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ANIL JAIN: Hi.
I'm Anil Jain, Managing Director of Media
and Entertainment Industry Solutions at Google Cloud.
It's my pleasure to present at the first Digital Next OnAir.
Media and entertainment companies
are in the midst of a significant transformation,
transitioning from the traditional pay-TV ecosystem
to providing their content directly to consumers
via new streaming services.
According to PwC, direct-to-consumer streaming
will grow significantly, increasing
to nearly $74 billion in global revenues over the next three
years.
That's a growth rate of nearly 14% year over year.
With the impact of COVID-19 and shelter in place policies,
this transition has accelerated in the past few months.
According to a recent study done by Accenture,
video streaming has increased by over 36% since the beginning
of the pandemic.
It's clear that audiences are hungry for more content,
stories that inform, educate, and engage
during these challenging times.
Today I'll talk about how Google Cloud is helping
some of the world's largest entertainment companies
satisfy audience needs in four key areas.
First, we're working to provide and support
robust and resilient content production pipelines.
The number of scripted television series produced
in the United States alone continues
to reach record highs year after year.
And with the pause in filming due to COVID,
media companies must find a way to continue remote production
of new content.
Second, we're helping companies apply artificial intelligence
and machine learning to manage content
and to maximize the value of existing libraries.
Third, we're providing scalable infrastructure
to power direct-to-consumer distribution
platforms that scale with audiences across geographies.
And finally, we're helping companies understand
their audiences more deeply throughout the customer
lifecycle using data and predictive analytics.
Leading media companies must continue
to innovate and transform in all of those areas,
while also maintaining a safe and collaborative environment
for their workforce.
This is going to be increasingly critical in order
to succeed in today's fast changing media landscape.
Let's take a look at each area in more depth.
First, content production.
With live action filming for many TV shows
and films on pause this year, and with many editors
and artists sheltering in place, there's
been an acute need for establishing
remote post-production workflows.
While many companies have been working
with hybrid workflows for some time,
we've seen more companies experiment with cloud native
processes during 2020.
Here at Google Cloud, we're working
with media partners such as Teradici, Nvidia,
and BeBop Technologies to bring GPU-accelerated, high-powered
workstations to artists everywhere
for tasks like visual effects, animation, and film editing.
We know when it comes to remote collaboration
that securing your content is a large concern.
So we've worked extensively with the media industry
to ensure tier one compliance with all of the major film
studios.
We also undergo regular independent security
evaluator audits and conform to the best practices outlined
by the MPA standards.
Luma Pictures, a visual effects company,
completed hundreds of shots for the blockbuster "Spider-Man:
Far From Home" with about one third of those shots created
in the cloud.
By utilizing our global infrastructure,
teams in Los Angeles and Melbourne
could work around the clock to produce astonishing visuals
collaboratively.
While the creation of new content has paused,
companies are working to mine their steadily growing
libraries and back catalogs to help fill the audience
demand for content.
In five years, entertainment data
will encompass a quarter of all the world's data,
but 42% of media CIOs today struggle
with managing the immense volume of content
being produced, according to a recent white paper by IDC
and Seagate.
Google Cloud's AI and machine learning capabilities,
in conjunction with partners such as GrayMeta, Vidispine,
and Zorroa, can help companies digitize, categorize, index,
and activate content.
We're working with Fox Sports to help automate
a time consuming manual process in media and entertainment,
the labeling, discovering, and storing of video assets.
Fox Sports will utilize Google Cloud's video search
and advanced machine learning capabilities
to more effectively unlock the value of its vast archive
of sports content.
When it comes to distributing content to a large audience,
media companies need reliable, globally available
infrastructure that scales to meet demand.
Everything we do at Google Cloud is based
on our global infrastructure.
This is the very same technical infrastructure
that makes low latency experiences on Stadia
and on YouTube possible.
Our 24 data center regions are spread across the globe,
with nine more regions to come.
These locations are tied together by our private fiber
optic network.
We have two tiers of network offerings,
but our premium network tier is what we're recommending
for media streaming.
It keeps traffic on Google's private network
as long as possible and exits to the public internet
at a location close to the viewer
in order to provide a smooth viewing experience.
On top of our scalable infrastructure foundation,
we're also working with a growing ecosystem
of media partners to help modernize existing broadcast
and video processing workflows, including Synamedia, MediaKind,
Evertz, and several others.
Innovative media companies like Vimeo and fuboTV
are scaling their distribution supply chains
to continue serving their audiences globally
with Google Cloud.
Vimeo was able to seamlessly scale their live streaming
service in response to unprecedented demand
due to COVID, and we continue to work with fuboTV
in scaling their video processing and distribution.
The shift to digital viewing and direct-to-consumer
allows companies to understand at a much deeper level what
their audiences are experiencing in real time.
Streaming services produce billions of data points
and events per day, but media companies often
struggle with harnessing the power of that data
to produce personalized audience experiences
throughout the customer journey, from acquisition,
to engagement, through to retention.
Our smart analytics platform, powered by BigQuery and Looker,
provides a scalable serverless data warehouse
with machine learning capabilities
built right in that can help capture, store, process,
and analyze massive amounts of data seamlessly.
Customers like Major League Baseball, ITV, and Sky
are utilizing our smart analytics platform
to better understand their audiences and listeners
and provide personalized experiences.
Now, stories and audiences are at the heart
of any successful media business,
but there's one last critical factor driving
a successful transformation to direct-to-consumer,
and that is your teams.
Many companies have already pioneered working from home,
but 74% of CFOs surveyed in March 2020
say they intend to shift some previously
on-site employees to remote work permanently post-COVID-19.
