when they put together their rough cut and cat DV they'll then say, well, I want to transcode that. And they'll automatically transcode it into 12 different formats for giving to the global broadcasters through to putting out in, you know, small kind of iPod friendly or iPhone friendly videos. So about 12 formats and cat DV will orchestrate the transcode of all that stuff work. I can do that. It can also then send that stuff elsewhere. So we've got an FTP file, catalyst workflow documented on our website. And we know a lot of people use it with us power to be able to ship this content around after you've made it Speaker 0 36:43 Blam. So go all UDP on that stuff. I wonder out loud if the Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy, the video version, if that would run cat TV over time, probably that like damn this legacy code from the year 1999. No. Well, you know, there'll be like good house, thank God for this code that's scaled. And they, they kept, you know, bringing into the realm of modernity. Right. Well, you know, it's, whoever has to asset catalog some Vogan poetry, I suppose. Seriously. So, yeah. So, um, we've talked about worker node. We've obviously chatted a bit about some of the interesting stuff going on with the, the new main, you know, cat DV application. You know, the other side of cat TV is the web client. And you know, one of the, you know, I always try to describe to people, you know, media, asset management, as far as the thing you, as the end user are interacting with God generally falls under one of maybe two camps. Speaker 0 37:45 There's the fairly intense tool with a lot of builtin capabilities, often very oriented around the needs of the post production expert, the creative, I need to find things to bounce into a timeline and this NLA, or I need to open it up and find her so I can bring this selection of stuff into an after effects project. And they're going in and out. You know, the man is probably up and running at all times and it's just stuff bouncing back and forth. And they're producing new content using the math, essentially as a tool, as part of that process. And those folks have a lot of pretty specific needs, um, that can tie into all aspects of cat DV. Then there are some other users that often the ability to search for things, or maybe even kick off some of these automation processes and delivery processes are, do review and approval stuff, just so they have a little window into it. Speaker 0 38:42 And yeah, that looks good. Here's a couple of notes on a few markers on own and tweak that and hold that three seconds longer. Yeah. They need a lighter experience. A lot of them want it on a, a web of browser versus a full on application that they have to launch. They need it to be very simplified. They obviously want it to be supported on modern web browser technology. So different types of platforms, maybe even mobile can support it fluidly and elegantly. So you guys have this thing called the cat DV web, the client, which is different than what do you like the enterprise client is the full client application. And tell me about what's been going on with that because, you know, that serves the needs of this whole other crowd of users. And then again, a thing I really like about cat DV is you inherently have these two tiers of interface. Whereas a lot of the other platforms may be specialized in one and rarely want to get their hands dirty. And another one. So tell me about web client, where you see it's going some of the love that you guys have been giving it and were you aware we can take it and expect it to go and, and how that might serve people? Speaker 1 39:52 Yeah. And when we talk about the web plant, actually even that kind of shards down into two different things, because we have the web client and then we have the web services clients. And so the web client is a cut down version of cat DV that very deliberately has a cat DV look and feel to it a much less on the screen and a cut down piece of functionality. But we did a refresh of this last year and we added things like upload download more sophisticated searching sub clipping markers and simple kind of cut lists. At the same time, we, we added the ability to integrate with our server API. So you could kick off some extension workflows in cat DV, and that's pretty cool. That's getting a really nice reaction. And it really was, it was probably a little bit overdue in terms of refresh and it's kind of filled out the product quite a lot. Speaker 1 40:40 And so I think that is a really, really good addition to the cat DV stable, but at the same time, and almost more importantly, the thing that drives that is our web services API and our web client is the first implementation that, uh, now uses that web services API. And we've got a few more. So we have an iPhone, an iPad application. In fact, we have two one's called cat DV review, and one's called cat DV approved. The KTV, reviewed the read only version of cat DV with all the same security and all that kind of stuff. And you can just look at the metadata and the footage in cat DV, really simple, the approve application just lets you change status and put some notes in for the footage that you're allowed to see. And those were both written using the web services API. And then we also ship with a couple of example, applications that really show the art of the possible. Speaker 1 41:31 They're