 Hello, and welcome to theCUBE's presentation of the AWS Industry Tech Partner Showcase. This is season one, episode one, kicking off a new series, covering the exciting partners from the AWS ecosystem to talk about accelerating media supply chain volume and velocity with AWS. I'm your host, John Furrier. Today, excited to join by Chris Blandy, Director, Global Media Entertainment Strategy and Business Development for AWS and Rowan Dupamare, CTO of DPP. Gentlemen, thanks for joining us today. So we had a lot of conversations been going kicking out in the industry, so NAB just happened. That was a huge discussion around digital, the future of media, but the media supply chain was a conversation that was notable. People were talking about the supply changes are changing these different formats. Let's get into this keynote to unpack the current state of media supply chain and then look at the future. What are the key trends and let's get into it. First, let's get a definition. What is the current state of the media supply chain? If I could take that one, we see a lot of customers have already moved their media supply chain operations into the cloud and we've got a rich set of partners who have enabled that. What they are looking for primarily is operational efficiency, a secure way to manage their archives and increasingly, especially with all the mergers and acquisitions occurring in the business, developing ways to integrate multiple disparate supply chains into more of a unified view of their media operations. Yeah, the move to the cloud has been phenomenal. And DPP, Rowan, what's your story? Tell us about what you guys do and how do you fit into the equation here with the media supply chain? Yeah, so the DPP is a network of nearly 500 companies across the media technology space, media companies, technology partners and so on. And actually, I mean, I'd really echo what Chris says. We have our flagship event, the leaders briefing every year. We hear from 30 major media companies talking about their top strategic priorities. And if you look back over the last three or four years, there's been an incredible shift from a lot of talk about moving operations and supply chains to the cloud. And as Chris says, I think many organizations are well along that path now. We went through obviously a particular set of different challenges during the pandemic where there was a lot about remote operation, there was a lot about workforce and managing people. And then coming out of that into a tough economic climate at the moment for many media organizations, I think that operational efficiency piece is really front of mind right now. People are thinking about how they optimize, how they do more with what they've got and really focus on kind of maximizing ROI for their technology investment. I'd love to get your thoughts on what those leaders are thinking about when you have those conversations because Chris pointing out the move to the cloud has been going on certainly from a developer standpoint, but media, they act like developers too, they're developing content, content is data. Data has processes, processes can be automated, a lot of undifferentiated heavy lifting. These are the talking points of AWS, Chris. I mean, every time I do an interview with the folks at Amazon, that's what they talk about. Now you got AI. This is interesting as media workflows kind of get identified from an efficiency standpoint, you can take away some things, move that to the cloud or automate it. There's a transformation mindset. What is the top transformation conversations around these workflows? What are people thinking? They see digital, they see some scale, they see omnichannel, they see all kinds of new things that they have to get their arms around. Well, I think the first wave was really focused on ROI and operational efficiency and migration. And then after companies and customers started to get experience operating the cloud, they realized it's more than just an ROI case or a TCO analysis, it's also a capability unlock. So for example, we have solutions of partners that allow customers to enrich their content metadata when they do the migration. So you can use our core AI ML services to generate new metadata by examining the content and extracting information like actors or products that are in the scenes, leveraging speech to text to do transcription and then also managing things like rights and avails and really building up a rich metadata library around the content, including integrating third-party tools like our own IMDB service. Yeah, I think what I'd really add here is the transformation words that you used there, John. I'm actually almost seeing fallout of favor a little bit. I think right now there's been, we've been in a constant state of flux for many years, constant state of transformation. That's probably not going to go away, but actually we're seeing a lot of media companies really trying to focus on very specific tangible use cases, things they can make better. And sometimes that's faster, sometimes that's more cost-effective, whatever it happens to be. And I mean, as Chris says, there are new opportunities, new use cases being unlocked and what's quite exciting now is I think we're seeing some of the technologies that we've been talking about for a number of years move sort of beyond the stage of hype into like real tangible application for media businesses. So some of these ML tools is a good example of that. Three or four years ago, the trade shows it felt like everybody was trying to sell you the same basic AI solutions and they mostly