G Suite and Google Meet can help.
A great example is how we help the broadcast team at Yahoo
Finance transition 150 reporters, producers, anchors,
and technicians from a legacy TV studio
to a 100% work from home model overnight.
Within a span s a few hours, our team
worked with them to set up eight hours
of seamless live broadcasts from locations across the United
States and London, providing global audiences
with critical news and information
in this particularly uncertain time, all using Google Meet.
In short, many companies are turning
to Google Cloud for a globally scalable infrastructure,
advanced data analytics and AI capabilities,
and our growing ecosystem of media
specific partners who can help manage
the new normal while continuing to modernize
their organizations to serve audience needs.
I had the opportunity to speak with Jason Gaedtke,
chief technology officer of Major League Baseball,
on how Google Cloud is helping him modernize America's game.
Let's take a look.
Hi, Jason.
We are so incredibly excited to be working with Major League
Baseball.
Thank you for making the time to join us today.
JASON GAEDTKE: Thanks Anil.
I'm glad to be here today, and we're
excited to talk about the new Google partnership.
ANIL JAIN: So earlier this year, as many people know, we
announced a strategic partnership with MLB.
Can you tell us a little bit more
about how that came about, what your goals were specifically
with the partnership?
JASON GAEDTKE: Sure.
When we sat down to take on this infrastructure
refresh and our product refresh mission,
we had to ask ourselves, what is our end goal here?
And it pretty quickly became obvious to us
that our fundamental goal is fan engagement.
It's bringing the game of baseball,
which is a beautiful game, to our millions of fans.
And being able to come in and introduce new technology that
allows for things like personalization,
personalized recommendations, a social viewing
experience, where something happens in the field,
you get excited about that, and you
get to share that experience with other fans.
These are the things that really motivate us,
and Google's been a great partner
in building some products that I think embody those values.
Statcast is a good example.
Statcast is our baseball analytics platform
where we are increasingly measuring everything
that happens on the field to extremely
high degrees of fidelity.
This started off about five years ago
as a ball tracking technology, so we could track pitches.
Today we can track literally everything
that happens on the field, not only pitches and hits
and throws, but also player positioning
for all players on the field, even coaches and umpires.
And we're moving from tracking players
as a single point of mass, center
of mass on the body, an approximation
for these players, to skeletal tracking, which
is a real-time data feed that really captures
the player poses and positions and how a player responds
to a play on the field.
It gives you a much richer sense of the game
as it's being played.
And this is something that is now entirely being
powered by the Google Cloud.
ANIL JAIN: It's early on in the partnership between MLB
and Google Cloud.
So can you maybe give us some examples
of projects that you have already started to work on?
JASON GAEDTKE: Sure.
I'll give you a couple of examples.
Our technology infrastructure team
is really excited about deploying Anthos within the 30
ballparks around the country.
What Anthos allows us to do is provide a common control plane
for all of our compute workloads,
whether we're running those on-prem at the baseball
parks themselves where we have small data
centers in each facility, or within the cloud.
A more fan-facing example would be a project that we internally
call Fastball.
This is a fundamentally new approach
to video within the game.
So traditionally baseball has been
a one-to-many kind of publishing platform
where our editors and producers cut highlights like home runs,
or double plays, or exciting moments in the game,
and there's a handful of those that then go out to the fans.
What Fastball allows us to do is cut literally
every play out of every game and put
those in the hands of the fans with some powerful tools,
like advanced search, personalized recommendations,
and social sharing.
We think this is a new way of experiencing the game,
and it's one that's really going to appeal to a younger
generation of fans.
Finally, an example maybe behind the scenes more of a baseball
operations workload is our business analytics platform.
We have a project in-house called Wheelhouse,
which is a large data lake that integrates
all of the interaction our fans have with the game of baseball.
So this could be buying a ticket, buying a jersey,
streaming a game online, visiting our website,
using the mobile app.
All of these touch points tell us
a little bit about how individual fans engage
and enjoy the game.
And by putting Wheelhouse on BigQuery,
we found that we have an extremely powerful data
analytics platform for running complex queries.
It also integrates very well into the rest of our workflow
and tooling, whether that's single sign-on using G Suite
IDs or integrating Google Sheets to do
ad hoc queries and analysis.
Finally, the MLB marketing team and the club marketing
departments enjoy the fact that a lot of their ad management
integrates natively into BigQuery and the Google ad
platform as well.
ANIL JAIN: The global pandemic has of course disrupted
practically every industry.
Can you talk a little bit about how
it's affected your operations, and even how you're sequencing
some of these projects?
JASON GAEDTKE: Our MLB teams and the club teams
haven't missed a beat.
We've used the time that's available to us
to pull in some projects that we had planned
for later in the year, finishing the workload migrations
that we have, polishing up our products,
testing our infrastructure, making sure
that last 1% of our use cases are buttoned up
and ready to go so that we can provide a great fan experience
when play resumes on the field.
ANIL JAIN: Jason, thank you for sharing your experience
and your insights.
We at Google Cloud are very excited to be playing a part
in helping modernize America's pastime
and working closely with MLB.
We have a few more sessions with the teams from MLB
throughout the rest of Next OnAir, so be sure to tune
in for those.
And again Jason, thank you very much for your time.
JASON GAEDTKE: Thank you Anil.
ANIL JAIN: We're proud to help Major League
Baseball and other media companies
in continuing their cloud journey,
and we're thankful to all of our partners and customers
around the world.
For more information on how Google Cloud can help you
with your direct-to-consumer transformation,
please visit our Media and Entertainment Solutions
website, and tune into our continuing Next OnAir
programming throughout the summer.
Thank you.
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