>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, its the Cube, 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 Wrabetz, the VP of Marketing for HGST.
Joan welcome to the Cube.
>> Joan: Thank you, its 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 suit to nuts.
I heard you can buy an, 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.
>> There really, really is.
I haven't seen the helicopters yet, I'll have to make my way upstairs.
>> Yeah you can get a demo, a 3-D demo.
>> Wow.
Oh my goodness.
>>
>> So one of the pervasive, overarching themes of the event this year is the M-E-T effect,
the MET effect, this convergence of media, entertainment and technology, which is so
interesting, and as we were talking before, technology is both the bane of the existence
of a lot of companies, in any industry, as well as something that provides tremendous
opportunity.
>> Yeah.
>> 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 that 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, I don't worry
about, you know, asset archivings.
So, there's probably nothing you can sell me."
And it only takes about ten 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, you know, 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 videophile.
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 its 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 in 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, 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 theaters.
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've 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.
So that'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.
When I go to a movie theater the guys that produce that movie aren't getting that from
me.
>> It's more of a qualitative reaction.
>> Exactly.
>> 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 imagine that the conversation with the studio that ten minutes later, you said, understands,
"Oh wait, 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 data that needs to be archived and needs to be easily accessible.
You were mentioning something before we went live about, you know, studios that go, "We
shot this this way and it's great but man wouldn't that be great with VR?"
>> Right
>> 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 archive 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 a movie that's
no longer being created as an insurance policy almost.
Today, its 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 use out of that data and monetizing
it et cetera is understanding where the value might be.
So the example I give is I was sitting with this 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, we finished
the scene we said, 'Oh my gosh, that would've been a great VR scene.'"
And so that scene had 250 extras, all in costume, for this ballroom dance, right.
So they kept all those people in costume for four extra hours, went back and re-shot that
scene.
And I said to them, "Too bad you don't keep your dailies, you would've had that scene."
>> Right
>> 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 days worth of filming.
They don't see that as a critical asset, but if you start to rethink your problem, it is.
So part of this 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 cost of storage.
So it's both understanding how they can keep their cost 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 we see, as we're talking to the major companies in this industry, they're all moving from
a somewhat defensive to a 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 redefined 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 the entertainment industry really preserve these digital assets in hybrid workflows.
>> Sure, well and the hybrid comes in because not only is there an explosion of data, but
there's an explosion of processing requirements.
So the cheapest, 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 are 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.
It's not expensive to keep data in the cloud, but it's very expensive if you touch it and
move it.
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 of these guys that do rendering, for example, they burst 20 to 50 percent of their
rendering to the public cloud because they're on very tight schedules.
And it 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.
>> Is one of the benefits that they can get from that accelerating production workflows?
>> Yes, I mean they're 100 percent deadline oriented.
Right so you look at these animated movies, whether it's Despicable Me and the minions.
It's all about how long it's going to take to produce that.
So the workflow that is used to create and then render the animated information is, I
mean that's it, that is the critical path.
I had these guys in animation space talk to me about simple mistakes where they changed
the hair on an animated figure and they look at it in the morning after it's all been re-rendered
and the hair is half an inch behind the person.
>>That's a problem.
>> I mean and then they have to run it again and it takes eight hours.
That's a whole day lost in a production schedule.
And you know movies we see today, so much more of it is CGI than 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.
>> I can't imagine.
And something that you mentioned, 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 it's this 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 where they have these common overlapping technology problems they're working
together in industry organizations in media and entertainment whether its 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 of, you know, that
each other has, and try to learn and adopt some of the similar technologies.
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 on
live TV.
So yeah we see a real sort of sharing of information and collaborating around best technology practices
across all of media and entertainment in ways that I think are probably much, much more
intense than in the past.
>> Fantastic.
Well it just shows 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 in collaboration
is probably really, as this event, which has been going on for many, many years, evolved,
really the direction that it should go into.
>> Yep.
>> Thank you so much, Joan, for joining us on the Cube.
>> You're welcome.
>> It's been so delightful speaking with you.
And it sounds like never a dull moment,
>> Nope.
>> In the day in the life of you.
>>Nope, it's always changing.
>> Excellent.
Well we wish you have a great time at the rest of the show.
>> Thank you.
>> And we thank you for watching The Cube.
We are live at NAB 2017 in Las Vegas.
I'm Lisa Martin, stick around, we'll be right back.