weren't living up to the quality bars that people wanted. Whereas now, I'm having very, very tangible conversations with media companies about where they can automate aspects of their supply chain, aspects of localization or packaging and delivery or whatever, using some of those tools. I mean, it's almost a perfect storm of innovation opportunity, we've got multimodal AI as it's called. It's not just tech with a large language model, it's computer vision, it's audio, it's data. I mean, this is, media is data and this is where I like that conversation you just mentioned, AI is cool. But automating workflows is one, event-driven supply chain for instance, a conversation that's been having manual work being automated. Talk about the event-driven supply chain because automation seems to be the first wave. People go for that right away. But what does that actually mean? Is it actually in practice? Can you guys share the event-driven supply chain discussion? Sure, I think, as Rowan mentioned, there was an initial wave of transformation that was really about moving to the cloud, migrating your operation and then automating workflow and moving towards more of a managed by exception model so you have more operational efficiency with your operations teams. But now I think, given all the tools like AWS Lambda, you can start to monitor the workflow and trigger actions dynamically based on a state change in the environment. So when a new piece of content shows up, you can automate inspection of that content and understand what processes do I need to perform on that without human intervention. So this type of automation is sort of the next wave. And that's going to drive that efficiency conversation. A lot of customers now are facing economic headwinds as we all are. And they're looking for ways to consolidate the operations and to drive more efficiency. So leveraging this next wave of automation and event-driven supply chains is really the next step. I'm also really bullish on generative AI. I know it's in the buzz a lot. You mentioned large language models and things like that. But if you think about, you know, what Rowan mentioned about localization, for example, think about the potential to leverage some of the visual gen AI tools to automate things like subtitling, dubbing, and even driving lip sync matching to the dubbed version so that the end result is more realistic. The audience is more engaged because it feels like the actor's speaking in their native tongue. We're seeing startups doing that now, built on AWS and really starting to gain some traction. So I see this as a future unlock that's going to really drive even more efficiency in the distribution side of the business. Rowan, this is back to you. You brought it up earlier. AI and machine learning, big part of it. What's the hot areas? I mean, I've seen all data, it's metadata. A lot of things to work with here. What's your view on this? What's happening? Yeah, I mean, there's been a lot. And localization is a great example here. I mean, we just did a big piece of research in this area and there was a very palpable feeling that we are at a bit of an apex for the use of machine learning in that space. Huge amount of excitement right now about voice, like a machine learning voice model. So voice cloning and synthetic voices that can be used to enhance a human performance will make it sound like somebody else. I think that's somewhere that we're seeing a lot of rapid progress right now. I think what Chris said about things like using generative to manage lip sync and that kind of thing could be very, very exciting. But actually, I think one of the things that's exciting about sort of some of what Chris was touching on there with the event-driven as well is there's a bit of a mix, right? Of maybe systems that might be relatively simple rules based automation, using some event-driven workflows to apply some fairly well-defined rules that can be incredibly powerful for automating things. And then you start to mix in some of the more sort of creative generative machine learning aspects. We've got a real mix of technologies that are coming together to make much more of a difference than any one individual would make. This is, I think, one of the most exciting years. I think it's not really kind of recognized yet in the industry. If you're inside the ropes, you see media entertainment as certainly a very nerdy, very tech, cloud-scale data-driven AI opportunity unlocking as Chris was saying. But media is changing so much. This is a big opportunity. I think programming, data, how you guys are looking at it, we're going to change the game significantly. And I really get your guys' thoughts on what happens next as the industry changes and continues to evolve. It's very DevOps-like. It's very DevSecOps. You're going to have to have containers. You've got Lambda. I mean, you got AI. So yeah, a business that's been, I won't say manual, but they've had technologies been there around, but now it's going to be some change. What is the pace of change that you guys see coming in this industry? Because this is going to be disruptive. I mean, these things you guys are saying it's just mind-blowing. For sure. Well, I think that there's been a lot of work put in to enable that agility, right? So we've been seeing media companies looking for more modular technology solutions for a long time, looking to integrate best-of-breed components from different partners. And whether you're doing that in an event-driven way or whatever architecture you're using, actually almost doesn't matter. I think the fact of