 From Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering NAB 2017. Brought to you by HGST. Hi, welcome back to NAB. I'm Lisa Martin. We have had a very exciting day so far, talking with lots of great leaders. Very excited to be joined next by Joan Rabbits, the VP of Marketing for HGST. Joan, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, it's good to be here. We're very excited to have you here. NAB 2017, this is our first time here, an event with over 100,000 people overwhelming. Walked a lot of miles so far today. Tell me your first impressions of NAB this year. Yes, well, this is also my first year at NAB. And it's a little overwhelming. Yeah, a lot of people and the technology is everything from soup to nuts. I heard you can go upstairs and buy a helicopter. Wow. Yeah, which apparently is important in media and entertainment. So our little piece of it, which is IT, I think is a growing part, but yeah, there's a little bit of everything here. They're really, really, as I haven't seen the helicopters, I'll have to make my way upstairs. Yeah, you can get a demo, a 3D demo. Wow, wow, oh my goodness. So one of the pervasive overarching themes of the event this year is the MET effect, the Met Effect, this convergence of media, and entertainment and technology, which is so interesting. And as we were talking before, technology is probably both the bane of the existence of a lot of company and in any industry, as well as something that provides tremendous opportunity. As you lead marketing for HGST, when you're talking to major studios, how are CTOs reacting to market trends that are going on, whether it's virtual reality or now we've got so much more data we need to keep because there's more IP there, how is that CTO journey changing in response to technology proliferation? Right, well, it's interesting. Some CTOs are very aware that they're in the middle of a big disruption for which data-related technologies are going to be the key to surviving. Others, not so sure, and they'll say in the first meeting, you know, I'm not the storage guy, don't worry about asset archiving, so there's probably nothing you can sell me and it only takes about 10 minutes for them to realize that that's probably not true, that underneath most of their biggest challenges, there's some aspect of how to manage a large amount of data. They're in the middle of a big disruption in their industry. One CTO told me that new people don't go to movies anymore. There's a loyal audience of people who go to the movie theater and I'm one of them. I'm a complete video file, but a lot of younger people just don't go to movies. They get the same content in other ways, whether it's Netflix, whether it's movies at home, and so there's a huge disruption going on there that the way people want to consume the content that studios create is really changing. They tend to want to consume it in ways that require more than just the storyline, which is kind of what a film and a movie theater is, it's got to be interactive. So if I buy a DVD or the digital version of it to take home, I often want added scenes or extra stuff. If I might be playing a video game or that's based on an actual real piece of content, that's going to be an interactive form of it. Some of the new technologies that are coming out like virtual reality are really interactive. That's where they shine. It's not a format for theater. So they recognize that they have this core content, they have to deliver it in a very different set of ways and delivering it in a different set of ways means curating it and keeping it and producing it in different ways. So not only is the accuracy and the quality of the content going up, right? I got these 8K cameras and everything. The delivery mechanism is changing so that I'm going to keep and create this content in a lot of different ways. Underneath all of that is about how do I keep it? How do I store it? So all these disruptive changes are driving a proliferation of massive amounts of data. Though there's one side of it, they just have to keep this stuff, right? For insurance purposes, for historical purposes, they're keeping it. The flip side is monetizing, right? So you mentioned before Netflix. So Netflix is in a very interesting position in the industry in that they own so much information about you and me, the people who watch movies. They know all about our preferences. I can come right back into a show at the exact place I left off on a different TV in another location and I love that about Netflix. And they also know a lot about my habits. And when I go to a movie theater, the guys that produce that movie aren't getting that from me, right? More of a qualitative reaction that they're employing. Right. But the flip side is that Netflix, historically, has only been able to give out content as it's been provided to them. Whereas if you're in a film production and you can get feedback from your users, you can really modify your movie. You can change the storyline. They change the endings. I mean, they take characters in and out. So I think on the one hand, the film industry's understanding that knowing the behaviors and the preferences of individual consumers is critical to success in the future. Meanwhile, Netflix, who has that information, knows that curating and making their own content is critical to their success. Otherwise, having personalized information is of no value if I can't customize the content. So they're all figuring out that there's some core thing that they need in this disruptive world that they don't have. And in both cases, it's about content. And it's about the storage and the data and the ways that they can take that data and find useful, basically mine, useful information out of it. Right, and new revenue streams. So I imagine that the conversation with the studio that 10 minutes later after you said, understands, oh, this actually is a conversation about archiving this. There's so much data, but it must be, to put it bluntly, overwhelming. How do you help really transform the culture from the C-suite down to, say, IT? Help them understand what are the steps that we need to take given that we've got petabyte scale, a data that needs to be archived and needs to be easily accessible. You were mentioning something before we went live about, you know, studios ago, we shot this this way and it's great, but man, wouldn't that be great with VR? So it's really interactive. What is that, walk us through that evolution that you help CTOs and their teams understand with respect to getting an archived strategy that allows them a lot of capability and functionality. And that's exactly kind of a key word is strategy, right? So historically, the CTO might have looked at keeping copies of old, a movie that's no longer being created as an insurance policy almost. Today, it's a strategic asset. And some of those assets they recognize as being strategic and others, they're not sure, right? So the first part of developing a strategy for getting good use out of that data and monetizing it, et cetera is understanding where the value might be. So the example I