 Hello everyone, welcome to theCUBE's presentation of the AWS Industry Tech Partners Showcase. This is season one, episode one, kicking off a new series covering the exciting partners from the AWS ecosystem, talking about accelerating media supply chain, volume velocity with AWS. I'm your host, John Furrier, our next guest on the program, here's Adam Miller, co-founder and CEO of NoMet Security, Adam, thanks for joining us. Thanks, John, for being here. Great to kick off this new series around innovation in the cloud, cloud media. You guys are in the cutting edge of standing up, delivering, integrating new technologies in the cloud for media production, live feeds, a lot of different things. Take a minute to explain what you guys do real quick, then we'll jump into some of the architecture and some of the things, the problems that you guys solve. Sure, sounds good. So NoMet really is a technology platform that's brought together for our customers who choose to buy a platform rather than build a platform in the AWS ecosystem. Today, AWS has probably hundreds of services, I'm not actually sure how many, and we bring together probably 30 of those together into a platform that a customer can bring live video, they can take asset management, the existing video content, even images, audio, they can enrich it with advanced metadata analysis, AI analysis, and then finally in the backside, distribute it to their partners, their customers, and all of this is contained within the AWS world. So a customer can simply purchase the NoMet platform and all of these things come to life. So it's great about the solution I love, you have a really strong AWS integration on their stack. So you have an Amazon tech stack that enables you guys to deliver some capabilities that are packaged for customers that, like you said, they don't have to assemble themselves, so you save them a lot of time. What's the big solution benefit? What's the core problem that you guys are solving? What are some of the key features and capabilities that you guys are building on top of AWS? Well, so a number of years ago, when we first started building a platform, we were looking ourselves for a platform for some of our customers that would take the live video, let's say, and then it would bring the live video in, I could clip that live video, I could then take it and distribute it to my customers, I could monetize it, I could do ad insertion, I could search the video content, I could group it, and all these things didn't exist on the platform. So really by us being able to take and create and start from the end result, the end experience, for us, our customers need an experience that's very familiar. So as an example, two technologies today that we're big fans of, say Netflix or YouTube, everybody's used those. So from our opinion, that's what our platform should look like. Ultimately, customers are used to doing that. So if our technology can make it look like a customer's own content is coming up in the form of Netflix or YouTube, then we consider that success and our customers love it. Our best testament is that if you don't need a training manual, then you can just suddenly start using Nomad because you're so used to it already, even though you've only seen it for 10 seconds, that's a big win for us. And that's really one of our driving goals. Well, you know theCUBE, we do hundreds of events a year. We're always on the road. We're very nomadic ourselves and we love the live piece of it. That's a big part of it. Live streaming and going on location has been extremely difficult. Now you see corporations getting into streaming. You see the bigger streamers and the bigger broadcast is going more digital or hybrid. What's the market that you guys see Nomad really succeeding in? What's the current beach head and how do you guys see it expanding? So we actually have three different markets that we find one of those markets is really just traditional broadcasts. Let's say for example, you have very high quality streams. Maybe you are a concert for example, or maybe you're broadcasting something with very high quality. Some of the AWS tool sets specifically media live in this case, very, very high professional, very, very high grade quality content with lots of features. That's always, that will always be a core set of ours. But then we also have other technologies from AWS. For example, the IVS stack where we can spin up live streams, hundreds of live streams very quickly, effectively the Twitch model. And so we have different technology stacks in different areas, but it's all underneath the Nomad umbrella. So for our end user, they simply click a button that says, I want this one or this one. And then we handle all the heavy lifting behind the scenes. The third area that's becoming more prominent today, it's much, much more used, let's say, and in new installations is near real time video. Something or as we call it glass to glass. And when we're talking about that video, it's more like this conversation today where it's let's say 600 milliseconds from the point that someone's saying something or you're seeing it to the other side in the glass. Ultimately, that's becoming more and more prominent today because people are expecting much faster video content, lower latency. And we're seeing that as really being the trend that we're working with our partners much more now. You mean the live remote pulling people in in real time, that kind of kind of community TV, I don't go to TV, but more connections, the internet. Yeah. And in fact, I'll give you an example. One of our customers has drones, drone footage, and they