 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering NAB 2017, brought to you by HGST. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at NAB 2017, 100,000 people. The Las Vegas Convention Center is packed and it's everything you could ever want to get involved in video and media and it's pretty crazy, exciting. Hope trying to get the guys from spinning all of our budget money next year on new cameras. But we're excited to have Brian Raleigh on. He's a VP post-production and production business intelligence at ABC Studios. Welcome. Thank you, I'm excited to be here as well. Absolutely, so first impressions of the show? You said you haven't been that many times as you walk around, what strikes you? Yeah, this is only my second time here. I will say I've seen plenty of booths that have the words ingestion, transcode, archival, distribution. There certainly is a lot of distribution out here at the Broadcasting Convention, which makes sense. But you're involved in that pesky little process between what comes off the camera and what goes out to distribution. Yeah, exactly. We're prior to broadcast, right? So my world is really production and post-production and the production management systems we use within them. Right. So, love to hear kind of how has that world evolved? I mean, it used to be, you had an artist on a machine with local files, doing the editing and all this stuff and clearly that world is long, long gone. Yeah, most of our production and post-production workflow is in the cloud. You know however you want to call it. And very recently what we've done is we've tried to move on from the email-based world and saving everything on your desktop-based world. A lot of it revolves around the push, the push to move off of that revolves around security, efficiencies, better distribution, better control over who has access to what. So my role is really to introduce digital production management system, digital daily systems, digital purchase order systems, digital scheduling systems. Just kind of take us into more of like a holistic one-way world that covers both the production side as well as the studio side. And where would you say you are kind of on that journey? Year one is what I would say. Year one. Early days. So our department is called the production business intelligence department but that's really, I would say we have more enthusiasm for business intelligence than we do have knowledge of business intelligence. So phase one is really getting our systems rolled out, to get these digital systems in use with 100% adoption on all of our shows and all of our studio and network users. Once we have that piece done, we can actually start to collect the data and make some use of it. Right, right. And how has kind of the efficiency in the workflow, I know you're still early days or how do you anticipate it really being impacted by moving to more cloud-based systems versus kind of local on your hard drive on the controls? So security is 100 times better than it was before, right? Just because everything is hidden behind a password now. Axis is much more controlled. Efficiency has increased many times over as well. I will say that we project over the course of our first year with these systems, we will have reduced our email count just within the studio by 650,000. Who doesn't love that? Right, exactly. I keep telling them it's good. I'll be. Everything is more searchable now. Right. Higher quality, we're getting things faster. Our PAs are no longer burning thousands of DVDs and distributing them all across town. So it's improved our world in many ways. Right, and how do you kind of boil that ocean? Is it kind of by department? Is it by show? Is it, you know, one little slice kind of spread really, really wide? I mean, that's a big rollout. You guys are a huge studio. When the department, it used to be called the production technology department, and when it started eight, nine years ago, the approach was really like, let's build everything in-house and try to piece it out one by one. What we have learned is that doesn't really work and it was really difficult to get adoption and it was going to take a huge workforce in order to build what we needed. So we started to go with the best and breed approach with these applications. And what came with them was 24-7 support and kind of white glove training and admin services. Because I have a really small centralized team, they can focus on just the training administration and we have really this third-party service team that comes with each one of these production management systems that we use. So we've been able to boil the ocean because we have a lot of help. Right, and the other nice thing is, just because of the nature of the studios, teams kind of form around shows, right? So now you can onboard a new team around your infrastructure piece. They do the show for one season, two seasons, however many seasons, then they go away. They log off even though it's a huge training endeavor for sure with our production teams because we have something like 8,000 people on our freelance production teams at any time. And they're a transient workforce. They go from studio to studio and show to show. But I think something like 60 to 70% of the people that we hire, we've hired before. So the good news is once we've trained