 Hi, I'm Duncan, I'm the manager at Meltdown, London's premier esports bar, and let's go inside and see what's going on. So right now there's like gamers having a tournament right here. Yeah. So right now we're in the middle of a League of Legends TV2 tournament that we run every Friday night. You can see these guys playing right now, and the first prize for the tournament this week is a free shadow box with a month subscription, they're all playing on shadow PCs right now, as you can see. The shadow is a cloud-based PC streaming service, where from any device you can basically stream from a top of the range PC, and a data center that's constantly updated to run everything on the high specs. Yeah, I think it's great, I think it's obviously new. You're definitely going to deploy it, so I really appreciate it. Yeah, we've got it here right now, we're using it at the moment. You're the first. Yeah, we're the first in the UK. Yeah, yeah, so today is the official launch, so it's brand new. So let's check out, and right here at the event there's the shadow team. Hi, how's it going? I'm Patrick, I work for Shadow. My name's Patrick, I work for Shadow, and I'm part of the team that's bringing shadow to the UK. So Shadow is a team of French guys, right? Yeah, absolutely. And now you're launching in the UK, the British people are welcome. Yes, so we're launching in the UK, we're very happy to have new, well, whatever customers. This is going to be the thing that finally heals the rift between the British and the French. Finally. Yes, it heals the rift. Just before we tear it open again. Tear it open, exactly. We're all gamers in this together. Actually, even with Brexit, the fiber is going to stay, right? There's going to be fast connection no matter what. We'll still be connected despite Brexit. As we're negotiated, yeah, we might have to cut my table, so it should be a bit downer for you. And here at the event, you even have some of the guys, some of the gamers buying the shadow. Yes, absolutely. The shadow is available for purchase here at the bar and anywhere in the UK. And so we have some of the customers trying to buy it and enjoying it. Hey, so hi. So you are a gamer, right? Yeah, I'm a full-on gamer. And you're one of the first customers of the shadow. You have it running on your phone right now. Yeah, I have at the moment. What do you think of it? I think it's great, actually. I mean, to be honest, I was upgrading my computer sometime this month. But this package is going to make it so much easier for me to actually game on the go and game at home, really. So basically, you just bought a £1,500 computer for £17 for the first month, which is almost as a gaming machine. At the moment, I've got a six-core AMD 750 Ti graphics card, but I can only just about run Overwatch or League of Legends at medium to low settings. Right now, you can play games like this, right? This is League of Legends. This is not really, no, it's an intense game. That works fine on your desktop right now. It works fine on medium to low settings without any lag. So you're looking forward to be able to play at any game full speed, right? Yeah, with the max graphics on Overwatch, League of Legends, Fortnite, Warframe, I'm happy with it. And I can't wait to actually get home and try it. And the price? Pricing, what do you think? For the price? I mean, for the first month to try it, at least, is probably the best thing that's actually happened. So I'm happy. Cool. Let me check if all these guys are here. Let's take a look. Better next time, huh? Yeah! You're one of the gamers who are here. How was it to play on this machine? Yeah, no, it was great. I mean, I didn't really... I didn't know that I wasn't playing on a PC, so that was cool. It felt like a local desktop computer, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, it felt really normal. It was super chill to play. It was really fun. Enjoyed it, man. No, no, unfortunately, we lost. Yeah, unfortunately, we came close. No, no, yeah. It's because you were slow, right? Yeah, it's because I'm slow. Is this his fault? Yeah, his fault. Oh, I mean it was good. It couldn't help this guy out enough. He's very sad right now because the winners are going to get one. I mean, I've got it, but... I look into it, I might have to get one. Like... Cool. Actually, you were telling me before that you work with movies. Yeah, yeah. So you could use this for video editing, right? Yeah, so I've been told that it works well with editing software and stuff like that. So... Yeah, yeah, no, no, it'd be great. Alright, so check it out later. Yeah, cool. So, right here, you have the Shadow machine right here. So who are you? I'm Roman. And you work with Shadow. Yeah. And right now, what are you playing? I'm playing Ball from Stein 2. I'd like 1.4 FPS. Where do I see the FPS? Yeah, right here. So you got 1.44 FPS. Yeah. I'm probably going to die, but... So how's the... Is it one of the big games? Yeah, it's a game that came out like maybe two months ago or something. It's a pretty good game, I like it. So it's a good game, it's great detail, very nice graphics. Yeah, it's based on Vulkan. And it's the latest, basically, technology available. It has like... High settings and everything? Yeah. If you look at my setting, it's... Well, it's a controller, but... I'm using like... Everything at max. You're like... Ultra, everything at max. And the game has no problem being rendered on the... Everything is really smooth and... Really good. So how long have you been working at Shadow? Almost two years now. Two years? Yeah. So you're one of the founders, kind of, right? No, I came... Yeah, I'm one of the first ten employees. Are you CTO? No. But