>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE!
Covering AWS re:Invent 2019.
Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, and Intel,
along with its ecosystem partners.
>> Well welcome back to the Sands,
day two, AWS re:Invent 2019,
lot of buzz still going on here Dave Vellante.
>> It's all buzz.
>> Yeah, a jam-packed show floor, second day in a row,
day two of our coverage here on theCUBE,
along with Dave Vellante, I'm John Walls,
and we're joined by Paul Cheesbrough, who's the CTO
and president of digital at the Fox Corporation.
Paul, good to see you, sir.
>> Thanks for having me on.
>> Thanks for being with us, we appreciate that.
>> Paul: I'm a big fan of theCUBE.
>> So what brings you here, about your partnership
with AWS, and let's just start with that,
characterize a little bit about
what that relationship's all about.
>> Yeah, well I think re:Invent's become the go-to show
for cloud computing generally.
I think it's its eighth season, and certainly for my team
and myself, it's the place to
discover the latest product evolutions
and talk to other people in my position
and peers in the industry and see what's going on,
so it's a great opportunity to do a bit of fact-digging
and see what's going on in the industry.
>> So what fact-digging are you doing right now
that applies to your world, what have you seen here,
maybe in the past day or two,
that you said "Yep, I can see where that's playing
"into the entertainment world."
>> Yeah, I'd say the first thing is the ecosystem,
you can see from around here the buzz and the vibe.
I mean this is at a different level
to what I've seen before,
and that's always really good to see,
so it's not just an AWS story,
it's kind of the companies that they're enabling,
and a lot of the innovation comes
out of these smaller startups
that are building on top of the platform,
so spending a ton of time on that front.
I'd also say Andy Jassy's keynote yesterday,
really very impressive on how they've kept the foot down
on new releases on the data front.
So SageMaker and Redshift are two technologies
we use heavily and they've continued to innovate
on that front, and just getting time with
the top table of AWS and the deep technical engineers
who can kind of give you a view of where the company's going
and where the services will be in a year or two's time is,
you don't get that any other kind of place.
>> You know when we first started doing theCUBE
at re:Invent seven years ago,
lot of tire kickers, certainly from the enterprise,
lot of developers, no question,
but you're way beyond kicking tires,
so what are some of the things that you're doing
in the cloud, you mentioned Redshift and SageMaker,
what are you doing with those tools?
>> Yeah, so, I mean you're a media company,
so you'll understand how technology's kind of carved up,
and on the enterprise side, which is all of our
internal IT and networks,
we've pretty much migrated all of that
over the recent years into the cloud,
and largely running on AWS, so storage, compute,
we've retired all of our data centers bar one.
All of our applications that our employees use
are software as a service based,
so we don't really run our own infrastructure,
and on top of that we've really
put a very deep data infrastructure
in place where the consumer trend,
the way our content's consumed these days,
we've got a very direct relationship with the consumer.
We stream more and more content to them,
and that throws off a data trail that you've got to capture
and manage, and we use Redshift
and SageMaker to analyze the data
on top of Redshift on that front,
so the enterprise piece, we've done pretty holistically.
On the digital side of our business,
our products and services and our apps,
they're almost entirely built natively on AWS services.
Our engineers, the innovation that they're driving there,
they couldn't do it without partners like AWS.
And then the third and final piece to a media company's
the media and the broadcast piece,
how you move video around the production organization,
the creative organization.
And that's the bit that we're announcing here today,
that partnership with AWS to kind of solve that issue.
>> Yeah, so I wanted to ask you about,
a big part of your transformation was data.
And so you got rid of,
they always talk about the heavy lifting,
you got rid of that for the most part,
all except one data center.
What did you do with the people
that were doing all of that stuff,
did they just sort of go through retraining,
or attrition, did they get excited
about learning new tooling, how did that all go?
>> Well I've been on the journey around cloud computing
since 2006 in my career, so--
>> Dave: Day one, I guess it's still day one.
>> In fact I purchased S3 from Werner Vogels back then.
>> That was the first product, wasn't it, the first service.
>> And then I met Andy soon after,
and in those days, and I think some organizations
experience this, the technology team
were the most risk-averse, and they put every blocker
in the way from moving to the cloud,
'cause they saw it as a threat,
and frankly didn't understand it, so,
it took a lot of pushing to get things going in those days,
I think it's slightly different now,
but once you're through that barrier,
and people get momentum and,
anyone in my position as a CTO will tell you
there's no shortage of work to throw people at,
so the resource that we've got within the team,
I'd much rather they were building software
than managing servers and pipes and doing upgrades,
so we've released a ton of talent to do what I would call
the value add piece, that consumers touch and feel,
and moved it really kind of front of store,
and that's made a big difference,
some people didn't make the journey
and we brought new talent in, I think that's inevitable.
But yeah.
>> So it's almost like you get to practice a little less
and play a little more, is about what it comes down to.