give as I was sitting with the CTO of one of the major studios and we were just talking about virtual reality and how is virtual reality going to change their business? And he commented that, well, we had just finished this beautiful ballroom scene and we finished the scene, we said, oh my gosh, that would have been a great VR scene. And so that scene had 250 extras all in costume for this ballroom dance, right? And so they kept all those people in costume for four extra hours, went back and reshot that scene. And I said to them, oh, too bad you don't keep your dailies, you would have had that scene, you know? So he kind of looked at me and said, wow, we never thought of the dailies, which is the film that they throw away that doesn't get kept from each day's worth of filming. They don't see that as a critical asset, but if you start to rethink your problem, it is, right? So part of the strategy is having them start to think about what is and might be a critical asset going forward. And then how could they cost effectively save that information? Because the reason they don't save dailies today is because it's another two petabytes. If I don't know the value of that, that's pretty expensive, even at very low costs of storage. So it's both understanding how they can keep their costs down for certain types of information and get the value up. Know that that value could be there. Then they build a different type of strategy than the one they have today, which is really more of a defensive strategy. So yeah, we see the, as we're talking to these major companies in this industry, they're all moving from a somewhat defensive to very offensive strategy with digital assets. They have to or they'll be out of business. Absolutely. You recently spoke last month at the virtual NAB conference on hybrid redefine and the future of digital assets. What were some of the takeaways from you in terms of, or recommendations on how can the media and entertainment industry really preserve these digital assets in hybrid workloads? Sure. Well, and the hybrid comes in because not only is there an explosion of data, there's an explosion of processing requirements. People think the cheapest way to do extra processing is to send it up to the cloud and do a lot of processing up there. Unfortunately, the data has to go with it. So the challenge that they face is how to keep some of the data assets on site where they're more protected, they're not subject to risk. And by the way, if you take data and you move it in the cloud and you're moving it around, it becomes very expensive because it's very expensive. It's not expensive to keep data in the cloud, but it's very expensive if you touch it and move it, right? That's where they start making their money. So how can I keep my data where it's protected and where I don't have to pay to move it around, but get all the benefits of on-demand processing with thousands of processors in the cloud? And the answer is you do need to make the data accessible to the workflow that might happen in the crowd. So most these guys that do rendering, for example, they burst 20 to 50% of their rendering to the public cloud because they're on very tight schedules and just doesn't make sense to buy the extra equipment when it's only going to be used for three weeks. So hybrid workflows are about moving the processing around but not necessarily having to move all the data around and keep the data secure. And that's a big priority right now for all these media and entertainment companies to figure out, right? Is one of the benefits that they can get from that accelerating production workflows? Yes, I mean, it's all, they're 100% deadline oriented, right? So you look at these animated movies, whether it's Despicable Me and the Minions, right? It's all about how long it's going to take to produce that, right? So the workflow that is used to create and then render this animated information is, I mean, that's it. That is the critical path. I mean, if I had these guys in the animation space talk to me about, you know, simple mistakes where they change the hair on an animated figure and then they go look at it in the morning after it's all been re-rendered and the hair is like a half an inch behind the person, right? I mean, then they have to run it again and it takes eight hours, right? That's a whole day lots in a production schedule. And you know, movies we see today, so much more of it is CGI then at any time in the past that even if it's not an animated movie, there's a whole lot of processing that's going on on that movie and that all is critical path. So yeah, time is of the workflow around that, that whole processing workflow is absolutely time critical. Every minute that's spent costs them a lot of money. Can imagine. And it's something that you mentioned and I want to ask the last question on collaboration. You talked about the benefits that Netflix has and then some of the challenges or the opportunities and the same thing on the side of the filmmakers and it seems like this is sort of circle. What did you call it? A virtuous cycle. The virtuous cycle. Do you see collaboration happening between some of the streaming providers and film? Is that a two-way street that is starting to become viable? Yes, and we do hear stories of them collaborating directly and indirectly. So indirectly they all where they have these common overlapping technology problems, they're working together in industry organizations media and entertainment, whether it's Simpty or Etsy and trying to develop technologies that are for everyone's benefit. And then directly I think they do work together and they see the benefits that each other has and try to learn and adopt some of the similar technology. So I don't know if it's always been this way but you get this feeling when you're here at NAB that there is this intense desire for everybody to learn from everyone else's strengths across the industry. It's not just film, it includes people who are doing sports. We talked about interactive gaming and now we have video games being played in tournaments, live TV. So yeah, so we see a real sort of sharing of information collaborating around best technology practices across all of media and entertainment in ways that I think are probably much more intense than in the past. Yeah. Fantastic, well it just shows that the momentum that we're feeling around this event, this convergence of media, entertainment technology is incredibly viable. But to have this feeling that you're sharing of sharing best practices and collaboration is probably really as this event, which has been going on for many, many years evolves, really the direction that it should go into. So thank you so much Joan for joining us on theCUBE, it's been so delightful speaking with you and it sounds like never a dull moment in day and a life of you. Nope, it's always changing. Excellent, well we wish you have a great time with the rest of the show. Thank you. And we thank you for watching theCUBE. We are live at NAB 2017 in Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin, stick around, we'll be right back.