you're working on the apps? Yeah, I do. Do you work on the client's software or what do you do? I do all the software, basically. But you have a team, like a bunch of pretty cool... Yeah, we're like a team of three people at the moment. I have, like, all working on the Windows app. I'm mostly focusing on Mac and Android. And I have Muammar working on the Linux app. So you have Mac support. It's pretty cool that people can play on a Mac. Yeah. Any Mac? Any Mac. You need to have, like, at least 10.10 as a Mac version. You can get Yosemite. But, like, yeah, any Mac. I would recommend a Mac that is, like, at least 2011 or after to get the best experience. Because before, they were, like, no hardware decoding on Mac. But, yeah. So that's one of the most important things with the client apps, right? You need to be able to decode the video stream very fast. Yeah, that's it. And the internet connection needs to be good to the decoder directly. Yeah, basically what we do is, so we receive the frame and decode it using the hardware usually embedded in the graphic card. So, at 2011, Macbook, actually, it's maybe on Ebay. Yeah. But, like, you can even buy, like, super cheap PC, like, 50 euro PC with Intel Atom CPUs that would, like, work at 60fps, 180p with no problem. 60fps? Yeah. What do you need to play 144? It's only with this box? Or is there other hardware that can do 144? Yeah, you need, like, a quite recent graphic card, I would say, like, maybe three years ago or less. Because it needs, like, to be able to decode really, really quick. Decode the video? Yeah. Imagine that you have, like, 60fps. So if you divide, like, one second by 60, it means you have roughly 16 milliseconds to decode one frame. Now, let's say you're at 144, right? You roughly have, like, six milliseconds to decode one frame. So your decoder must be very fast. Do you have your phone? I don't know. Can you see me connecting to your shadow? Yeah. We can try. Can I do an LTE or something? Can we go? 4G, so... Can we go just over there? Can you connect? Because right here you have a... This is the other video? It's not a video, is it? That's it. Hello, team. Yep. Look here. Hello, man. Patrick, somewhere. This guy? Hey. Hey, what's up? What's your name? I'm Luke. So what do you do? I am the community manager for the UK, actually. So this is a big day. Oh, it's a huge day. I've been waiting forever for this. I mean, I arrived in the company about four months ago, and when I arrived there was zero community outside of France. And so, for me, this is a big day. So I'm able to interact with people and... Exactly. I would say it's more of an international speaking account. So anybody outside of France, really. All right. So let's see your Android... So how good is your Android support? It's as good as it can be. We can decode on recent graphics, on recent CPUs, almost 120. On the Razer phone, for example, which has a 120 screen, we managed to do 120 rendering on Android. So can you log in on your shadow? Yeah, I can. Let's go right over here. Right here, just to get a little bit quiet. Because I think it's very exciting to have the Android support. Yeah, it's cool. Does that mean you can also support Smart TV? Yeah, yeah. We definitely support Android TVs like Sony and Philips. That's awesome. So any Android TV, just download the Shadow app. Shadow app on the Play Store. It's on the Play Store for Google TV. And you connect the same... Can you get really good gaming? What can you get? 4K? Yeah, you can get 4K. Usually Android TVs add good decoder support. So you get 4K, you get good controller support, and everything, it's working pretty well. To log in is just one click? Yeah, it's to log in. This is Android, regular Android. Just start Shadow, and then boom, done. You get your Shadow on it. So basically... You can log in. This is your... This is my Shadow, basically. What do you do? Do you do development? Yeah, I... On your Shadow? A bit. Lots of testing, mostly. You need to compile code, and it's really faster doing that, maybe? I could do that, but I'm not using it like this. I'm mostly using it to test you feature. My colleagues that are working on the streaming services are developing most of their code on Shadow, because they're working directly on the VM. So there's this box that you sell. You call it the... The Shadow box, yeah. The Shadow box. How good is that at the service? Like, it's been... Did you also work on that box? A bit, yeah. They optimized the hardware, everything for the best experience, right? Yeah, the goal is... There were like two things we could not control with Shadow. One is your internet connection, and second one is what PC you are. And we wanted to bring the best experience we could give you. So there is one thing we would never be able to control is the internet connection, obviously, to your place. But there is one thing we could control is your computer, by giving you, like, by selecting the good hardware and selecting the good PCs and developing the perfectly optimized software for that PC. That's why we built the box, basically. So, I don't know, maybe it's a secret, but let's say there's a few thousand users in France. How many percent use the box and how many percent use the apps on Android and stuff, 50-50 or...? Yeah, it's roughly something like that. Something like that, yeah? But I'm guessing that it's not so easy to, for example, make an Android client because there's many different Android phones. How do you optimize for all the different hardware out there? It's basically like, try on an error. Like, a user will tell me, oh, on my phone it's not really working. And I say, yeah, if you swing by the Paris office, we can try to fix it