probably not completely ready for time, but they show the kind of thing you can do in cat DV. And it just looks a bit, you know, one of them's or looks a bit like YouTube, you can choose a selection of clips. You can see a select small selection of the metadata. And in fact, an application was written for the London Paralympics going back to 2012, that used an early version of this web services API, to be able to show the footage from the Paralympics on a webpage, it didn't look anything like cat DV. It had somebody else's branding on it entirely. So the global broadcast it could see and then order the organ was by telephone, but could see, and then order footage from the, from the day's worth of events. And so, you know, we, we believe that folks should be able to interact with cat DV and the way that really suits the way they work. So in the cat desktop clients, if you've got a lager, the logger will only see the logging page and that'll carry across to the Academy web clients and then other applications or other apps can be with other applications or user interfaces could be written that suit particular users, a producer wants to see different stuff from an editor. What is Speaker 0 42:36 The, the coding skill set that maybe an organization's web team would need to have in order to start delving into the API documentation for the web services? Speaker 1 42:46 Yeah, so it's a, it's a, it's a rest API and it's a wittered so web services and web development skills. And part of the reason we've invested so much in these API APIs is so that it makes it easier to extend cat DV and it makes it easier for us to grow the product. It makes it easier for us to grow our development team. I think the development team is getting on for doubled in the last year. And rather than everyone having to learn everything about every part of cat DV, these API let us and our partners, whether that be customers, retailers, distributors, or independent integrators, right. Their own staff. And I was down with one of our bigger customers this week, looking at what they'd done with their web integration, with cat DV, for many of their major channels. And it's incredible. It doesn't look anything like cat DV, but cat DV, the engine behind all this stuff that manages security, I'm managing the assets, managing the amount of data. It's a great implementation. Cool, cool. Speaker 0 43:42 Very cool. And again, I think with ma'am systems in general, there's as many of those cool stories as there are people who are using a particular platform, cause they, they ended up becoming different things and employ, you know, you emphasize different uses or tools within them, you know, depending on a particular project, a particular workflow, how, how your organization works, the type of products you're doing. I mean, cat TV, I think can have a role in an organization that's turning out 24 second commercials, or, you know, small little training videos or people who are doing a documentary, a full feature length documentary who maybe have a giant catalog of just footage. They've been accumulating for several years or talking just about the, the reams of footage, gosh, reality TV, right? Some of the clients that we deal with, we've probably talked about before hundreds to one shooting ratios, you know, four or 500 hours for every hour that makes it onto television and they have to sift through it and find the stuff that makes an entertaining program and search for flipped table. Speaker 0 44:48 And, and, and honestly, based, based on the quality of a lot of reality TV, it seems like they could certainly use more tools that allow them to more efficiently find better content, right. Search for terminology, except for our clients who make the best reality television now. Well, here's the thing about the best reality television. It can still be kind of trashy that's. What's so great. It's true. It's deep. I mean, kind of like the Oscars when she took that selfie and it was so clearly like a pay to promotional thing from Samsung. I mean, it was like fun, but kind of just feel dirty afterwards trashy. It was like really direct product placement at the Oscar. It was pretty amazing. You know, just imagine what, what advertising will look like in the future and imagine what advertisers could do cataloging their assets if they're generating, if they're, you know, and we're speaking a little facetiously here, but it's interesting, right? Speaker 0 45:39 Cause I've, I've, I've had a lot of conversations recently with different people and getting them to realize that the, the media that they generate as part of their jobs, isn't, isn't just the stuff they need to get the job done, but it's their inventory, you know, it's the product they have. And as you said earlier, Dave, you know, the ability to repurpose, you know, keep that catalog available for maybe your own clientele and, you know, recognize new revenue streams by allowing them portals into their own content, if you will. So they can, you know, it wouldn't be great set up a web client login for your client that, you know, maybe you're a small firm and you've got, you know, five biggies that you work with. And it's like, yeah, here's your catalog guys. You can't see anyone else's, you can search for things. We're going to give you a paired down metadata set. You can look for all of your talking head events, all of this, all of that, all the