them once, there's a good likelihood that we won't need to train them again. Right, and so there's kind of the application-centric piece of it, and then there's kind of the infrastructure piece behind the applications. I mean, good news is, you didn't have it eight years ago, but I mean, the developments on the infrastructure side around storage and bandwidth and CPU, huge change from where it was before. I mean, could you even have done what you were hoping to do eight years compared to kind of where you are today? I don't think the companies just didn't exist at that point. That's right, so the companies weren't there because the technology wasn't there. Now they've both kind of aligned, and aligned at a good time, right? When I think people are ready to hear that we need to modernize as a studio. There's so much competition out there that we need to make sure that we're doing things as good or better than everyone else. And you said security a bunch of times. So was the security, was it a security hole? Was it people forgetting their laptop at the coffee shop? I mean, what were some of your main security concerns that you've now been able to address? It's interesting. So we're ABC Studios, but we do a lot of co-productions with Marvel Studios. And Marvel Studios' culture is very security-centric, and because we work so hand-in-hand with them, we've been very cognizant of the security abilities of these applications as we bring them in. So I will say, whereas we didn't have any big outbreaks that we didn't have, we had shows like Lost that people were really concerned about, shows, Scripps getting out, but more recently, we haven't had these huge high-security titles, but now that Marvel is on board, it's made us very security-conscious. Okay, and it's more early leaks and people getting access to the assets. Yeah, mostly we're worried about Scripps. Right, right. Really, mostly Scripps, as opposed to images or finished products and those things. Scripps and rough cuts, I would say. Okay, so that's kind of the bat, the stick. In terms of a carrot, what were some of the benefits that you hope to achieve or you are really starting to achieve on the carrot side of the equation? Well, so we're still in phase one, as I said, in kind of rolling out these applications. We'll let you talk about vision, Brian, you will not hold you to whatever you say that's being actual in-production. The carrot, so we're now called production-business intelligence, but we don't have much intelligence at this point. So, now that we're seeing some light at the end of the tunnel in terms of rolling out these systems, the hope is, the carrot is, we're going to be able to find some really great business insights from the data we collect. The kinds of questions we want to be able to answer are things like, which of our directors that we hire are costing us the most in production staff over time? When an editor's cut delivers and it delivers 11 minutes long, how does that correlate with the length and complexity of the script? We can start to learn these things, and the hope will be that what was going to be a nine-day production schedule, we really can do it in eight. We'll have the data, not just anecdotally, but real data to back that up. And I wonder, and don't tell me if you can't, but within kind of the whole budget of a movie, production, post-production, distribution, promotion, what pieces is post-production? I mean, I just think of the complexity of it. It can be just a sinkhole if it's not managed well. As a part of the production, well, it depends on the show, right? The complexity of the visual effects, right? But I would say 10 to 20% of the budget is post-production, and the systems piece of it is much, much less, maybe 1%. So you can make a pretty significant impact on that budget by being more efficient and leveraging that intelligence. Below the line, which is what these systems really do impact, so not just post-production, but production as well as two-thirds of the budget, so absolutely. I mean, that's, I get many millions of dollars. Right, right. Okay, so as you look forward, have you got any insights that are kind of helping you drive to the next place, or are you just kind of working down a road map as you look at 2017? I know we're a third of the way through, which I find really hard to believe. Yeah. Well, you know, what's kind of on your agenda for, what's next? I'd say we're still working down the road map, right? So we have, like I said, we have documents figured out, we have digital dailies figured out, we have production purchase orders figured out. Now we're going to start looking at asset management, and we're going to start looking at scheduling, and hopes that ultimately we can, you know, really, I guess the real vision here is that we can have kind of a production ratio, right? So we can start to rate our productions against each other based on all of these, this information that we have, but it requires some additional systems first. All right, Brian. Well, I wish you, at least you got 650,000 less e-mails to deal with. I mean, that's a free out of a ton of time. Yes. That's a great start. All right, he's Brian Raleigh from ABCM. Jeff Rick, again, thanks for stopping by. Thank you. All right, you're watching theCUBE from NAB 2017. Thanks for watching.