the matter is that what's best-of-breed today may not be in two or three years' time. And so people have been, I think starting to really leverage the cloud to give them that flexibility, to be able to adapt the workflows, the automations, the tools they're using over a period of time. I'd be interested to know if you're seeing that in amongst your customers, Chris. Yeah, I think there's two trends that are emerging now that I think will have a huge impact on the future. One is customers are starting to see this media supply chain operation, not as a cost center, but it's also increasingly seen as potentially impacting revenue. So if you think about it, if you can automate your media supply chain for distribution, you can increase your time to market and time to revenue dramatically by having a cloud-based archive being able to automate your distribution processes. And so we see customers who, in the past may have taken weeks or months to move a set of assets to a distribution partner are now doing that in a matter of hours or days, including entire libraries of content. So this type of agility and speed on the distribution side of the business, which is a big part of the revenue that immediate customers earn is important. I also see new business models emerging that are enabled by automated media supply chains. So Fast Channels is a great example where customers have moved their archives into the cloud, they've mined more metadata, and now they're able to automate the process of standing up Fast Channels and experimenting with what's working with customers very quickly, iterating very quickly, and then shifting on the dime, as you will, to adapt to customer and audience demand. And Fast Channels, Fast Channels for the people who don't know what it is, is the large aggregators, right, over the top. Is that what you're referring to? Yeah, free, ass-supported television. It's been a business model for a very long time, but now it's available in a much more personalized way. There are deep archives of content that have not been syndicated for a long time, that are now emerging, and we're seeing new entertainment customers really starting to drive more revenue out of that archive than ever before. One of the things that I see is really heating up is sustainability. And a lot of the partners you're going to hear from have adopted sustainability goals themselves that are enabling customers, especially in Europe, we're seeing this trend very importantly emerging, but it's starting to spread out globally. But by moving your media operation into the cloud, especially all the work we're doing at AWS to get to 100% renewable energy by 2025 for all our data centers, you can dramatically reduce the carbon footprint of your operation. So we're seeing a lot of demand from customers to move to a more sustainable model. Many of the largest media companies have stated net carbon zero or sustainable goals as part of our main corporate mandate. So moving the SAPA operation to AWS can really accelerate that goal. That's awesome. And then JNAI stuff's too great. Rowan, you have your take on it? Yeah, I mean, if I can respond to both of those actually. I mean, on the fast point, a huge amount of buzz recently. If one looks at the hype cycle around a piece like this, I feel like we're in that, almost in that trough of disillusionment at the moment in the, people have really dived into fast. And I think what Chris has said there about experimentation and iteration is really the key. Getting the data out of it and responding to that. We have this great quote in a research piece we did recently where a media exec said, if fast generated as much revenue as it does conversation, we'd all be in a very good place. But the fact of the matter is that those who are getting it right are generating good revenue out of it. So what you've got to be able to do is experiment, learn, shut down the things that aren't working and really dive in on the things that are working. And that's what an agile media supply chain enables you to do. So some of those experiments won't work, but some of them will. And that's why you want that agility. And I would just really underscore the sustainability point as well. This is a big area for the DPP. We have our own sustainability assessment program committed to sustainability. It's available to everybody in the industry for free. And if you don't know about it, I'd really encourage you to look it up. But that's really about helping people to make those steps towards a more sustainable business. So we're very much aligned with what Chris is thinking there. I think it's a really, really important topic in the industry now. I love that sustainability piece. We made me think of something else I wanted to bring up since you're here. Local content, sustainability is on one hand is carbon footprint. Local journalism, local media seems to be an issue. Low-cast was a company I saw out there got shut down. They were like a free, they had some property rights, they had some content issues. Local content, fast channels. Is local a hot issue? Or are we getting there? Was there thoughts on that piece, Rowan, on what's going on with local conversations? You meant localization. I mean, local's an interesting term, isn't it? Because it depends on the granularity at which you look. We recently had a major event with European broadcasters and many of them are national broadcasters. They have a really strong news focus. They really care deeply about the commitment to the audiences in the countries they're working in. And so that's certainly in Europe, a