together, or we speak on Discord together, and then we try to fix it. So sometimes we manage to optimize the decoder. I have, like, lots of optimization on my Android decoder to optimize for a MediaTek softsock, for Intel, for Qualcomm, for Rockship, for lots of different system on chip. And many of the Google TVs, I think there were some kind of MediaTek. Yeah, usually MediaTek. Maybe some RealTek, Marell or something, but I guess it's Mali GPU or Power VR? Yeah, it's usually Mali, yeah. And so you optimize for those two GPUs, kind of? Yeah, but it's more complex than that. It really depends on the OEM and on how it implements the Mali GPU driver. So it's really up to the OEM on how it implements hardware decoding on Android. So for example, Qualcomm is doing a quite good job. Samsung and their Exynos are doing it next time. They're probably the best in terms of hardware decoding today. Definitely Nvidia and their Shield, Tegra, Stem on chip are also the best. The Chinese one, like MediaTek and the other ones are like, depends. Do you try the old winner, the RockChip? Yeah, old winner has like a very huge latency. RockChip is very good. What does the latency do, too? Is it a low-cost RAM or something? No, it's mainly because they put like frames in the pipe. So for example, when you input one frame, you don't get the picture decoded directly. You have to input like four or six frames to get the first picture you put decoded. So you get like, again, 16 milliseconds time, sex, which is like a very huge latency. So the thing is, if you make a great app, if it becomes so good, there's no need for the box anymore. That could be a risk, right? Yeah. The box is also a brand. It's our product, it's what we cherish. It's what we're striving for. You can always do the best app. You will always have like hardware that will be lagging. For example, a person will have a computer that's six years old, seven years old, ten years old, and he will not be able to do like 144. He will not be able to do 4K. With the box, you can do that without buying a super expensive. Any of the Android's can do 144K? No, almost none of them. Only the recent Qualcomm can do 120K. Like, for example, the Razerphone can do 120Hz display. So we could do like 120Hz decoding on the Razerphone or on... This one outputs HDMI too, right? Yeah, it has like an image shell, I think it's named. So you plug it and then you can... It's a Type-C alt mode to display port or to HDMI directly. And that one can also do 120Hz on the external display. Did you try that? No, I did not try that, but it should be. That's pretty cool. But it's only duplicating the screen, so if it's able to do it on the regular screen, you should be able to do it on the... And there's a Snapdragon 835, right? Yeah. Now there's an 845 coming next month, so it'd be interesting for you. You're probably gonna get, as soon as the new phones come, you're gonna be trying them all out, right? The 25 of February, we're gonna get the S9. Are you going to Barcelona? Do you want to check all the phones? No. You probably should. I used to be. You need to have a space at the Qualcomm booth, I think. Maybe. Because you're probably interested to make sure that you have best Snapdragon 845 support, because maybe many other phones or many other devices will come with 120Hz. Yeah, definitely. We would love to have a space in the Qualcomm booth. I'm not sure what's planned, but maybe, yeah. Just an idea. And how about iOS support? Which one is better, Android or iOS support? iOS is doing a pretty good job in terms of audio decoding. Apple has optimized their phone to decode video pretty well. So you connect to their APIs and everything to get their video decode hardware accelerated? Yeah, we used a layer to do audio decoding. Basically, it's almost the same code on Mac and on iPhone. So you can see that Apple really think through their APIs when doing Mac and doing iPhone and doing stuff. They have impressive video acceleration solutions for software developers. They have some amazing video editing apps on iOS that they don't have on Android, which is sad. So how about what's called the Chromebooks are great? So the Chromebooks are on the Android apps, right? Yeah, we're using the same app on Chromebook as on Android. We did not develop a Chromebook app. It's just the Android app on the Chromebook? Yeah. How about Apple TV? Apple TV, it's something we plan. I do some testing, but it's not out yet. Because Apple TV is not iOS apps, right? Yeah, but still the same thing. It's still almost the same APIs as Apple and it's super easy to port from one another. So do you work on the Windows apps? Also, yeah. So there's Windows 32, 64 and 64 beta, I see. So what's new in beta? What's going to happen? Beta is mostly the support for USB over IP. So USB over IP for... To connect your hard drive? Yeah, so you can connect your hardware, your webcam, your mic, basically all your peripherals. Like you want to use your stick to drive planes or whatever and you can do that. But can you connect the mouse and keyboard before or also? Yeah, but... USB over IP is more than just mouse and keyboard. Yeah, you could use like the Chrome app software for example on Razer or like the Fnatic, like Changer or stuff like this. But it's called beta because it's not perfect? Yeah, because it's... Some bugs? Lots of bugs. What bugs? I don't know, crash, random crashes. But you and your team are just busy every day, right? Yeah. It's probably hard, what's called... How is the work in Shadow? How many guys and engineers and stuff? We have like 12 guys that are like developing software and then we have like five guys working on the VM and then we have ten guys