need to get that drone footage out to a whole bunch of people. Well, the reality is, if you think about a drone and literally a person standing in the middle of a field, how do you get that video content out to somebody, except that person is watching it on the other side of the world and they're seeing it in less than a second after it's being picked up off the camera off the drone. Those are some of the use cases that we're finding that people are really being excited by because now we can take and we can bring a whole virtual community around a live video source and we can bring it all together under the Nomad platform and going back to our mantra, you can install this in an afternoon. This isn't meant to be a big build solution. We can actually enable that specific use case and others like it very, very quickly. What's the hottest use case for you guys right now from a capability standpoint? What's the best selling feature? What's getting people excited now today and which one do you see developing in the future? Well, that's tough because it's split. I would say that the live video content, that's one of them. But the second one is probably getting into the AI analysis. So there's been an evolution and not a revolution yet, but there's been an evolution of AI analysis. Think about the fact, let's say I've got two years worth of video and all of that video is now in my catalog and I've archived it. So it's one thing to be able to broadcast that live stream and to be able to have people enjoy it while it's being broadcast, but then we also archive it behind the scenes. Now let's say two years goes by and I've got 10,000 hours of footage. How do I find it? How do I find that specific situation where someone was talking about this thing or the concert was happening with this particular performer? The AI analysis on this is really evolving quickly now. That's really the next big thing that we're seeing because it's moving beyond just simple face recognition and what's called object detection. It's now moving into more of what we call concept or conceptual analysis. In other words, is this a concert as opposed to it being, let's say a basketball? Like what is it that we're actually looking at that's more philosophical and being able to have users use that as a searching mechanism to find that content. It really starts to get into the chat GPT side which is a whole other topic, but generally the industry in the world is quickly moving that direction. You know, video is data and data can be consumed with this new multimodals being called large language models for the text. That's the transcriptions. You got computer vision, you know, the mid journeys of the world. I recognition, like you guys were looking at the video, this is the concert of sports and then you got audio and all kinds of other kind of multimodal opportunities. This is all new headroom. This is like, you know, creating value from pre-existing content and adding value to new content. How much has that impacted you guys' strategy? I'm sure it's been euphoric on your end right now. You know, I'll tell you the most, somebody was just saying, Adam, what's the most fun time of your job? What do you get to do? And that's when a customer comes online for the first time and they've given us a box of media. And when I say a box of media, I literally mean a cardboard box with thumb drives, part of drives, tape drives, beta drives and they literally hand us the box we get it loaded into the cloud. And for the first time they log in and they look at it and they say, wow, this is incredible. I haven't seen this footage in 33 years. And then we say, and by the way, search for this particular term that's relevant for them and it just comes up. And so to me, that's really my, that's when I get the most fun because when I get to watch them see for the first time media that they haven't seen in forever and they see the real power and the value of doing this and it's all automated and it's done through the AI, it's pretty great. I think the media transformation, the business transformation together is a twofer. And I think that's people going to get blown away by what they do. And I think the stack makes a big difference. Talk about the partnership with AWS. How does this help you? Obviously this enables you to move faster. I see that clearly here. What is the partnership with AWS done to help you innovate and move faster for customers? You know, we actually have a couple of different partnership relationship types, let's call them. On one side on the AWS world, we have the, let's call them the sellers. It's the people who are touching the AWS customers every day. And what we've really enabled for those customers, for those sellers inside the AWS world is the ability for them to now offer more solutions to their customers, their prospects, if you will. Someone will often call AWS and say, we love your technology, we want to use it, but they don't want to build it. So that's where we come in and having those relationships in the AWS world enables us to offer that solution and really bring more value to the AWS ecosystem because it goes back to that buy versus build solution. The second side is on the partner relationship. We get a lot of support from the AWS partner team and anything from being able to offer pilot demos, so basically funded pilots for our customers so they can test drive the software before it's actually used to marketing campaigns to, there's a whole variety of things that either on the marketing side or the really just simply the partner relationship side really bring us a lot of value. Adam, I want to ask