 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE. Covering IBM World of Watson 2016. Brought to you by IBM. Here's your host, John Furrier. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center for the IBM World of Watson Show. Exclusive coverage from SiliconANGLE Media, theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signals of noise. My next guest is George Davis, Creative Director and CEO of Quest Digital Interactive. That's cdinteractive.com. Talking about the future of television. Really interesting and super exciting scenario here that we're going to talk about. George, welcome to theCUBE. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Okay, it's QD Interactive. What did I say, Q? I don't know. I said QD Interactive. Get another plug. QD Interactive, don't ever forget. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. I'm speaking in so many places that I get confused too. No, an extra plug always helps. You know, repetition, frequency. Yeah, they tell you what we do. We invented a method to build software systems that allow artificial intelligence to insert interactivity into the storylines of a TV drama series. So give an example. It's not an ad, so, I mean, ad insertion is great, but again, TV is lean back, got the clicker, but now we have the internet. You've seen the cord cutters out there going, Netflix, you got Amazon going on, crazy. Give me an example of how it works. Let's call it participatory TV. You have a person in a TV who's facing a crisis and you can actually get in there as a viewer become a player because each interactivity is like a game module and you can play and actually intervene in the story in ways that get more and more complex as your AI is complex. So this is gamification meets TV. Gamification of marriage and cognitive. Let me think of one of my little cute lines. Marriage of cognitive computing and television drama or popular entertainment, what do you call it? You're a pioneer, so I love this conversation because it's what you're doing is really hard. Okay, but you're also, on your title, creative director slash CEO, which means chief executive officer, you run the company, but also the creative director is also the key part. Explain the role of the creative aspect of this because this is a fundamental... Okay, we take an overview, I do, that's my job. Then we have people, if you write to the site and you want to find out more information on the business side of it, how does it, or how it generates revenue, how you can generate revenue with it. We have people who can get back to you on that. What I'm giving is a broad concept of something that's very new that can revolutionize television itself because for a long time, for about three decades, television spent billions of dollars trying to get true interactivity, that is interactivity in which you can interact with the story itself. It tried to converge the machine and the machines have already converged because you have streaming now, which means your computer and your television set can be the same thing. So, when you have a convergence like that, what you have to do is converge the content. What we have is a software system that converges the content. So, the example would be, just kind of putting my geek hat on, you've got this cognitive engine with AI that understands at a large computing scale that it could generate scenarios in the content. So, I jump into the content and then relying on AI to adjust the story based upon my interactions. So, in essence, I'm changing the story based upon my participation to get that right. So, interacting with the story. Let me give you an example of what we're doing for the people at IBM series game and gamification. We're doing a show called, producing a show called Saving the Planet, a TV series and computer game to fight climate change. Okay, we have a lot of data on climate change. We know it's a bad thing. You can't really get people to do anything about it because it's so difficult. But suppose you have a story. Stories are better than facts. For example, we know all the facts. Or jumping into a big piece of data, all this data you're swimming through. Yeah, and people don't remember. I can't even remember the CO2 level, that is this, that, the other. But supposing a story, you have a kid running down a hill. He falls down, can barely breathe. And your game challenge is to get that kid up off the ground. And in learning what you need to do as fast as you can to get that kid breathing again, you have had some, what we might call, tacit knowledge. Deeper understanding of the. The immersion of the situation and the story puts you in a readiness position to get boned up on whatever you need to do at problem solving. Yeah. You solve the problem. And you have to do it fast so it becomes tacit knowledge. Yeah, this is incredible. So what I love about this too is it plays beautifully into virtual reality, where augmented reality's going, computer generated graphics. You can almost envision this being standard, quickly. That's what we are hoping for. Okay, so throw the dart at the board because it feels like this is, I have no clue on how fast this is going to emerge. Your thoughts on how early is this? How would you see the progress accelerating? What are some of the things that need to happen? We're going to start building a prototype in January. We should be finished with a demo of prototype by June 30th. I was down in Los Angeles just now talking to the people who are going to do the television series because in order to make it work, you have to have a hit television series because not only is it the audience aggregated, it is the emotional involvement. The involvement in motion is decision making more than fact. People make decisions based more on the emotion. The kid falling down. So they have to be connected to the actual content. Yeah. So connections are key. Emotional connection. Emotional connection entangled with the content. And so people will, okay, suppose the kid is on the ground, you have to figure some things out. Maybe there is traffic jams somewhere around and the air has gotten polluted with that. And so you might figure all of that out. What it does is it creates what's called persuasive technology. Once you've done something to figure out how to solve the problem, it becomes your tacit knowledge. So the next time you're in a traffic jam, you might think it'll change your behavior. You might turn off your ignition. Not because of CO2 levels, but because of the kid who fell to the ground. And you got that kid out. You can start to get mind share around the impact of what that could do. That's it. Okay, so what are some of the cool tech that's involved? Is there anything you'd like to share around some