commercials we produced for you and then your own marketing team can just have their own little login and get in there. Speaker 1 46:37 We have folks doing that with kind of DV. You know, we have some folks that deploy cat DV into the cloud. Uh, we have some folks that in fact, there's a service company that acts as a, uh, an archive and a storage service for their customers. They use cat DV to be able to present that stuff out, to segregate different customers from each other more in terror. Santee, I'd love for you to, you know, talk a little bit more about these, uh, these cloud based use cases. So you have folks who have, uh, enterprise installations of cat V that are running on virtualized servers in the cloud. Yeah, absolutely. So, um, in cat DV can run one of <inaudible> strengths is its flexibility. So we don't mind whether it's installed on OSX on windows or on Linux. And so the cat DV server can happily run there then. Speaker 1 47:20 Yeah. So one of our, one of our bigger customers, they've got a, they're going to handle it, Amazon web services thing going on, they use a spare to, uh, accelerate data into I'm going to get the terminology wrong, but at the S two storage of a part of a it's good enough. Yeah, it sounds good. Um, and so KTV runs on the web and, uh, they use the upload and download in the web client. Um, you can, uh, you can D you can show the cat DV proxies web proxies in a standard cat DV, desktop client two. And so they're quite happily one in cat DV. So when you're, when you're connecting with the cat DV, a desktop client, you're just navigating to the, uh, the cloud-based location and everything else is, is presenting itself as though we're, we're a local install. That's right. Yeah. Speaker 1 48:06 Oh, gosh. It's almost like you could offer cat TV as a service. You know, we think about it, cat, SAS, cat, cat, SAS, sassy cat. I think we might not call it cat's ass dogs basically. And so something, yeah. Um, I've lost my thread. I was like guys software as a service or otherwise yeah. Cat's ass. I think isn't currently on the agenda. Uh, so we, you know, we believe we are experts in wanting media asset management software, and we have a part of things that we want to do, and we are doing with the product, and we want to stick to those things where we think we are, we can be the best in the world at doing them. I think that would be moving to software as a service will be a big step for us. It could be a good money on her, but I think we need, as far as a company, we need some focus. Speaker 1 49:03 And at the moment, our focus is all about making great asset management products. And the reality is that's why he's the CEO people. The reality is you're also enabling other people to turn those services on. And if there's, there's really nothing stopping third parties from creating those services themselves. Absolutely. You know, we, um, we introduce, we changed that price list last year. And we, the unlimited web client was always a price on application, the Western market question, Mark, uh, and we decided that that was should change. And so now that's, uh, I think that's 17 nine, nine, five, but that means that a customer can put that on a machine and the bigger the machine, the more uses it can support. And that's your total investment to support however many hundreds of, uh, casual web customers that are customer casual web users that you want to interact with KTV. Speaker 1 49:53 And if you want to do smaller numbers of web clients, the web clients, specifically you guys license in terms of simultaneous users, correct. That's right. So our smallest web where Bumble, I guess he's a couple of web sessions and depending on usage that could still support many tens of users. You know, if you've got a few folks that only kind of look every once in a while, say you're an advertising agency and you're delivering some, some proofs, you might not be working on that many accounts at the same time, a couple might well be fine for you. But then if you realize, if you hit that edge, you call Chesapeake systems and we sort you out, we send you a quote for your additional web clients Speaker 2 50:28 And budgeting, bada boom, signed picture comes up. You know, if that will help, then I'd even do that. I think. So you're a charming guy. Thank you very much. We've got the accent. That's Americans just think it's cool and it doesn't work so well in the UK might work for you. You gotta, you gotta travel over there. See how the ladies like that. Yeah. I don't know, proper American. I'm not known for my voice. It's amazing that I'm doing an audio podcast. It's we, we all have faces for radio here. There's no question. Yeah. But, uh, so Cathy V voices for braille, but, uh, we, um, you know, Kathy V I, I think if I could make an observation about the product, certainly over the, um, you know, the landscape things are different now, you know, I hear 4k about as much as I heard FireWire back when, you know, we sort of kicked off that cycle and it's almost like HD, the cycle of HD was half the cycle. Speaker 2 51:31 I think I expected it to be with 4k coming up right here. And three years from now, you'll be talking about support for 3d environments, for the Oculus rift, virtual reality headset, 4k, whatever, whatever we live in the video we take <inaudible> and call it a day. Right. But NICU had made a comment that that was really on point, which