 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 are winding down day three at NAB 2017. It's been quite an event, 100,000 people, a ton of buzz, a lot of cool gear, a lot of cool activity, and we're really excited to have Jason Friedlander with us. He's the director of marketing communications for the Verizon Digital Media Services. A mouthful, welcome, Jason. It is a mouthful, the email's even worse. We won't go there. So for people that aren't familiar with the Digital Media Services, a lot of people know Verizon obviously for lots of different things. What specifically does your group do? So our group, our mission is to change the way the world watches. So we do that a couple different ways. We are a group made up of about three acquisitions. So in 2013, Verizon acquired uplink video streaming service, which is where I came from. And that's an end-to-end video content and gestion delivery, ad insertion, workflow, and then we acquired, literally three weeks later, the Edgecast Content Delivery Network to really put those two things together. Because Verizon saw that video was eating up a large majority of the bandwidth. About the bandwidth, right? So we put together these services and Verizon bought these two kind of startups and they knew that we could put the war chest behind it and build the infrastructure that's kind of associated with the name Verizon, like that backend to really build these two systems up to really be able to handle the shift from broadcast television, cable television to OTT. So we built a lot of new features on top of uplink since we were, in the last three years, we've added a lot of scalability to handle tens of thousands of people hitting play at the same time, tens of millions of people watching. And we've also, on the CDN side, we went from about two terabits per second to over 31 today with over 100 points of presence around the world from about less than 20 when we were required. So it's been an exciting time. So that's really what we do is we kind of prepare and create the assets and deliver the highest quality of the end user. Because you're sitting right there, you know very specifically how video to the mobile has just completely changed the world. Yeah, and being part of both the delivery and the preparation, we get to know a lot about what works best so that every user can have the highest quality. Because we know if our customers can't deliver that high quality, personalized experience to every user, then it hurts their engagement, it hurts their brand loyalty, and thus doesn't help our business. So our goal is to really use all the pieces we have to make sure that we're delivering that for our customers. And you had a new exciting announcement here at the show, so tell us a little bit about that. Yeah, we're really excited about this. Like I said, Verizon Digital Media Services is made up of those acquisitions and last year we had another one called VoliCon. So the three companies are really the basis of what BDMS is and this year at NAB, we launched Media Experience Studio. And Media Experience Studio is really exciting because it's the first product we've launched that sits on the same level of those three acquisitions in our stack. And it's what we're calling a content intelligence system. And what that means to us is that where we've kind of nailed monitoring and quality, we've nailed delivery via our CDN, we've nailed content preparation and personalization via uplink, we really heard our customers and kind of the entire industry talking about how everything upstream is still kind of a little dysfunctional. A lot of different systems are needed just to execute the delivery of a single asset to an end user. So we've kind of moved upstream to really give content owners the ability to manage a single asset from whether they're acquiring it or producing it like you guys are and manage the metadata associated with it. And then the delivery to the end user, whether they want to build an app, come up with a subscription service or personalized feeds or anything around that, that's what this service really does from an end to end perspective. It's really magical when you think of all the things that have to happen in the background. For someone to navigate pit picking application, Netflix, YouTube, whatever, go to an asset, hit play, and the thing is delivered. Yeah, my kids have no idea what it takes to actually get it there when they're watching Disney Junior. But, and the content owners are constantly having to deal with those headaches from conforming metadata from one system to another. And we felt, if we can kind of get rid of all those little pieces and put it into a single really usable, really cost effective platform for people to use, then this becomes the source of truth for everything out here. And then if I need to update my metadata for an application that's out here already, I just make that change. I don't then have to push it out here and then go here and then go here. So we think in the long run, it's going to help our customers, which are content creators, it's going to help them create new experiences and experiment to be able to offer a better OTT experience to the end user in the end. And not only did you think it's a cool idea, but it looks like you got some accolades from the industry as well and a few awards. Yeah, we did. We won the MX Studio won an award, our live event solution, which our live streaming solution won an award for Best in Show. That one we're really, really excited about because that's another one where we've listened to kind of our customers. For years, the APIs on top of Uplink and Edgecast have allowed customers to produce the largest live events, whether it's sports or it's concert series or whatever, but they asked us for tools to simplify the production of that where they, for instance, we had a customer who bought the rights to multiple college conferences and when they get those rights, there's only a small subset of those sports that they're actually going to ever air on their broadcast network, football, baseball, basketball, right? Right. And they have the rights to field hockey and men's soccer and girl swimming and all those things and they said, we already own these, help us come up with a cost effective way to produce these highest quality and put them in our OTT app because in our OTT app, we can offer much more niche kind of sports because we don't need millions of people to watch it. Right. Just a handful of people are watching it with monetization. So that's what our live events tool does. Last year we did 26,000 events for customers and this year we're on target for over 56,000. So we're really excited about the power that this really simple tool has to deliver and help monetize those events they could improve. It's interesting because there's a lot of talk about the democratization and kind of the, you know, the semi pro or the hobbyist now that has access to all these tools and live events. But even within the big brands, you know, you still have this kind of long tail content that never was going to break into regular on broadcast but it does have an audience. Well, it's a waste of money. They're, yes, they're buying the rights to football. I mean, that's what they're getting, but if they can offset the cost of those rights via offering all these other services, then that's a win. And really in the end, it's really a win for the consumer and down the road, the advertiser, right? If we can finally put all the pieces together where, you know, you're watching a specific thing that you're interested in, obviously you're getting served dynamic ads, but your dynamic ads are super highly targeted to things you really want to buy right now or then it's a win for everybody. You get the best experience, you know, sitting back on your couch. The content owner gets the most value for their content and the advertiser gets to reach people they traditionally couldn't reach that targeted. Right, right. And the variety and types and size of the content, it's only getting bigger. I mean, as you walk around here and see all these 360 cameras and VR cameras and IR cameras and, but then you have 5G coming right around the corner. So a whole nother kind of ratchet up of opportunity to deliver a whole nother kind of genre of content right around the corner. Yeah, it's great for us. It's, you know, 5G to us is just another distribution endpoint for our content, but we're interconnected throughout the world to 3,000 last mile networks, whether they're 4G, they're your home internet, or it's a next 5G network. But what that means for us on our end as a vendor is we have to make sure that the encoding profiles that we're using the most efficient bandwidth that we're offering that highest quality that can be delivered over the available bandwidth of the network to that end user so they're getting the most value of their 5G network or whatever it is. Okay, so you got the first product out without giving away any trade secrets. If we see you in a year from now, kind of what are some of your objectives? Where are you guys going next? Yeah, I think part of our MX studio is, again, giving that insight to a content owner to be able to see this piece of content cost me X and I've made Y. Now what we want to do is the next layer we want to be able to offer up a vision to your entire content library to tell you you need to produce more content like this or you need to put out an app that consists of these assets from your library because based on the data we're looking at, we can tell you that's going to have an ROI. So in the end that content owners are avoiding the risk or much less so risky and they're going to be more targeted with their concepts and allow them to experiment more to really find what works in the OTT space. Analytics instead of intuition, how about that? Analytics and personalization, man. That's what it's all about. All right, well Jason, congrats on the awards and the product launch and make sure it's taken a few minutes to stop by theCUBE. Thank you, my pleasure. All right, Jason Friedlander from Verizon. I'm Jeff Frick from theCUBE. You're watching us from 2017 NAB. We'll be back with our next guest after this short break. Thanks for watching.