 Hi everybody, we're back. This is Dave Vellante. We're here at HP Discover Day Two, we're at the Sands Convention Center in Las Vegas. This is the cube where we extract the signal from the noise. We bring you the best guests at these events and share with you their knowledge. I'm at Dave Vellante. If you want to tweet me questions, please do so. Two folks from all digital are here. They do broadcasting to mobile devices. We're going to get into that and talk about that quite a bit. Steve Smith is the vice president of network services and to my immediate left is Tim Napoleon, who's the chief strategist at all digital gentlemen. Thanks for coming on the cube and welcome. Thanks for inviting us. Yeah, so we were just talking about, this is your first HP Discover, but you've been HP customer for quite some time. But let's start with all digital. Guys based in Southern California, where all the action is in media. Tell us a little bit about the company. Who wants to take that? So the problem we tried to solve in the marketplace is we see there's a huge opportunity to help bring broadcast solutions to virtually anyone. So that could be a brand, that could be an enterprise company, could be an individual personality. So what they want to be able to do is take live and on demand content, ingest that into the cloud and get that out on their favorite devices, whether that's a mobile device, a tablet, a desktop, or even connected televisions. There's use cases across all those different verticals to really get their content services across as ever expanding universes of devices. Why they want to do that is because the audience, where people's attentions are turning to, are on these devices. You see the viewership, the video, and other types of services on devices going way up. Well, it's interesting, we were, John Furrier and I, my partner, we were talking the other day about the whole Nielsen ratings. Organizations have been canceling, the broadcasters have been canceling certain shows, and then they're realizing, wow, we're kind of using an outdated metric here. We're not counting, I don't know what the Nielsen measures, maybe a couple hundred thousand, maybe not even, maybe it's a couple thousand households. And here we are with mobile, and iPads, and everybody watching content online. So it must be a huge boost to your business all this action. Absolutely, you think about the term broadcast you use at Nielsen, and that used to just measure a few key broadcasters. At one point it's probably a handful, now it's maybe a few hundred. But with our software and cloud, what we're trying to enable is almost virtually anyone to be a broadcaster. So we have people that are literally on their iPhones creating their own broadcast going into the cloud and out to the different devices and audiences, or we have much more sophisticated traditional broadcasters that are getting things like live local news out to a new audience on all these different devices. So how's the service work? Talk about the sort of how I engage with all digital. So it's very simple in the sense that we have a product called all digital cloud. It's a cloud-based solution. You simply sign up with that, and then we give you a set of instructions on how to originate content into the system. And then we can go through a discovery process where we help you say what devices you want to be on, maybe what you want to have apps that work on those devices, how you want those to look. And our professional services team and integration services team configure those experiences for you. And then people can find your app in the Apple app store on the Android Play store on your favorite smart television platform. So the app, the content that's embedded within an app can be embedded in an app or can be available on an HTML5 type mobile web or desktop browser. And the value that you guys bring is turnkeying that experience. And there's additional promotion involved or not necessarily, it's up to me to promote, correct? Yeah, we're not the marketing arm for your company. We're more of the technical execution of it. But really what's great from a marketer's point of view is you're now able to get to lots of different devices. So maybe you don't have to just serve an audience on one specific platform. You can take your broadcast message and go as wide as possible. Okay, so you're like a better YouTube? Is that fair? I would say that YouTube is a phenomenal company and they give you a lot of ability to show videos online. What we find is a lot of our companies want a lot of control. They want to have control about what content, maybe what business models. They want control about how their brand is presented and what venues. And so we would be more appropriate for people that want to have control of their broadcast experience and keep it to the audiences that they find appropriate. Okay, and they might want to control the revenue flow too. They might want to have all the revenue go directly to them, that's a great point. All right, so Steve, talk about the network requirements. That's obviously your area of expertise. How are they evolving? What's changing as a result of all this video explosion and mobile explosion? How does that put increased pressure on what you have to do? Certainly we needed a way to solve the, to take large file sets, both the object size themselves, might be a large broadcast quality mezzanine asset. It might be a small mobile asset. It might be text files, it might be images and give that, present that in the cloud. So an example workflow that we see is we have a customer that has a mobile broadcast application. So anybody can download this app out of the iTunes store, put it on their phone and become a broadcaster. They do a short three minute clip. We will broadcast that live. At the conclusion of that broadcast, we take that asset and we store it on the store all and then we transcode it into a couple of different derivative formats and then present that for delivery out on the internet on demand. So they do live events with that. They also do just individual one to one, but that's an example workflow. So the file system, we needed something that could scale both in terms of size to be able to support a very large and complex