>> And sort of rearchitected your business around
data and software, it sounds like,
as opposed to, like you said, pipes.
>> Yeah, but everything starts
with the consumer in our business,
so if you work backwards from that,
they've changed their behaviors and they expect
content in different forms on different devices.
They expect the traditional channels of cable,
they expect the new channels of mobile and streaming,
and that places a lot of stress internally
on how you create and produce and distribute that content,
so to some degree in our industry,
we had no choice, we had to change,
and that's been, as a technologist driving transformation,
it's been a fun ride.
>> You're almost on this parallel track a little bit,
you talk about the transformation you're going through
with live streaming right now, that's a must,
must do, must have,
that's how consumers bring in their media,
and yet you have to transform technologically speaking
to provide this consumer transformation as well,
so you have these two tracks
going down that you've got to answer to,
I mean what kind of complexity does that create for you,
because your business is fundamentally changing,
and the technology is fundamentally changing.
>> And you know, I think historically,
the solution to that problem was to put parallel
infrastructure in place and your digital team
would have their own infrastructure,
your enterprise team would have their own infrastructure,
and then your media and broadcast team
would be on a completely different network
doing their own thing,
and they would all coexist, and I think the convergence
at the consumer end has rippled back into a convergence
within the organization as well, where,
our technology teams play across
those three different fields,
and someone like AWS, and other partners like that
are now capable of being partners across
those three different fields together,
so the convergence at the consumer end
really does apply within the organization as well.
>> So you mentioned some things you're doing
with AWS, maybe you could talk about that initiative
and talk about the tech, and we could talk about
the outcome for the consumer.
>> So I think the last bastions within any media organization
in terms of transforming, you think about the media
and broadcast operation,
everything from the trucks and the cameras
through to the edit suites, through to master control,
through to the way that you play out and distribute,
not only do we have a national network,
but we've got local stations as well,
and you overlay the digital products on top of that.
It's a very complicated set of partners
and direct access points at the end,
and the technology that's been operating in that space
hasn't changed since the 90s, genuinely hasn't,
it maybe got a minor upgrade when HD came along in 2001,
but it really hasn't changed, so,
what we have decided to do is really re-engineer that,
it's the only piece of our business that doesn't run
natively on the cloud,
and we're pleased to announce this week
the deal with AWS as the strategic partner
to really lift our video workflows in terms of how
we produce, create, and really importantly
distribute our video to all of those partners,
in a way that really transforms
the way our creatives can work as well, so,
it was a pretty long process going through
how you do that safely, because if you get it wrong,
you go off the air, and that's really,
you cannot do that, you're TV guys, you know that,
and so we've been very careful.
So AWS have stepped up with some great technologies,
but really important they have great vision as well for it.
>> So what specifically have you done,
you created a new platform in the cloud?
>> Yeah, so we were very very fortunate,
we've just completed this deal with Disney
to sell some of our assets there.
It meant that actually we had a greenfield approach
to this part of our business, so,
for the first time ever we were unencumbered with a legacy,
so a blank sheet of paper, and we came at it
with the attitude of, if you were a large broadcaster
starting your business today,
how would you do it?
And with that mindset, it takes you
into a very different space, so we're working with AWS,
and their media services team, and the elemental team
within that, to encode our video
within our sports news entertainment and local stations,
we're using them to move the video from
studio locations and football stadiums,
and news gathering locations, remote locations,
straight into the cloud, to be both managed
and produced, and then it stays natively within the cloud,
to be published out to distribution partners,
whether it's Comcast for cable,
whether it's Hulu for live TV,
whether it's Apple for the VOD stuff that they do,
or whether it's our own services,
but that natively stays in the cloud,
that workflow, and that just really enables
a very different way of thinking.
>> And the move is obviously a big challenge, right?
I mean it's video, and it's big data.
How are you solving that problem,
what are the components of that
that enable you to do that?
>> So I think it would've been very difficult
to achieve this vision if some of the products
like Outposts and the local zones
that AWS have announced at the show,
we had early visibility and testing of those.
If you're in an edit suite, editing 4K content,
you can't necessarily, in a truck,
you can't necessarily go back and forth to the cloud
all the time, so we had the ability
to kind of put a piece of the cloud on-prem
or into a truck or into a studio
to reduce the, eliminate the latency,
and to manage that, so that's one thing.
We also have architected it in a way
where resilience is core and key,
so if for whatever reason one part
of the architecture goes down, then other bits of it
can pick up the slack, and again,
the way that we work with AWS on that front,
they've really helped us architect something robust there.
>> Yeah, how much does live come into this,
I mean you can't afford a slip-up, right,
I mean it's one thing to have down time,
your point is, you can't go black,
but just in terms of what you deliver,
whether it's live news, live sports,
live entertainment, it's real time.