huge focus. It runs deep in the DNA of many of the broadcasters there. You go into a much larger market like the US and obviously you're down into much more of that kind of traditional local community kind of content. I do think this is hugely important. I think sometimes we're still feeling our way to getting the economics right of doing that in a streaming world. But the potential is actually to have more flexibility than we've had in an affiliate broadcast network model where the definition of local might be rather dependent on where the transmitters are placed or where the cablehead ends. It's situational, yeah. I mean, Chris, this brings up the benefits of an Amazon web services. You look at the API kind of architecture of cloud. You got integration, you can work with anyone. This unification of the supply chains potentially could be how companies partner. How do you guys see people integrating together? I mean, I can see a market where you have a platform set of tools and then content applications and content providers working with each other, whether it's common platform or through APIs. This unification becomes a big deal. What's, well, how important is that and how does that play into what could be innovative, whether it's local, sustainability, or other opportunities? Yeah, so just to touch on the local piece real quick, we see a lot of interest in local content scaling globally. So for example, we've been working with customers who built out an OTT platform in one country and now they're making that available globally through the use of AWS as a cloud, a global cloud platform, reaching audience all over the world who's interested in that content. So this is opening up new opportunities for these local content producers to distribute their product. In terms of unification, as I mentioned earlier, we've seen tremendous change in the industry. Lots of mergers and acquisitions over the last several years. These companies have inherited a lot of technical debt and a lot of disparate workflows and trying to integrate those workflows, especially across a global workforce is really challenging. But by migrating to the cloud, you can take that a great leap forward. And at a minimum, get observability over everything and then start to figure out how to strategically unify the things that are important to drive more efficiency. Yeah, I think your point about ROI efficiency and then unlocking new opportunities is the real key, key focus there. Final question, the last couple of minutes we have for you guys is, and when you have these opportunities where you have platforms and tools like AWS Merging, you're going to see moving to the cloud, okay, I think there's going to be unlocking of new ventures and new brands that could emerge. What's out there that you might see or people might not see that they should know about that's emerging, that's new, that's a new brand that's taking advantage of the tools. There's always new players that emerge when there's new capabilities that are different. They refactor, they build, they get in the market, they use cloud. What are you guys seeing as new things that people might not be seeing right now? Well, I'll jump in and say, I mean, as a neutral industry group, I'm not going to mention names because we can't align too closely with anybody in particular, but what I will say is that we see regularly now, small startup companies, technology startups that can come from all over the world who suddenly can get in front of huge media companies or huge companies in any sector because of the fact that we have these software defined supply chains running in the cloud. If you can be in a marketplace of AWS or just out there and available to run on a cloud platform and integrate with other tools from more established vendors, we see some really interesting small companies coming through that just wouldn't have been possible in the hardware world. The barrier to entry is much lower now. So especially in some of these AI areas, I would be keeping my minds wide open for that kind of stuff. Yeah, I would add that this category, media supply chain was practically invented by startups building on AWS. And while the concept of a media operation obviously existed before, the vision around moving it to the cloud and then both driving that efficiency and also driving that capability unlock for future use cases was really driven by that startup community. And then the more established players sort of were followers in that space. So I think you see a lot of startups leading and gaining ground and then the market moves. We're seeing that as well with Generative AI. Startups built on AWS-like runway have now won Oscars for the work they did in visual effects using Generative AI tools. So I am very bullish on the startup ecosystem and the best way to start a business is in the cloud. Yeah, we are too, Chris. Great point. I think AI is going to be a big game changer, supply chain, velocity, volume, the ability to merchandise that content with tools and supply chain capabilities. And then it's like AI, it's going to be an opportunity to change content games. So you guys are the head of it. I think it's going to be a massive change. Congratulations. Thank you for joining us today on the program. Chris Blandy, Director of Global M&E, Strategy and Business Development and Roland Damon, CTO, TPP. Thanks for joining us for this kickoff of the AWS ecosystems talk and showcase about accelerating media supply chain, volume and velocity. Thanks for joining us. Thank you. Okay, I'm John Furrier with your host. Thanks for watching.