you about the origination story for Nomad, how did you guys get here? Was it an itch you were scratching with video and all of a sudden the cloud appears, the cloud scale, all these benefits, what got you to where you were and then how did that unfold? Take us through a little bit of the origination story. Well, in reality, we didn't intend to do this. It actually, it's sort of unfolded in front of us and as we watched it grow, we realized that we're onto something about five or six years ago, we were intending to build some software for some of our customers that did a lot of what we're doing today and we started building it because it didn't exist in the market. And we frankly just became grumpy. We said, you know what, why doesn't this exist? How hard can this be? Why doesn't someone already have this? There are a lot of as it's called lift and shift models where the media platforms have been picked up from on-prem and then sort of bolted into the cloud. And we said, that's not the right way to go. This should be a serverless type model. It should be something where it can scale where it can sit there and idle very, very low cost. And then when you have a lot of media, it'll scale out and it'll grow and then it'll shrink back down again, a true serverless model and it didn't exist. So we started building it. And as time went by, we realized we're onto something and we ended up actually pivoted the whole company away from services and the custom side that we've been doing. And five years ago, we said, you know what, no matter is it and it's been taken off and it's been growing like wildfire since. And that's a cloud native mentality. You were ahead of the curve there. You saw the cloud, you saw that agility and saw that scale is really critical. Great, great run there. What does some of the customer engagements look like? And how would I engage if I want to be a customer? So we do a lot of live events. I'd love to be a customer. Do I just sign up or do I get a SaaS portal? What's the engagement look like from a customer standpoint? How do they get involved? Well, first of all, contact me afterwards. We'll get you connected. The real question is what type of customer and what involvement do they want? And so we have two or three different models of engagement. And we've really tuned this to the way that our customers really to what their needs are. So as an example, one into the spectrum, a customer can simply call me and say or call us and say, hey, Adam, we want to turn on Nomad this afternoon. They can go to the marketplace, AWS marketplace. They can subscribe to the service and literally in an afternoon, it can be up and running. Now we have a couple of different deployment models. One of them is that we can host it for our customers. We trade, security is very important for us. So we are not a typical SaaS based model where it's one service and everyone shares that world. Instead, we actually deploy Nomad into individual AWS accounts, one for every customer. It gives them all the security and all the privacy of all their media and the metadata, independent of all the rest. Now in your case, you might come to us and say, we're actually already a big AWS provider or shop. We already have AWS accounts. We can actually deploy Nomad into your AWS account in that situation. And now you own your media, you own your data, and it's all in your security control. So all the self-contained, it's not a multi-tenant shared resource. It's single-tenant on my infrastructure on AWS. No one's going to touch it. I can spend it on servers. It is, but we do have that sort of shared model for the smaller installations where they say security is great and all, but low cost is also important to us too. So we will do some of those, but our real bread and butter, really what our focus and our passion is about is about those customer deployments. Awesome. Adam, I got to ask you, I go to NAB a lot and I see a lot of old school broadcast solutions, you know, media management. You get a buy-in to that workflow that feels restrictive based on broadcasting, like on cable or I won't say linear TV, it's all TV, but it seems older. It reminds me of the oracles in the old CRM systems. Yet now you're seeing more agile like you guys with a cloud-native stack, using the tools to build capabilities on top of AWS. That seems to be the new way. What's your view on those two sides of the streets? How should your customers think about the new way and how do they think about their old techniques and bring them over? This is a tough question because I think it's evolving. And I also think that there's a lot of undercurrents that are pulling this whole concept one direction or the other. So I don't necessarily know that the whole industry is going to move. I think it's really about accepting that both are going to be here for the long-term. We have one of our customers and they're in the news industry. You know, it's having a fantastic conversation with them a few weeks ago where they were talking about news, news broadcasts, six o'clock news, for example. And how there's a demographic out there in the world that just expects that and wants that. And that's great and we can support that. As an example, we can create a linear channel. We can actually have programming to different segments, different programs, and we can support that model. It works great. But there's the other half of that news world that we were discussing, which is the different generation. And they expect news and bite-sized pieces and they want a 10-second clip and they want to be able to share it and do things that are different than