 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering AWS re-invent 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and Intel, along with its ecosystem partners. Well, welcome back to the stands. Day two, AWS re-invent 2019. A lot of buzz still going on here, Dave Vellante. There's all buzz, yeah. Yeah, I mean, the jam-packed show for a second day in a row. Day two of our coverage here on theCUBE. Along with Dave Vellante, I'm John Walls, and we're joined by Paul Cheesebro, rather, who is the CTO and President of Digital at the Fox Corporation. Paul, good to see you, sir. Thanks for having me, John. Thanks for being with us. We appreciate that. I'm a big fan of theCUBE. So what brings you here? I'm about your partnership with AWS, and let's just start with that. Characterize a little bit about what that relationship's all about. Yeah, well, I think re-invent's become the go-to show for cloud computing generally. I think it's its eighth season, and certainly for my team and myself, it's the place to discover the kind of latest product evolutions and talk to other people in my position and peers in the industry and see what's going on. So it's a great opportunity to do a bit of fact-digging and see what's going on in the industry. So what fact-digging are you doing right now that applies to your world? What have you seen here, maybe in the past day or two, that you said, yep, I can see where that's playing into the entertainment world? Yeah, well, I'd say the first thing is the ecosystem. You can see from around here, the buzz and the vibe. I mean, this is at a different level to what I've seen it before, and that's always really good to see. So it's not just an AWS story, it's kind of the companies that are enabling, and a lot of the innovation comes out of these smaller startups of the building on top of the platform, so spending a ton of time on that front. I'd also say Andy Jassy's keynote yesterday, really very impressive on how they've kept the foot down on new releases, on the kind of data front. So SageMaker and Redshift, two technologies we use heavily and they've continued to kind of innovate on that front. And I'm just getting time with the top table of AWS and the deep technical engineers who can kind of give you a view of where the company's going and what weather services will be in a year or two's time is, so you don't get that any other kind of place. You know, when we first started doing theCUBE that reinvents seven years ago, a lot of tire kickers, certainly from the enterprise, a lot of developers, no question, but you're way beyond kicking tires. So what are some of the things that you're doing in the cloud? You mentioned Redshift and SageMaker, what are you doing with those tools? Yeah, so, I mean, you're a media company, so you'll understand how technology's kind of carved up and on the enterprise side, which is all of our internal IT and networks, we've pretty much migrated all of that over the recent years into the cloud and largely running on AWS. So storage, compute, we've retired, all of our data centers bar one, all of our applications that our employees use are software as a service based, so we don't really run our own infrastructure. And on top of that, we've really kind of put a very deep data infrastructure in place where, you know, the consumer trend, the way our contents consume these days, we've got a very direct relationship with the consumer. We stream more and more content to them and that throws off a data trail that you've got to capture and manage and we use Redshift and SageMaker to analyze the data on top of Redshift on that front. So the enterprise piece, we've done pretty holistically. On the digital side of our business, our products and services and our apps, they're almost entirely built natively on AWS services. Our engineers, the kind of, the innovation that they're driving there, they couldn't do it without partners like AWS. And then the third and final piece to a media company is the kind of media and the broadcast piece, how you move video around the kind of production organization, the creative organization, and that's the bit that we're announcing here today, that partnership with AWS to kind of solve that issue. Yeah, so I wanted to ask you about, a big part of your transformation was data. Yeah. And so you got kind of rid of, they always talk about the heavy lifting, you got rid of that for the most part, all except one data center. What did you do with the people that were doing all that stuff? Did they just sort of go to retraining or attrition? Did you get excited about learning new tooling? How did that all go? Yeah. Well, I've been on the journey around cloud computing since 2006 in my career, so. Right, day one, I guess it's still day one. In fact, I purchased S3 from Verna Vogels back then. That was the first product, wasn't it? Exactly, and then I met Andy soon after. And in those days, and I think some organizations experience this, the technology team were the most risk-averse, and they put every blocker in the way from moving to the cloud because they saw it as a threat and frankly didn't understand it. So it took a lot of pushing to get things going in those days. I think it's slightly different now. But once you're through that barrier, then people get momentum, and anyone in my position as a CTO will tell you there's no shortage of work to throw people at. So the resource that we've got within the team, I'd much rather they were building software than managing servers and pipes and doing upgrades. So we've released a ton of talent to do what I would call the value ad piece that consumers touch and feel and moved it really kind of front of store. And that's made a big difference. Some people didn't make the journey and we brought new talent in. I think that's inevitable. But yeah. So it's almost like you get to practice a little less and play a little more. Yeah. It's about what it comes down to. And sort of re-architected your business around data and software. It sounds like as opposed to, like said pipes. Yeah, but everything starts with the consumer in our business. So if you work backwards from