name space, but also so that we could support the scalability, in other words, the performance of both ingesting those objects and delivering those objects. Well, that happened to make copies of them and move them into different areas for delivery. So we should talk. So here we are, we're on theCUBE. You getting this, Mark? We're doing live broadcasts, right? You said, so how would we engage? Let's say, so we're doing theCUBE, we're doing this live videos. You see this little mobile studio that we have here. You know, we're pumping out content like crazy. I guess that you can kind of watch it on your mobile. It's not necessarily the greatest experience. I mean, it kind of depends, but so, so what would we get from working with you guys? Yeah, so we have a product. It's called the all digital cloud. You can log into that product and you can set up a set of workflows and business rules and then that'll create a player object that you can then develop into your app framework. Or we can do that for you. And essentially the end user experience might be that you'd have a, let's say an iPad app. That iPad app can feature a live button when you're broadcasting live. You know, your favorite on-demand clips. Maybe you want to have some of the clips with your key partners be subscription. Maybe some of the clips you want to have advertising models. So you set those business rules and business tools. We can figure that all for you. And then the finished product is a very nice engaging app that you control. Additionally, maybe you want to have some RSS feeds. Maybe you want to have your Twitter and social integrated. Maybe you want to want the audience to be able to share clips from that app out to their friends that are on Facebook and other social media sites. So the experience from your point of view is it's a very turnkey service. And then once it's done, you now have the ability from a show like this to upload live or on-demand clips right into the system. And within a few minutes or live, if it's a live stream, publishes out to all of your audience in these various apps. Okay, so I would be of course responsible for the equipment that allows me to live stream on the web to your platform. Correct. So we connect into that. You would ingest that content. And then depending on how we set things up, what the policies are, the content would be rendered in the solution that we choose. Absolutely. And then the nice thing is your business rules, your content workflows, you're not having to replicate that for every device that you want to go to. Right. So using all digital, we provide a unified platform so you can publish to all these different connected experiences. Meaning different platforms, different operating systems. Yeah, so maybe you want a Roku channel or maybe you want to, you know, the new Xbox 720, maybe they need a channel. Maybe you want to have mobile, maybe you want to have iPad. So the goal of the platform is to be able to support all these new connected devices that come out and have your broadcast experience work on each one of them. That's cool. Definitely want to, that's the guy right there you got to talk to Mark Hopkins. I love it. Doesn't it? I love it. Real-time biz dev on the queue. My job is done here. All right, so Steve, you were talking a little bit about some of the requirements that you have and you guys are a Store All customer. Yes. So talk about how you use that platform. So Store All is effectively the center of our cloud universe. We have adopted basically a grid computing concept where we have clusters of machines that do various things in the workflow. For example, we have a group of machines that will do DRM encryption. We have other machines that will do DBR-like functions. We have other machines that will do server-side recording of live streams. We have other machines that will do transcoding. So the beauty of Store All is that we can scale it out in terms of performance. We can present that same namespace to a number of different machines. Either it'll look like block storage, it might look like NFS storage, but we can present that same file. So I don't need to move it around to other areas to do things to it. For example, like Tim said, if you have live events such as this, we can do a server-side recording on that. And then based on the workflow that you've designed, we can transcode that into, say, six derivative output formats, supporting Android, tablet, Android device, iOS, iPad, whatever your formats that you are, we can transcode those the moment that the broadcast is done. Now we have your recording. I don't need to replicate it within my cloud to do those sort of things because we have one center of storage. So, okay, so you've got some IP that does that, obviously. That's not a trivial thing. So I don't have to make six copies and suck up a ton of storage. That's very important when you're dealing, particularly with large objects like broadcast quality mezzanine, those can be two, 15, 20 gigabits in size. It's very large. Oh yeah, we face that all the time. We're constantly running out of storage here. All right, so Store All is the center of that pipeline. We were talking off camera a little bit about object. Do you see sort of object storage as a potential future direction that you guys would go? From the, I'll let Steve handle the technical term. From the business side, what we see that the opportunity that's really exciting to us is, if you think about all these different combinations, right? So you have just, even as a small broadcaster like ourselves, you know, thousands of assets coming into the platform. And then you're going to potentially, you know, millions of different device combinations. It creates potentially billions of different asset types. And so being able to search, find, query, do all of those different things very quickly really gives the broadcaster a competitive advantage because if you start to see in the broadcast world, especially in news and breaking news, the first person to get that article or that story out on the web, it's going to get the lion's share of the audience and the viewership. So all of this technology, one of the key benefits that drives back for the business user is it allows them to quickly create