 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering NAB 2017, brought to you by HGST. Welcome back to theCUBE, we are live in Las Vegas at the very exciting NAB show 2017, and I'm very excited to introduce you to our next guest, Andy Schenkler. Andy is the EVP Chief Solution and Technology Officer for Sony DADC New Media Solutions. Andy, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you very much for having me. You are a veteran, not only of the media and entertainment industry, but of NAB, with this year's theme of the Met Effect, this convergence of media entertainment technology. What are some of your initial thoughts about the show this year? Well, I haven't had a lot of time to visit the whole show yet, it's only opening day. I think that over the last 20 years of even attending these events, it's been heavily focused on kind of cameras and the backend production technology, and over the last several years we've seen, you know, cloud technology, software-driven, IP interaction take place, and even with the thematic change of it being met, that's clearly coalescing even more, right? It's no longer a, this is a thing that's coming, it's here, and how do people really take advantage of that as they kind of move forward? I'd love to get your perspective, as you were saying, you've been in the media and entertainment space for about 20 years around the time of NAPSR, which is like we were saying before, kind of hard to believe that was 20 years ago, but I'd love to just get kind of a high-level picture of you must have seen massive evolution in media and entertainment, where, tell us a little bit about that, some of the things that really stood out to you over those two decades as milestones. So, I mean, there's clearly the ones that we all as consumers know, right? The iPod and iTunes and the advent of Netflix and Amazon Video and things of that nature, and I think those are the very tangible ones. From behind the scenes, I think it's the challenges that the business has had to go through, right? How do you actually deal with rights problems that are global in nature, right? You suddenly have a world that's portable. You suddenly have problems where, I downloaded something or I want to consume a piece of content that I really enjoy, I get on a plane, and I'm suddenly in a territory where I no longer have the right to watch that. Those are significant challenges that have to be overcome, and it's not always just technology, right? There's huge legal issues and things like that. And so, there's a real striation between what we as consumers expect to find and what the business needs to do to change to accommodate that ever-growing kind of consumption rate that people want. So- Absolutely. So tell us about the supply chain solutions that Sony, DADC is delivering for the media and industry. Sure, so we started about nine years ago, and it's not that certainly supply chain solutions aren't nine years old, and I think our perspective on it was one where we were fortunate to start with a white piece of paper rather than transform a legacy business. And when we did that, we said, what does the solution five years from now need to look like? And so we run full supply chain offerings for companies like Sony Pictures, BBC Worldwide, Village Roadshow, PlayStation, Funimation, things of that nature. And we're talking about distribution of content to roughly 1500 endpoints globally. So that's multiple languages, multiple versions, trying to keep all of that stuff in track. And really the way we approached the problem was, I know it sounds terrible, but really to get humans out of the mix from the perspective of what's not actually good for people to do. Looking at millions of permutations of data is not really a strong suit for people. It's a good strong suit for a computer. It had up until that point in time being relegated to Excel spreadsheets and emails, and we tried to eliminate a lot of that by putting systemic decision making in place. And that's really what's allowed us to kind of scale at a fairly aggressive pace. So are we talking about artificial intelligence, machine learning? I wouldn't go so far as to say that. Much more rules-based engines, logic around it. So let's take an example, right? Maybe you have a motion picture we'll say like a Spider-Man. Spider-Man is made and it's available in 15 countries. Each one of those countries have different compliance and rules, cultural rules. Maybe you can't show certain imagery or you can't have somebody drinking in Saudi Arabia or something like that. So now you've kind of left customer service reps to have a conversation that say, hey, I need you to send this to all of these places. How are they supposed to know all of the possible combinations of things? Then on top of that, not just knowing it, how are they supposed to interrogate a library of millions of assets and say, oh yeah, I figured out all of the combinations of these things to make that happen and do so within a timeline to hit a business goal. That worked great in the beginning when it was, hey, we're going to get 50 titles out. Now we deliver 60, 70, 80,000 titles a month. Suddenly, that is no longer sustainable for a human project. You couldn't get enough people in this building to go through that much content. God, it's really kind of rules-based. So you've got users of the Sony technology, film studios, broadcasters, music labels. Give us an example of say, on the broadcast side, about what they're looking to do with managing assets to meet consumer demand and ensure that it's, with this multi-channel distribution model, they're meeting consumer demand wherever those consumers are. So I think from a broadcast perspective, which even in that world, that's blending, right? I mean, there is no traditional broadcaster as we know it anymore. Even a broadcaster has VOD services, they might have some sort of mobile provisioning, OTT. And so that, therein lies their challenge, right? They've put in large infrastructure over many years. They continue to reinvest in that. Along comes, you know, a Netflix, a Google, whomever with, you know, global licensing, the ability to move incredibly rapidly. And so they're looking at it and saying, how do I compete? How do I stay relevant in this space? Market share, as we know, is starting to move away from the broadcast side, you know, linear television per se. And so where we come into play is we say, we've already got a massive amount of content available. You've licensed it already. Let us make that available, let us run that infrastructure for you. Your focus should not be on how do I make sure that the power plant stays up, but rather how do I market, how do I differentiate, how do I create a compelling proposition to consumers so that I can effectively compete as this grows. Okay, so you're really helping them to scale on ways that they would never have been able to do on their own? I think we're just helping them get there sooner. It's not to say that they could never do it. I think that's a lot of ego, a lot of hubris, but it's very much that we've leveraged kind of our position as, you know, as Sony and as what we've done for a lot of