that, you know, they've changed their behaviors and they expect content in different forms on different devices. They expect the traditional channels of cable. They expect the new channels of mobile and streaming. And that places a lot of stress internally on how you create and produce and distribute that content. So to some degree in our industry, we had no choice. We have to change. And that's been, you know, as a technologist driving transformation, it's been a fun ride. You're almost on this parallel track a little bit. You talk about the transformation you're going through with live streaming right now. That's a must, must do, must have. It's how consumers bring in their media. And yet you have to transform technologically speaking to provide this consumer transformation as well. So you have these two tracks going down that you've got to answer to. I mean, what kind of complexity does that create it for you? Because your business is fundamentally changing and the technology is fundamentally changing. Yeah. And you know, I think historically the solution to that problem was to put parallel infrastructure in place and your digital team would have their own infrastructure. Your enterprise team would have their own infrastructure. And then your media and broadcast team would be on a completely different network doing their own thing. And they would all coexist. And I think the kind of convergence at the consumer end is going to ripple back into a convergence within the organization as well where our technology teams play across those three different fields. And someone like AWS and other partners like that are now capable of being partners across those three different fields together. So the convergence at the consumer end really does apply within the organization as well. So you mentioned some things you're doing with AWS. Maybe you could talk about that initiative and talk about the tech and we could talk about the outcome for the consumer. So I think the last bastions within any media organization in terms of, you know, transforming you think about the media and broadcast operation the, you know, everything from the trucks and the cameras through to the edit suites, through to master control through to the way that you play out and distribute. You know, not only do we have a national network but we've got local stations as well and you overlay the digital products on top of that. It's a very complicated set of partners and direct access points at the end. And the technology that's been operating in that space hasn't changed since the nineties. Generally hasn't. It may be got a minor upgrade when HD came along in 2001 but it really hasn't changed. So what we have decided to do is going to really re-engineer that. It's the only piece of our business that doesn't run natively on the cloud. And we're pleased to announce this week the deal with AWS as the strategic partner to really kind of lift our video workflows in terms of how we produce, create and really importantly distribute our video to all of those partners in a way that kind of really transforms the way our creatives can work as well. So it was a pretty long process going through how you do that safely, because if you get it wrong you go off the air and that's really. You can't do that. You cannot do that. You know, you're a TV guy, you know that. So we've been very careful. I say, you know, AWS have stepped up with some great technologies but really importantly a kind of great vision as well for it. So what specifically have you done? You created sort of a new platform in the cloud? Yeah. So we were very, very fortunate. We've just completed this deal with Disney to sell some of our assets there. It meant that actually we had a Greenfield approach to this part of our business. So for the first time ever we were unencumbered with a legacy. So a blank sheet of paper and we came at it with the attitude if you were a large broadcaster starting your business today, how would you do it? And with that mindset, it takes you into a very different space. So we're working with AWS and their media services team and the elemental team within that to encode our video within our sports news entertainment and local stations. We're using them to move the video from studio locations and football stadiums and news gathering locations, remote locations straight into the cloud to be both managed and produced and then it stays natively within the cloud to be published out to distribution partners whether it's Comcast for cable whether it's Hulu for live TV whether it's Apple for the VOD stuff that they do or whether it's our own services. But that natively stays in the cloud, that workflow and that just really enables a very different way of thinking. And the move is obviously a big challenge, right? I mean, it's video and it's big data. How are you solving that problem? What are the components of that that enable you to do that? So I think it would have been very difficult to achieve this vision if some of the products like Outpost and the local zones that AWS have announced at the show, we had early visibility and testing of those. You know, if you're in an edit suite editing 4K content you can't necessarily, in a truck, you can't necessarily go back and forth to the cloud all the time. So we have the ability to kind of put a piece of the cloud on-prem or into a truck or into a studio to eliminate the latency and to manage that. So that's one thing. We also have architected it in a way where resilience is core and key. So if for whatever reason, one part of the architecture goes down then other bits of it can pick up the slack. And again, the way that we've worked with AWS on that front they've really helped us kind of architect something robust there. Yeah, how much does live come into this? I mean, you can't afford to slip up, right? I mean, it's one thing to have downtime and you point it as you can't go black but just in terms of what you deliver whether it's live news, live sports, live entertainment. Yeah, it's real time. So we're predominantly a live company now, you know and it's the heart of our business. It's what we're great at doing. It's