was that, you know, uh, our transition from, from a tape or even film based workflow to a tapeless workflow, like happen like that. I mean, like, and I'm not that old. And I feel old thinking about the transition time between when it happened and where we are now, you know, just, it speaks volumes to just how quickly the, the marketplace is changing. But, you know, one of the things that I've observed is that the foundations of those marketplaces, they really serve as anchors over many, several decades. Speaker 2 52:26 So like Kathy, the, uh, is an example that I would say in many cases, there's sort of the media asset manager 1.0, I mean, they were the first kids in the block. I mean, they're the one that, you know, if I'm talking to a guy about asset management, it's nine times out of 10, the first asset manager that they mentioned is khatibi and it's, it's actually, it makes me feel very good, especially from an editor perspective, to know that cat DV is aware that while they were the first guy on the block, that they're really keeping, keeping their, their, their, um, their sword sharp and continue to develop, um, uh, in what I call burgeoning areas of media, asset management. You know, there are things that we talked about today that I know other asset managers are tackling and, and it makes me feel good because I know in my heart, I have confidence level in KTV that, that aligns with the, with the feature set you're discussing. Oh, that's cool. And, you know, I think that that's, that's great feedback for us. And I think the, uh, what are the other things that, um, Speaker 1 53:26 We think is vitally important? One of the things I say to my guys actually is I never want anyone to not buy cat DV, cause it doesn't work with their favorite flavor of storage or archiving. And so another cool thing that we are doing at the moment is working, uh, through a partnership to provide integrations, better integrations with many of the world's best archive companies. So we've got a couple out of the gate through this partnership. So there's a quantum StorNext integration and the ASG, a tempo integration with cat DV that provides API level integrations with those products for very efficient and very safe archiving, plus a whole load of feedback and a status stuff. And when you say store next, you're talking about quantum, a storage manager. Yeah. Speaker 0 54:13 The HSM and policy-based archive system. And, you know, that's great because we find that archival needs are often a good, I don't want to say Trojan horse for mammon an organization, but they're a good first run use case, you know, because again, to take ma'am as a set of technologies into an organization and just be like, man, you know, drink the ma'am, Kool-Aid like this can change everything. Like that becomes really overwhelming for people. And if we can say, listen, what about finding things in your archives more easily and moving things from a spinning disc tier to tape and giving you a very useful front end to do that, that gives you the ability to view proxies and search for metadata people like great, great. That's that's a great first step. Let me browse my stuff, Speaker 1 55:00 Whether it be on nearline offline far, like Fireline archive, whatever you want to call it. Um, being able to just view that stuff where wherever it is is one of Kathy's biggest strengths. And I think for 80% of our customers use cat DV as a window onto their storage. However, they happen to have their storage. Uh, they can also use cat DV and the worker to manage policies about how long things stay in various tiers and all that kind of good stuff. But, but absolutely it's crucial for us. And so that's why we've done this partnership. We've got the first two at NEB. We're going to have a big pile more so. Speaker 0 55:37 Well, it does sound like nib, which is only a month away from now. I know, I know we have got affects coding so far is going to be exciting though. A lot of cool announcements and gosh, I just can't wait to get out of the snow and the cold. So go to Vegas. I never looked for, I mean, I love nib. I love seeing people like you. And a lot of people, we only see one a couple of times a year maybe, but you know, it's a, it's a pretty overwhelming experience. But after this winter, man, I am just like, put me in the desert now, you know, maybe I'll just hang out in Vegas for a few extra weeks. Sure. Nothing bad will happen. Just stay out there, man. I got, I got you. I got you covered a few weeks in Vegas. I think could turn you a little twisted. Speaker 0 56:19 Three months later, I get a phone call on a Sunday afternoon from Nick. Where are you Ben man. Well, listen, are there any parting words that you want to tell people who are maybe considering a man platform and you know, just the, like, you know, from your point of view and you know, I think, you know, we take a very agnostic look at ma'ams and fitting one to someone's needs. And the thing we like about, you know, the number of men vendors that we work with is that I don't think any of them really want to be in an environment where it's not the right fit because frankly it, you want it to be the right fit. You want to have a success story out of it. You don't want to be cramming a piece of software into a round hole with a square peg and, and you know, so that's why we, we have you and a few others that we work with. But again, you