a channel, quickly search, find and add content to those channels and then distribute it very fast. And so you want a workflow that doesn't take weeks or days or hours, you want a workflow that's as near to real time as possible, even as your asset databases grow to billions and billions of objects. But to you, so we, I used the YouTube example before, I know it well, because that's what we use, but the real value that you bring is control over that experience. But unless I'm missing something, is there some inherent, you know, speed factor? It's because of your workflow system, I guess, right? Absolutely. Because I don't fully understand what that's all about relative to them. We designed our own workflow, I guess is the answer there. We have a homegrown workflow, so. Yeah, so you really, you know, the second that your video is published, how quickly is that available on an on-demand asset and all these different devices out there in your universe? And we think that making that a very fast, efficient process is important. Yeah, so for us, it's minutes, you know, which is pretty good. Yes. Right? But it wasn't always minutes. It used to be days or hours, you know. It took some effort to do that. But okay, so, but you got that right out of the box. That comes with the platform. So somebody that didn't sweat for two years trying to figure that out, you kind of get that immediately. Okay, that makes sense. We're making it easy for you. Yeah, right. All right, good. All right, talk about your, more about your relationship with HP. You guys been a customer of this for a long time? Or is the store all, it's kind of a new deal? Yeah, we were involved with a group called Ibrics. Yeah, okay. When that product launched, in fact, we really helped them kind of bake that product in. Yep. At our previous company, and the company was acquired by HP, still maintain a relationship with a lot of the Ibrics team that then became part of the store all team and continue that today. We help HP test their new store all software versions in addition to running store all in our production environment. What about analytics? We got all this metadata floating around out there around, particularly in video, when it was done, maybe some other attributes of metadata. Do you see analytics playing a role in either today or in the future in terms of adding value to your customers? Absolutely, in the broadcast world, if you don't measure it, it didn't happen. It's kind of the tree that fell in the woods, right? Right. You didn't record that. You can't sell it to advertisers. You can't record it for royalties. So having a very robust platform that not only can broadcast messages out, but also receive all that audience data back. And so store all is a great platform from that perspective that you have the disk speed and the disk IO to not only both be a broadcaster on the outbound, but take all of that data that comes back from those different apps back into the platform. So whether that data is people uploading videos or that's ad beacons or that's different types of analytic markers that you want to track, all of that comes back from the audience back into the system. And then it can be leveraged with your favorite reporting tools whether that's like an Omniture or Google Analytics or any of the HP products that do big data analysis. Okay, so you'll feed, for instance, maybe Google Analytics or Omniture is another one, but so you'll feed those systems and then I get my dashboards. Okay, so that's cool. Now, we've seen before, so you don't have a live platform, right? I pick my own live platform and then bring it to you or do you actually have a live platform? So you push a live stream into us from your favorite encoding product. Okay. And then we take it from that. So talk about that a little bit. That's another part that I'm very interested in. So what differentiates you from other guys out there, just the TV, live stream, YouTube's now got its own live platform if you meet criteria. Again, it's a unified workflow that you have total control over. So just like you would dictate with your on-demand clips, who gets to see it? What's your business model? What's your economics around it? What's your brand around it? With live, it's the same thing. You can quickly create a live on your channel and send that out. We've added some additional features that are very popular. So one is insertion. So let's say that you're a bank branch and your bank branch is a primary area that maybe Spanish is the primary language. And so maybe you don't want your commercials being in English, you want Spanish language commercials and your ad breaks. And so you can set up business rules and policy there to do overlays of injected content, even in a live stream. So there's a lot of really kind of broadcast-centric features that you get as part of the platform. And I can obviously make it as open or closed as I want. Absolutely, total control. All right, Steve, so I want to give you the last word here on stuff you want to see from the technology community, things they could do to make your life better and then drive more business ultimately. Sure. Right now we're seeing more demand for cloud services in other geographic regions. We sort of view ourselves as a Switzerland, if you will, as an origin. Our customers can bring their own CDN or whatever distribution model they want to deliver their content to the Edge and end users. But we are seeing demand for more origin setups in, say, Europe, Asia, South America. I think we'd like to see better distribution technology within the store-all products so that our clients simply need to send us their content once. And then we have a secure methodology that basically we don't need to build ourselves, but that we could just leverage store-all to send that object or that file or whatever it is that's been ingested to a remote point quickly in real time. I think that's something that we're looking forward to in talking more with HBT-1. Excellent. Steve and Tim, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate the story. And hopefully we can have a little discussion afterwards. Keep right there, buddy. This is theCUBE. I'm Dave Vellante. We're right back with our next guest live from HB Discover.