>> So we're predominantly a live company now,
and it's the heart of our business,
it's what we're great at doing, it's what
our creative teams have done all of their lives,
and if you take an NFL game on a Sunday,
number of cameras, feeds, data, stats,
the number of teams you've got both on location
and back in the production facility,
the number of games you're actually producing
at the same time, on a complicated day
it can be multiple games, and then the complexity around
who you get the signal out to, in effect.
Live is difficult, and I think that's why
you haven't seen too many broadcasters go in this direction,
quite yet, so we know we're an early adopter.
We're being very careful and cautious around
how we're kind of ramping this up,
for example, we're still alongside the fiber connectivity
into the cloud, we're also using satellite,
so some of those decisions we've put in place as near term.
>> You got some redundancies in place
just as a risk management.
>> Exactly, so we can slowly dial it up,
and we're building new facilities around this
to help make it happen as well,
but the number one thing is giving the consumer
a great experience.
I'll give you some examples, actually,
of how this'll transform the consumer experience,
so, we'll be able to do both 4K and 8K natively
through this infrastructure with AWS,
we can't do that today.
Latency will be reduced heavily,
so we effectively encode the video once,
and the device at the end decodes it,
so that really compresses that level of latency
that you'll see in a football game.
And when you think about things like 5G,
I don't know whether you saw Hans and the Verizon team
in their announcement yesterday.
Things like betting services and other things
that we're getting into, you have to have
close to zero latency to make those things work,
so in the current broadcast chain,
we encode and decode and re-encode, and all of these
compression chains, and at the end of it,
you've got a fairly decent quality signal,
but by no means 4K or 8K, and that's one aspect,
so the consumer will see a difference.
The other thing is, we never want to be
in a position again where we use infrastructure
from 30 years ago, I mean we, no company in 2019
can afford to be in that position, so,
by plugging into AWS, we kind of get that constant drip feed
of innovation as it comes, and a very software-focused
sort of architecture, as opposed to hardware and cables,
which is, you see a lot of in broadcast.
So we're pivoting not just the business,
but the way we do business as well.
>> So the consumer experience is much improved.
As well, you mentioned live,
of course the mainspring is live,
that's where the content is created,
but there's also an on-demand experience as well,
is that, I presume compressed,
so I can get to the best highlights
if I miss the game, get the little mini game
that I can watch and get a good flavor for it,
that is compressed as well?
>> Absolutely, so I mean going back
to your data question earlier,
so this infrastructure natively,
as we're putting video through it,
Amazon and AWS have the technologies
to index the video in real time,
to do scene detection, face recognition,
a lot of those very forward-leaning technologies
that I think for the last 10 years have been more
science than fact, but now
they're really coming to their own,
so all of the video that goes through the pipes
in a live form gets really in real time indexed.
All of the consumption information about how the video's
being consumed on the device comes back in in real time,
and we can combine that into an experience,
so if you're joining the live feed
or coming at the video on demand asset later,
you've got a much much richer experience,
whether that's searching and finding the bit that you want
or whether that's us curating a package of content
automatically, using that metadata, so,
we're excited about that.
>> Talk a bit more about the search,
how does that all work?
>> Well I think search on a TV experience
is still pretty clumsy.
>> John: Amen.
>> Yeah, it's definitely, and part of that's
the user interface, I mean hats off to Comcast
and their Xfinity product, a lot of the search now
is done by voice through the remote
and they're seeing a transformational difference there,
but even in some of the OTT streaming services,
the search and discovery, I'd use discovery
in the same context, it's still clumsy,
and that's entirely driven by the data,
there's a reason Google are the best
in the marketplace at search, because of the
level of indexing that they do to create the,
and I think AWS and their approach to video
will be game-changing for us on this front,
and they've obviously got the search technologies
on the front end to enable that as well as the indexing
technologies on the back end.
>> How do you keep up with all the innovation,
you mentioned up top that, citing Andy Jassy
announce all this stuff,
how do you keep up with it all,
does it sometimes feel like it's going too fast
to be able to absorb it all?
>> No, this is a great time to be a CTO,
because there's no way,
we could complain about it, but the consumer's
not going to stop changing the way
that they demand content from us,
so for me it's a combination of picking the right partner,
speaking to them frequently and coming
to events like this to meet my peers.
I also spend a lot of time with venture capital companies,
and very early stage startups
to really get an idea around what's coming next
over the next three to five years,
and getting in early with those customers.
I kind of have a mantra with my team internally,
where I don't reward them
necessarily for just doing business
with the old incumbent legacy technology providers.
I'd much rather we experiment with the next generation
of companies, that's actually how we began our
very early relationship with AWS and Amazon,
and it's served us well.
>> Well, the next time you see Joe or Troy,
please give 'em our best.
All right, if you will, they're always welcome on theCUBE,
as are you, Paul.
Paul Cheesbrough from Fox, joining us here on theCUBE,
we'll be back with more coverage here live,
AWS re:Invent 2019, you're watching theCUBE from the Sands.
(techno music)