that news broadcast. So for us, being able to support both of those models is very important. And letting our customers make the decision as they evolve from one model to the next, that we can support them during that transition and really enable them. So it was a fun conversation we had and it really opened my eyes to the fact that people are now willing or even excited to start to go down this new journey, which is different than where we have been for the last, say, 50 years. Not to put you on the spot, but one of the things I've been really fascinated with is how the infrastructure to stand up video, like what you guys are doing is getting smaller, faster, cheaper in terms of getting it done, more value. Yet there's a lot of license rights. You've got the major networks out there in the studio houses, and you've got the license content, other content. What's the content licensing market look like? What's your, because there seems to be a lot of demand for content. And I've watched everything on Netflix. I moved to Hulu, I watched that, and then I went over Prime. So, and then I go back to TV and I'm on linear TV. So the consumers want more content. It seems to be like a lot of supply need out there for more content. What's your industry view on, you know, unlocking some of this licensed content and merchandising content? So one of our biggest strengths, I would say, is that we give the actual content owners the ability to take control of their own destiny. So as an example, if one of our customers is, well, whoever the customer might be, when we deploy into their AWS account, they now have full rights and management capability over all their original content now. And in addition, because they're the content owner, they can now distribute it. So the biggest piece that's been missing has been the experience, or what's called the user interface for how that content owner can get their media out to the world. So that's why we've really modeled some of our UIs after some of the big guys out there, the YouTubes and the Netflixes, so that their content can now be on par with YouTube and Netflix, but they don't have to give it away to YouTube, for example, to monetize. Our customers can now have that same experience for their users, except that now they're in control of the user journey. They own all the metadata, they own the content, and they really don't have to worry about on the other side of this, that licensing nearly as much. Adam, I got to ask you, if I'm a customer, what's your response to say, Adam, what's different about Nomad than me going with someone else? What makes you guys different? Why Nomad media? I think the key is, is that it's a, all in one package. So as opposed to you having to go out and say, I need an ad provider to handle my monetization, plus I need a video player to do the playback, and then I need some AI enrichment, and I need to go find a cloud to put it in. So really then having to put, as I call it, staple all those together yourself, really today we've taken the best of breed of all those technology pieces and focused our solution around an end-to-end solution, everything from the one side of the spectrum of content acquisition, meaning it's a live stream or it's an asset that's been archived, to the other side, which is the end customer being able to consume and enjoy it, and everything in between. So our customers can simply say, Nomad, let's turn it on, and then this afternoon we'll be broadcasted, we'll bring their media in, and tomorrow their customers, their customers can start to enjoy it. There's very few other products in the market today that really run the gamut like we do. Yeah, I think that really highlights the ability to stand things up fast, like the cloud, using the cloud scale, cloud native, being agile, and delivering. It's a great solution, I think it's awesome. Final minute we have left or so, give a plug for Nomad media, how big you guys, what are you guys looking to do? What are you hiring? Put a plug in for the company. I almost feel a little weird saying this at this point, because with all the layoffs going on in the world, and sort of in a tailspin, we're actually growing quite significantly at the moment, but knock on wood if there's any wood around here, I want to be careful saying that. But we're actually in a growing phase, we've seen a lot of successes here recently in over the last 18 months, and we're really pretty excited by that. So as a company, we're actually very distributed, in fact, we have a number of probably 20 different states represented here with our employees and probably 10 other countries. So we really have a nice footprint around, quite a nice one. And in addition, from the standpoint of our end users, the end users are really bringing us a lot of feedback. And so they're saying things like, this is what the next generation of technology is that we want. So we're spending a lot of time with our internal teams listening to that and growing the platform, and growing the technology stack to really continue evolving with what our customers want today. Adam Miller, co-founder and CEO of Nomad Media. Thank you for joining us today. Appreciate it. Congratulations on being on the inaugural episode of the season one industry tech partner showcase. Thanks for participating. Congratulations. Love your major. Thanks, John, appreciate it. Okay, this is season one of episode one of the new series. Media is changing, cloud native media. Media's data, data can be used for advantages. And this is a great example of the innovation we're seeing. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching.