 Welcome everyone to theCUBE's presentation of the AWS Industry Tech Partners Showcase. This is season one, episode one, kicking off a new series covering the exciting partners from the AWS ecosystem to talk about accelerating immediate supply chain volume velocity with AWS. I'm your host, John Furrier. We're here excited to have guest Benjamin Dubois, who's the Chief Revenue Officer of Telestream, company everyone knows a lot about in the broadcast business. Benjamin, thanks for joining us today. Thanks John, looking forward to our conversation. Yeah, everyone in the business pretty much has probably used you guys, very well-known brand. Congratulations on your great performance at NAB. We want to just drop in and ask you before we get into the conversation around the cloud, cloud-native, talk about what Telestream does right now. What's the core business for the folks who aren't following at home? Telestream has been the, I would say, tech leader in many aspects of the content processing platforms initially. And as through acquisition, we've driven now supply chain, trying to automate the simple and simplify the complex as much as we can. And we offer a number of point products both on the in advance and two end solutions in combination with partners like AWS on the content creation and production side and also on the content distribution and monetization side. So, go ahead. You guys have been driving a lot of these solutions in the industry. Now cloud is on the scene with benefits. We're seeing some examples of some operational efficiencies, but now the supply chain conversation comes into media. You also got software supply chain. We hear about that on the other side of the tech business, but now you got media supply chain. Where is the action from an efficiency standpoint and for a new content development standpoint? I think what happens is we interfere in the overall media supply chain and multiple endpoints. First of all, we manage it out of the content today. We manage a lot of the archives today and that happens through acquisition, but because of us we're managing multiple exabytes of content today and people are trying to find out how to leverage a cloud as they're looking for OTT services and direct consumer services, also leveraging fast channels, which is a new thing that's happening massively in the industry. And the idea is to how can you leverage the cloud, the burst capacity, but also fully cloud native solutions to optimize your overall supply chain. We've been trying over the years to really optimize every single task, whether it was transcoding content preparation, maybe post production at terms, all the way from the ingest to the distribution. Now people are more looking at, how do I optimize the entire supply chain and leverage all the content that I have to really sell it to as many platforms that I can on the long run. And so the interesting part of Terostream is we understand both live file and stream, which a lot of tech vendors are either or not all three. So that gives us the ability to focus on certain areas. So a couple of use cases that we've had, maybe that can help your audience understand it is intelligent ingest, leveraging, taking any feeds, but also any camera content and taking that to the cloud and doing something with it there. It's how do you migrate these archive content to the cloud? What we've seen is people wanted a copy of the content in the cloud and now they're reverting. So what used to be the backup becomes a primary because once it's in the cloud, you can do a lot of things like leveraging AWS recognition to add more metadata and then feed in to your distribution set. And what you also can do in the cloud is once you have all the orchestration and the content processing aspect, you can start really thinking glass to glass and end to end for your customers. So trying to leverage that digitalization of the entire portfolio and the entire workflow to make it more efficient. That's awesome. Here's a lot of use cases and value proposition there. I got to ask you about the Telestream role in helping facilitate the migration to the cloud. Take us through that. How does that work? What are some of those use cases? That's a big one. You mentioned intelligent ingest, but this is a migration to the cloud. And a lot of people seem to be moving there. How do you guys facilitate the migration of media to the cloud? Well, I think there's three leverage, three different ones. So ingest is one. Ingest is a lot of people get masters, for instance, delivered to them in the cloud right now. Or if you do live production and you're doing, say an event next year in Paris as an example. And a lot of feeds actually are going to come directly available in the cloud. And so the idea is to be able to capture that content as it is and put in directly in a post-production workflow that helps you do this, both by delivering the right files, the right metadata alongside it, and being able to, in addition to that, add the metadata to it. Another side of saying this, what I was mentioning about the archive, you migrate what is currently today on tape libraries, for the most case, or some on-prem disks. And that's a big conversation to manage. You need to manage your storage. You have multiple copies of this. You want to get very quick to the people that are going to test it in a studio environment. You want to ingest something in Atlanta and have someone in Hollywood being able to edit that right away. So facilitating these movements of data and the storage across the different regions that you may have in AWS. And then finally, it's all about the content processing, so ability to do transcoding, add subtitling, add captioning, do this, which is something we're really known for, is having that sophistication of building the right transcoding and packaging of the final content. Yeah, the product's been amazing. And this whole cloud phenomenon brings up, you kind of brought up my next question, which was once it's in the cloud, you're enabling the content production for the customers in that new kind of workflow and team configuration. How are you making that more successful? Because that's a big, big deal. Enabling the content production once it's in the cloud and then working, how do you make it more successful with the teams? Well, I think initially people looked at, the tips at all in the water was cloud of mostly for burst capacity, the flexibility that gives them when, I'm thinking of UK customers that had to, for instance, serve an entire sets of seasons of a very successful show onto Amazon Prime. And obviously they were not scaled on Prime to be able to do that. So what they did is run for a few weeks, months, a full set of workflows in a cloud that allows them to deliver that to Amazon Prime easily. That was the first aspect. Now what's also really happening now is people are not just interested in migrating their aging platform into the cloud. They want to use the cloud to build new sets of solutions. So live production is a good one where you have sports is a great case where you're not no longer sending 2,500 people to a big event. You're sending a few people and then you make sure that your feeds get back to you and then you treat them and you can scale rapidly. And then it's also using existing. So one of the things we facilitate is how we can migrate existing workflows on Prime to the cloud because we have an understanding of what they're doing on Prime. We can bring some ideas to do it in the cloud but optimizing this. Obviously you want to change your habits. You have a lot more flexibility. You have a lot more elasticity. You have the scalability you never had. So now you need to change the workflow not to repeat the things that we've seen in the industry as well when we moved to digital, people were just moving the same workflow they had with state and then they did it with file. Well, now that you're in your cloud, you need to reinvent your workflows and optimize them. And it's all about the optimism of that supply chain. How has that gone for your customers on the changing their workflows or optimizing them? Is there playbooks? How do you guys help them along there? What's been your experience? Yeah, I think there's a number of playbooks that we leverage. What's been interesting right now specifically at this minute is people that have launched large direct-to-consumer approach. So you can think of the large ones and I will name them but you know who they are. They initially were built as a completely separate entity. And so what was interesting is we were delivering on premise using tools like Vantage which is probably our flagship product. For instance, for companies in New York, their full workflows of content preparation for broadcast and then delivering that to the broadcast payouts. And then we would hand it over to, for instance, a company called encoding.com we just acquired last year that was doing all the encoding and packaging for the VOD for these large D2C customers. And what we end up doing is when you know the entire food chain, so to speak, the entire supply chain, we can come back and optimize some of this because now we don't do an end-off any longer. We're starting to optimize these workflows. So what we're seeing is a lot of convergence of what people do in OTT and direct-to-consumer now bring up into the broadcast world and vice versa and everybody can learn from both to try to optimize these workflows. I think that the next gen is really going to be about live production and studio production which is very exciting and we hope to be participating. The other thing at the very end of the spectrum on the distribution line, we have a set of solutions on the monitoring. So we're monitoring the quality of service and the quality of experience. Well, we bring this quality now on the contribution line. So really trying to leverage all that IPs that we have both on-prem but now taking it to the cloud and enabling new workflows. I was going to ask you about the quality on the delivery. It's come up a lot. You know, when you're delivering the media files to partners and end users, what do you guys do to ensure that quality for delivery of media files to the partners and end users? So we have intention monitoring capabilities that allow you to check, you know, at the head end, pre-CDN, post-CDN, if you have a loss of quality, if you can come back so that you can then inform potentially at the encoder level, whether you need to make some changes, et cetera, et cetera. And we do that both on traditionally on the linear side but also on the ABR side. So we're able to really leverage these tools. And as I mentioned before, it's now increasingly becoming all part of not only the experience towards the very end, but also as you prepare and you produce content. I love the cloudification, you know, the cloud native media bringing stuff into the cloud. What's on the horizon from Telestream on what customers will do with the next gen technology in the cloud? I can imagine there's some differentiated, heavy lifting that can be automated away. Intelligent ingest that points to maybe some, maybe AI in the future. How do you guys see some of these under the hood capabilities either scaling, changing, or being more innovative for the customer? I think the main thing is to leverage AI and ML in a different way. For sure, I think it's going to revolutionize the content management aspect of things. People have really focused on the hybrid environment into optimizing costs. So now you also have ability to track, to do cost tracking and optimizing through business rule, how you move things from glacier, going deep archive, moving back when you need it, being able to bring AI into searching mechanisms so that in the archive world, once someone passes away, for instance, you can anticipate that and you start retrieving stuff up front. So some of these new ideas around AI and ML. And the other thing that we'd say is probably going to come and we're participating at a certain level at the smart ingest level, but we are doing this also because we have the well-known tectronics video brand as well as part of this thing. So we have oscilloscopes that were physical on-prem appliance. We're doing a lot of that, that's probably for the future, but in the cloud and having these capabilities in the cloud so people can really leverage what they can do during live production. And we think these capabilities are moving away from just the truck, but getting the truck as an input into the cloud and then optimizing that live production workflow, I think is the next stage. And I think it's going to, there's a lot of things that's going to happen with the move to IP and everything that while maintaining a hybrid environment, we think a cloud native is going to be very, very fast and very efficient. I love the live production innovation. I think that's going to be a real game changer because it's going to move the, down the power curve, enable more producers to produce content, more concerts, more events, more live action. And not just at a tier one level, also being able to provide tools that allow, you know, not all your, your, not just the MLB level of baseball, they may down a little bit, not a notch and enabling more channels and more functions. If you start combining the ingest capabilities, the quality monitoring of, of contribution feeds, the advanced options of connection with the post production tools that you need and the distribution end, you can have a full chain and you can easily build, we have type integration with a lot of the key players as well on the distribution side to be able to fully enable a lot of people to leverage a cloud to, to build their own and become their own broadcast system. Benjamin, I know you guys have a lot of tier one customers. You mentioned a few of the names. We all know who they are. One of the big ones, as you see the emergence of digital first companies, like theCUBE, we're small, but we're in, you know, B2B enterprise tech and we go around the world. We do a lot of live productions, but we're small. We might want to have a truck, a virtualized truck. Why would we ever buy a truck? We could use you guys. What do you guys look at the next gen customer base beyond the big whales and the big, the big companies that you're serving? I mean, every company should be a media company in the future at some point. This is where it's going. I think there's certainly a lot of tailwinds in the media space and there's a lot of new ways of delivering video, but also building video. And I think video is a medium of the future for sure. And everybody's consuming it. Slightly different use cases. You know, the level of quality is going to be different. The needs are going to be slightly different. But at the end of the day, it's all about efficiency and a little bit the ability and the ease of use for a good quality content to get to the customer. So it's that idea of getting the eyeballs on that video and the way you do it is, you know, by optimizing your supply chain. You know, I remember when the cloud came on the scene, entrepreneurs would have to build data centers before they could ship any code. And then the cloud came and they could swipe their credit card and they can build products. That created new brands, new entrepreneurs could get in the market. Media is a lot like building code. It's the product you create, you're building on the cloud. Is there any new things that you see out in the horizon that's from a game-changing personnel perspective, creative talent? Do you see the YouTube generation coming up? They bring in audiences with them. You've got this digital piece. What do you see out there that's coming around the corner that people may or may not see? I'm sure you see a lot of things coming on the video. Yeah, I think we see a lot of YouTube creators and also people, digital teams within large, larger media entertainment entities coming with a very digitally savvy nature by their training, by their interests, and they push the envelope of, again, trying to be more efficient. TikTok is a big thing. You need to be able to build TikTok stuff. But once you do the first level, as we've seen in YouTube, then you start getting to a much higher level. You want the level of the influencers to have a better quality in their content. We see podcasts changing as well quite a lot. And so their needs are slightly different. The quality is always increasing. And I think we're known for helping people get good quality. And what's interesting in those new talent, is they're also pushing the envelope of how do you interact with technology? And we pride ourselves in building self-serve technology. We're also, dare I say, API first on a lot of things that we do because we see a new set of people. We used to interact with a lot of broadcast engineers and now we interact with a lot of DevOps people. And it's a slightly different approach because they're trying to get to the same conclusion in a different way. Video nerds also play well with cloud nerds as we found API first, a lot of scale, a lot of process, a lot of reliability, performance, all part of it. You guys have 80% of most of the professional video content in the world and you're constantly migrating those assets to the cloud. Final question, what's it like working with AWS? How's that been? Talk about that relationship. We have a great relationship with AWS. It's really a partnership. We not only leverage everything that they offer in terms of services, but we partner on going to customers and trying to enable these migration of certain workloads to the cloud. We're partnering very heavily right now on the archive migration, people that have 10 to 30 petabytes, maybe more of content sitting on LTO. How do you leverage Snowball to help ingest some of that into AWS? How do you migrate it, but then also build on top of it so that we can leverage, for instance, AWS recognition to generate metadata how we can incorporate some of our content processing tools to unify those media. Some of these media is a bit old, so we turn it back into something that's usable today and help facilitate the distribution of that into their different content management system. So clearly a very tight relationship on the technical side, but also on the commercial side where we can partner very nicely and build. I think we see ourselves as an enabler through technology of migrating people to what they want to do in terms of business outcome and having a partnership like AWS is fantastic for that because they're looking for the same idea. Excellent work, you guys elevating media companies into the cloud. A lot of benefits there, certainly storage, optimization, scale, Benjamin Dubois, Chief Revenue Officer at Telestream, thanks for coming on. Final minute we have left, take a minute to tell the audience what you guys are up to at Telestream, what you guys are doing at NAB, what's the new products, give an update, put a plug in for Telestream real quick. Thanks John. Well Telestream has been a great company in terms of enabling these workflows. And we have a lot of pieces and we keep doing these best of great components, but we're certainly working on building more and two end solutions for our customers, helping them both in orchestration of their workflows as well as the optimization of every single one of these workflows. We're very proud to manage a lot of content on premise, we want to manage a lot of that content in the cloud and we're helping these customers to do that. And it's a very exciting time right now with all the set of tools that we have to becoming a trusted advisor for all of these larger many companies to migrate the workflow to the cloud and optimize that. Well it's well known that Telestream stands for quality in the industry. You guys control a lot of that media. Congratulations on your success. And as the cloud comes, it'll be more head room, more opportunities. I think more customers for you guys for sure. Certainly we're going to see more builders and new talent emerge. Yeah, there'll be some content that might not make it, but they'll be doing videos out there. Benjamin, thanks so much for coming on this inaugural episode one. Thanks for having me. It was a pleasure. Okay, great, great job. We're here at theCUBE. I'm John for your host. This is season one, episode one of the new series covering the exciting partners from the AWS ecosystem to talk about accelerating media supply chain volume velocity with AWS. Thanks for watching.