of the technology? And also what are some of the hurdles that you're going through? Being a pioneer, you have to skin your knees. Let me tell you about something that happened here. I talked to the people over at Visual Recognition, right? Suppose you have a drama. It could be law and order. It could be any of those. And there's a creepy guy there. You can touch his face in the screen and it can bring up a game that can actually get you involved with who that creepy guy is. What is he doing? And so you actually then know more than the person in the story, right? And so as the story proceeds, you know whether this guy's armed. You know whether this guy's this. So it increases your suspense. It increases a lot of things. That's just an example of how you can deepen the engagement. There is also the revenue part because you can't have anything without revenue. Here's the revenue. The revenue is the studio's to pay you. Big cash. Come on, put a big bag of money. The way it works is you get the big bag of money from the studio, you go over your budget and then you get more budget and then they get so out over the limb that they have to do a trailer. Next thing you know, it's out in the theater. No. We have a pending meeting with Amazon, right? Suppose in the story, a woman's wearing a certain kind of shoe. You can tap the screen. That shoe goes to your profile. And then when the show is over, you can go to your profile, look at it, make a decision on what you want to buy. That's low hanging fruit right there. Yeah. E-commerce. Right. But then when you get, it might be an automobile that's being driven in the product placement taken to another level. AI level. Yeah. And then almost the emergent of being in the car, pushing the buttons. All right, so I got to ask you the question about the creative side because this is fascinating. So we did the queue. We're live here at Mandalay Bay at the whole set here. And it's just boring streaming. We're not boring. We're good. It's just a video signal. So imagine that we wanted to bring in like some computer generated action or some interact into this stream right now. Imagine that we're implementing future of TV, which we are, because we're not on cables, all non-linear. It's all everywhere. I want to add more oomph to it because I want interaction. I want people to say. Okay, suppose we talk about our software system in this way. And somebody's watching this stream. They do something and they say, that guy Davis, he doesn't know what he's talking about. He's a handsome guy. That furry guy. He's so full of it. Well, they know that already. So I get that on Twitter. They can interact. They can interact in other ways. They can bring in other data. That data can go to people's profile or it can appear in the show itself. And you have the ability to communicate with people around all the issues that we're talking about. Interactive TV is- You want to bring the guests in too. For us, we're kind of like a talk show, but I want interactivity. I want to have someone stop me and say, oh, whoa, I want to ask you a question. Yeah, that sort of thing. That's why we say the future of television is almost here. Interactive television is the future. They tried to make it come along when they tried to converge the machines. But the machines got converged anywhere. Streaming did it. And now a computer and a TV set are converged. Yeah, and more horsepower is available on the computing side. So, you know, you've got Amazon, for instance, they've got a huge cloud or IBM's got a cloud. You can imagine that any kind of hurdle with technology kind of goes away. You just spin up a supercomputer. And with AI, you have more interactivity because we had static interactivity before AI. But now you can have almost any kind of interactivity that a programmer, AI programmer can dream up. The way our system works is that the programmer and the TV script writer work together. It's like an agile software development project. So it's not the waterfall old way. People will scrum together and kind of be in an agile format. Yeah, and so the team, I got some guys there from Argentina, IBM, Argentina is going to work on a little echo game. The echo games are games inside the saving the planet thing where you have a echo game might be respiratory. The little kid. That is the echo game on respiratory. That could be one on clean drinking water. AI would decide when to insert those into the storyline and you just touch your screen, you go into the game location that AI puts up there for you and you're able to participate in the story. George, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE and sharing it. It's super exciting. What's next? Final question, what's next for you? What are you going to do next? Talk to Amazon, what's your next meeting? What's the next milestone? What's going to? We're going to start to build this thing and I have to get back to writing because writing the story, you have to have a hit. And I've been in writing business for a long time and started back in the 1960s with a novel called Coming Home that Jane Fonda made a film. You're a little too young to know that. I think I saw it on syndication. Yeah. But that's where I started. That's where I started the novel that's based on. I got to get back to writing because that's what I really want to do. You're going to ship the IBM prototype, right? In June, that's coming. We're going to have a prototype by then and what we're looking forward to is working closely with IBM for them to do some of that because IBM is the best market business to business. Well, I think whatever you do in your story might, well, not that I'm going to give you any advice, you're a genius writer. Is genius, right? I would, well, you got to get moving after your book. I mean, I don't have any of that yet. I'll get a book out there soon. Is the weather channel angle is huge. So you got to get weather in the storyline somehow. Yeah. Hurricane, tornado. Okay, let me tell you something about that. That's why IBM is such a good match for us. They have 80 million subscribers. Yeah. If you can do a streamer for something like this with 80 million subscribers, good story streamer. Yeah. We're going to work together on the weather project because I think you can get weather in there, you can got hurricanes, you got tornadoes, you got weather patterns, a lot of learning and they have the data. Yeah. So you can bring that Watson Mojo in. George, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. Good to see you. Thanks for coming on chair in your story. Future television is almost here. QDinteractive.com. I'm John Furrier, we'll be right back with more live coverage and Genie Keynote is coming up at one o'clock more after this short break.