know, we've talked a lot about what makes cat DV unique, but again, for someone, from your perspective, who's, who's thinking about getting into this area. Just again, what's that, that final point that you give about kind of what you really feel is differentiating you guys at this point Speaker 1 57:21 About cat DV is flexibility, its simplicity, the power in the automation and the workflow tools that we've got. One of the things we haven't really covered is kind of safety and security. So KTV has been around for a long time and we intend to be around for a lot longer. We're well funded and we're a successful product when folks buy asset management, you know, there's a lot of products out there and you want to be sure you're making the right one or backing the right one. So, you know, with cat DV, it's a product has been around for a long time. We have invested hugely in support in the last year. You know, I came on a trip a bit like this last year and I didn't get overwhelmingly positive feedback about our support. So we've, uh, we worked with a big distributor out here, JB and EI to jointly fund a dedicated cat DV expert for FirstLine support in the U S and while it's West coast, but in a U S time zone, uh, we've put better systems in place we've hired back in the UK. Speaker 1 58:25 And so we've turned what was good support into what I think now is outstanding support. And I think that is when you're making a big decision, um, about putting an asset management system in place. You don't just need to have the cool bells and whistles. You need to be sure that it's from a company that's going to be around for a bit and isn't going to disappear. And when the, how many of them have even including the big ones from Apple and that when, if there are issues during your installation or as things go that, that you can turn to some folks for help. And so I think I'd add that to the cold conversation as well. Um, Speaker 0 58:56 No, I mean, that's great. You are making an investment in something that's going to change the way you work eventually positively, you know, greater efficiency opened up whole new, you know, vehicles for, for your expression of video and the type of things that you can do to get it out there to your clients or whomever. But yeah, you're making a decision that can fundamentally change your organization and who is your partner in going to be? Speaker 1 59:22 And I think you say that very elegantly Dave and we, we would in no way question that we've been working with you guys for almost a decade for what it's worth. Right. You know, so there's a, we need a cake. We should, Oh, wait, we'll wait to the true 10 year anniversary. You know, I'll, I'll be a couple of years older and you know, we'll do, we'll do it up. Right. But you know, it's, it's, it's great because, uh, you know, there's an instance where we're Chesapeake systems, we've been basically alongside cat DV, uh, through this growth, um, through sort of its infancy into a much more fully baked product into now something that is having, um, great new development, uh, put under it. That's, uh, I think that's great. It reflects on Chesapeake systems really back in the right horse, I think early on in the game. Speaker 1 00:07 Well, I'm not gonna lie. I've, I've busted out at a lot of meetings. I, that story about meeting Rolf in the, in the 10 by 10, at the hall, like to boost our own credibility and at working with vendors that we recognize from an early point, there's something special about these guys. It's important from our perspective too. So we're committed to the channel and selling through our sophisticated dealers and resellers and that's okay. It's kind of, it's easier for us to go through a channel to sell, but actually it's better for customers as well because you know, you can use half of a successful media asset management implementation. It's not which software you choose. There are other good products out there, you know, um, it's part, partly the advice you get from your advisors and resellers that can talk intelligently about workflow that can understand customer's problems and then can put together solutions that fix those problems is just what customers really need. I think Captiva and asset management fits really well into those conversations. Um, but our perspective is that it needs that level of local sophisticated understanding and engagement, probably over a long term to really get inside a customer's skin and to work out what they need. And so that's why we deal with resellers such as yourselves and some of the best in the business, because we believe it gets our customer better implementations. At the end of the day. I swear to God, I don't have a gun to his head right now. Speaker 1 01:34 And that's how, that's how you end a wonderful podcast, right? There may have been implied violence, but I mean, it was, it was purely implied. Dave clack, CEO of square box. Thank you so much for coming out today. This has been a very, very deep and sophisticated conversation, which we fully expected, and we just love having you guys in a partner as well and, and expect it to be another 10 years. Wonderful. It's a real pleasure guys. Thank you for having me. Thank you. Thank you for coming out. Thank you for listening to another episode of the workflow show tune in next time. And that will probably be our post nib wrap up. So lots of fun stuff to report that.