what our creative teams have done all of their lives. And if you take an NFL game on a Sunday, you know, the number of cameras, feeds, data, stats, the number of teams you've got both on location and back in the production facility, the number of games you're actually producing at the same time on a complicated day that can be multiple games. And then the complexity around who you get the signal out to in effect. Live is difficult and I think that's why you haven't seen too many broadcasters go in this direction quite yet. So we know we're a kind of earlier doctor. We're being very careful and cautious around how we're kind of ramping this up. For example, we're still alongside the fiber connectivity into the cloud. We're using satellite. So some of those decisions we've put in place as near term. You've got some redundancies in place just as a risk management. Exactly, so we can slowly dial it up and we're building new facilities around this to help make it happen as well. But the number one thing is giving the consumer a great experience. I'll give you some examples actually of how this will transform the consumer experience. So we'll be able to do both 4K and 8K natively through this infrastructure with AWS. We can't do that today. Latency will be reduced heavily. So we effectively encode the video once and the device at the end decodes it. So that really kind of compresses that level of latency that you'll see in a football game. And when you think about things like 5G, I don't know whether you saw Hans and the Verizon team and they were announcing it yesterday. 5G, things like betting services and other things that we're getting into, you have to have close to zero latency to make those things work. So in the current broadcast chain, we encode and decode and re-encode and all of these compression chains. And at the end of the, you've got a fairly decent quality signal but by no means 4K or 8K. And that's one aspect. So the consumer will see a difference. The other thing is we never want to be in a position again where we use infrastructure from 30 years ago. I mean, no company in 2019 can afford to be in that position. So by plugging into AWS, we kind of get that constant drip feed of innovation as it comes and a very software focused sort of architecture as opposed to hardware and cables, which is you see a lot of in broadcast. So we're pivoting not just the business but the way we do business as well. So the consumer experience is much improved. As well, you mentioned live, of course the mainspring is live. That's where the content is created but there's also an on-demand experience as well is that I presume compressed. So I can get to the best highlights if I missed the game. You know, get the little mini game that I can watch and get a good flavor for it. That is compressed as well. Absolutely. So, I mean, going back to your data question earlier, so this infrastructure natively as we're putting video through it, you know, Amazon and AWS have the technologies to index the video in real time, to do scene detection, face recognition, a lot of those kind of very forward-leaning technologies. I think for the last 10 years have been kind of more science than fact, but now they're kind of really coming to their own. So all of the video that goes through the pipes in a live form gets really in real time indexed. All of the consumption information about how the video's being consumed on the device comes back in in real time and we can combine that into an experience. So if you're joining the live feed or coming at the video on demand asset later, you've got a much, much richer experience, whether that's searching and finding the bit that you want or whether that's, you know, us curating a package of content automatically using that metadata. So we're excited about that. Talk more about the search. How does that all work? Well, I think search on a TV experience is still pretty clumsy. You know, it's... Yeah, it's definitely, and part of that's the user interface. I mean, hats off to Comcast, their Xfinity product. A lot of the search now is done by voice through the remote and they're seeing a transformational difference there, but even in some of the OTT streaming services, the search and discovery, I'd use discovery in the same context, is still clumsy and that's entirely driven by the data. There's a reason Google are the best in the marketplace at search because of the, you know, the kind of level of indexing that they do to create the, and I think AWS and their approach to video will be game changing for us on this front. And they've obviously got the search technologies on the front end to enable that as well as the kind of indexing technologies on the back end. How do you keep up with all the innovation you mentioned up top that, you know, exciting that C. Andy, Jassy, announce all this stuff. How do you keep up with it all? Is it sometimes feel like it's going too fast to be able to absorb it all? No, this is a great time to be a CTO. There's no way, and we could complain about it, but the consumer's not going to stop, you know, changing the way that they demand content from us. So for me, it's a combination of picking the right partners, speaking to them frequently and coming to events like this to meet my peers. I also spend a lot of time with venture capital companies and very early stage startups to really get an idea around what's coming next over the next three to five years and getting in early with those customers. I kind of have a mantra with my team internally where, you know, I don't reward them necessarily for just doing business with the old incumbent legacy technology providers. I'd much rather we experiment with the next generation of companies. That's actually how we began our very early relationship with AWS and Amazon, and it served us well. Pay it off. Well, the next time you see Joe or Troy, please give them our best. I will, sure, thanks Joe. They're always welcome on theCUBE, as are you, Paul. Thank you, it's a pleasure. Joining us here on theCUBE, we'll be back with more coverage here live to AWS Reinfit 2019. You're watching theCUBE from the Sands.