working on the infrastructure and system administration. Infrastructure is a big deal. It's like server gurus, right? You need to design the server systems. Yeah, they design the room, they design the server, they design how to end all the software and everything, it's amazing. What's the secret algorithm to hand off the CPU from one user to the other to make sure that... Is that your secret sauce? Yeah, it's secret sauce. Because you need to have a whole bunch of stuff going on. People can have... As long as they keep their windows running, they still have their dedicated PC. The secret sauce is something I can't really share with you but what I can tell is that we have enough hardware to fit all of our users. So right here, we have the meltdown. It's a cool eSports bar. Let's go back in just one second. I heard that here at this bar, they have 70 megabits. Yeah. And there's one, two, three, four, five. Five, six. And there's six running on 17 megabits. And up there, so there's like 10 megabits is enough. Yeah. Yeah, 10 megabits is enough. I would recommend using at least 15 to get the best quality. And the more bandwidth you have, the more quality you will get. All right. Let me check with some of the users over there what they think. I'm going to ask them. Thanks. Hey. Hey, what's up? Hey, guys. Did you play on the machine? Yes, we did. Did you win? Oh yeah, we did. So you're in the final or win? We're just semi-final right now. Can we stand over here one second? Yeah, sure. So right here. What do you think about this? Did you know that it was a shadow? It's not, it's like a server. Yeah. Oh, I didn't know that before the staff told us the shadow is just... But it just feels like a normal... Yeah, it does. It actually feels like a normal laptop or gaming laptop. No slowdown? No, not at all. It feels like a local computer, right? Yeah, it feels like a local computer and it saves lots of space, right? What gaming machine do you have? I have an Alienware. It was a high-end, the best laptop gamer in the Bios, right? No, I had it for like a couple years now, so... But a couple years ago it was a best? Yeah, but a couple years ago it was really good. With the fastest GPU, CPU, everything. I believe so, yeah. And what do you think? Do you think it would be cool to have something like that? Yeah, for sure. That's why I'm here, right? That's why I want to win this. So it's possible. Maybe it's the winner. Yeah, there's a possibility. How many games more is needed before you win? Two more. Two more? If I win two more, I will win the whole game. It's possible you will win? The first one is special one. The second one is special three. If we win all of them, then we win the whole game. Cool. Okay, good luck. Yeah, thank you so much. Cool. How's it been going the tournament so far? There's been no bugs at all? So far, everyone seems pretty happy. So I'm going to say go ahead and say yes. But honestly, I think their work for it. So... So there's been no slowdowns at all? I think it's been smooth. Yeah, everything has been good. Is it just like zero issues? Are you recording any bugs or anything? No, the shadows have been pretty fine. I mean, any time you let loose a bunch of people in a tournament for like five hours, there's going to be... They're going to do some dumb stuff. We have work, so... I think that is fiber. What's it called? It's just a 70 megabit download, right? Yeah, but that is fiber in London. We have two of them, but yeah. You could maybe upgrade to one of the... The new one ultra fast. It's not available in most of London. Welcome to UK Internet. It's a wonderful thing. But the thing is, for most users, if you have 30 megabytes at home, that's absolutely enough. But we're obviously trying to run five at the same time. And we have two 70 lines and it's working fine, so... Yeah, I mean... There's some parts of London where you can get 200, but this is not one of them. There's very small parts of London, like Short Itch and, you know, just around St. Pancras, but... So it's going to be an interesting future in the next few weeks, and you'll have more and more use out of this, right? Do all kinds of different tournaments or is it mainly the league legends? No, so we have a weekly schedule, usually, where we do Smash 4, like Dota, like PUBG, and then basically we cover all different games. And then on weekends we do different stuff, so we do hard phone, fortnite, smite, basically every league of legends, of course, we do every week as well. So pretty much whatever you're into... Some of the more higher demanding games, too, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, the upside of Shadow is basically any issues we have are kind of connection-related, so they're not going to really make any difference while you're playing a very demanding game or a less demanding one, because their data center has all the technology to run anything, so, yeah. Maybe you could pull one of those cables into the direct fiber, get a gigabit in here. It'd have to be a really long cable. There's no gigabyte a bit available here, that's the problem, otherwise we would have it, but if you run maybe a 10-mile cable from here, then maybe you get to wherever the gigabit is, but it's not here. Cool, thanks a lot. Starting from 15 megabits, so here in the UK, people can just sign up, right now, at 26, 27 pounds per month, and do some high-end gaming. So, the connection from London to your server in France is the same as from Paris to the server? Precisely. The same speed, everything is like local. Exactly, yeah. So actually there's more lag time maybe from the display than from this to the server? Yeah. It just sounds like magic. It sounds like very men's.