partners in the space. And we've said there's a reasonable way to kind of level the playing field, right? A supply chain should not be the level of differentiation, right? We don't simply say, oh, well, here's a really good manufacturing supply chain. There's only one company who should use it. It should be leveraged by many, many, you know, facilities. And so we take that same view from a digital perspective. You know, traditionally we've been sending content out all around the world. We've now moved to a model that said, why don't we just host it all singularly in any format that you want? Your choice, any spec, any DRM, but it's centralized. So for one of our customers, in fact, they air something in Japan and 24 minutes later it's available everywhere else. That couldn't be done if I also had last mile bandwidth considerations to take into account. And we believe that that 24 minutes is soft by about half. We think we can get that down to under 10 minutes. Question for you. And the speed theme has come up a number of times today with different folks that we've talked about. If we look at a Netflix, as we brought up, for example, you know, we think, well, from an audience perspective, the audience is so empowered and we have access to anything and we want it wherever we want it. We binge-watching, streaming, we're time-shifting. So you think, wow, Netflix has a great advantage because they know so much about the audience. At the same time, until they started creating unique content, they couldn't really change the content versus on the flip side in the film industry, they haven't really historically known their audience. It's been more of probably qualitative data decisions. At the same time, they can change content. So do you work with the streaming services as well as the traditional film studios do they have a similar challenge that can be solved by using media as a service? So from ones who want to use everything that we offer end-to-end, we kind of, again, that level playing field, we give everybody visibility. We believe data transparency is pretty important. We recognize that people hold onto data as kind of the keys to the kingdom at this point. You know, certainly Netflix does and look, they're leveraging it quite well, right? So it's hard to find fault with what they're doing from a business perspective. At the same time, you know, as a consumer, you really don't want to have to be potentially loyal to a particular brand, right? That's not how capitalism works, so that's a different problem. But people who run on our platform, we think that there is a good balance and that both sides should have visibility to a lot of that data because it should help each other. They should really, you know, a rising tide should float all boats and not just create this imbalance because then it becomes very difficult to amortize costs if there's one and only one solution in the market. And that's really how we try and approach that problem. So in terms of the kind of volumes of content that we're talking about here. So we stored today just over 20 petabytes of content, roughly a million hours worth of, this is premium content, so this is not user generated. This is not like YouTube clips of somebody's cat. There's probably a couple in there. There might be a few in there, but that's not primarily what it is. We're talking about really high end premium content and in about 23 languages. The variations that we have are very high. Now, a lot of times people will say, well, it's easy to get to a million hours because people do bad data and so they'll store something like Spider-Man with a hyphen in the middle or a space or all together. We're actually very, very focused on not having that. So these are all unique assets. So it's a very large library when you look at it on a global scale. So how can a linear network versus a streaming network access a million hours of content? So we actually don't differentiate between a linear and a streaming network because at the end of the day we're a complete IP solution. The ability to uplink through satellite is fine. It's just another method of transport, but really all they do is they come to us with their licenses and then we provision the assets for them in their specification and we make it available to them anywhere. I mean, it's pretty straightforward. We try and take a lot of the heavy lifting off their plate, reduce their infrastructure costs, reduce the team sizes that they've had from a scaling perspective. They don't have to grow so much. We really try and flat rate a lot of this to make it easy and predictable. Fantastic. Last question, since we're running out of time here, I know that you guys have really migrated the media supply chain to the cloud going all in with AWS. You had mentioned before that really started about a year ago. Tell us about what you're doing with AWS and how has that influenced the genesis of media as a service? So I think that what I should tell you first is that when I went to the team to talk about this, I borrowed a line from the hunt for it October where they said Cortez reached the new world and burned his ship so that his men could not go back. We got rid of our data centers first and then told the team we're going AWS. And so there was no going back. We were making this move. There wasn't going to be hesitation and an all in model is the only model that worked for us. The hybrid model is just not cost-effective. We had to embrace something that was future-proofed and that seemed like the right one. Where we've benefited from it is clearly there's economic advantages but some of the other advantages are like what I was talking about before, 24 minute time from receipt to availability everywhere would have been unthinkable in a completely contained environment where I had to have huge lead times for scalability. I had to know in advance that I would need more storage or more transcoding capacity or more bandwidth. I no longer need to have that level of information upfront. I live in a world of unpredictability. People come in with requests all the time that I didn't know an hour ago was going to be asked for. I'm finally in a position to be able to offer a solution to all of them that says go ahead, do whatever you like. Our system will manage it and we have confidence in the AWS infrastructure to be able to support that. So it sounds like a fantastic partnership that's going to be really enabling a lot of more content creation and more uses of this content in the future. And we really want to see that. We want to see people create differentiated solutions for consumers without having to worry about how the sausage gets made. Exactly, nobody wants to know that. Nobody wants to know that. Well Andy, thank you so much for joining us on theCUBE and sharing your insight. I know you just got to the show not too long ago so we wish you and your feet healthy next few days. Thank you very much. And we look forward to seeing you on theCUBE sometime soon. I appreciate it and look forward to being with you. All right, well we want to thank you for watching. Again, Lisa Martin live at NAB in Las Vegas. Stick around, we'll be right back.