Voices of Video
Explore the inner workings of video technology with Voices of Video: Inside the Tech. This podcast gathers industry experts and innovators to examine every facet of video technology, from decoding and encoding processes to the latest advancements in hardware versus software processing and codecs. Alongside these technical insights, we dive into practical techniques, emerging trends, and industry-shaping facts that define the future of video.
Ideal for engineers, developers, and tech enthusiasts, each episode offers hands-on advice and the in-depth knowledge you need to excel in today’s fast-evolving video landscape. Join us to master the tools, technologies, and trends driving the future of digital video.
Voices of Video
Navigating the Global Market Through Authentic Innovation
Discover the journey of JP Saibene, co-founder of Qualabs, as he reveals what it takes to build a tech powerhouse from humble beginnings in Uruguay. With a background in video technology and telecom engineering, JP shares his experience of expanding a local company into a global player with over 100 professionals. Gain insights into the trials and triumphs of entering the global market, especially the U.S., and how a passion for video technology propelled their continuous innovation. Listen as JP emphasizes the importance of authenticity over marketing hype and the real value of creating products that genuinely solve industry problems.
Join us as we explore the challenges technical founders face when shifting from product development to sales. JP discusses his experiences at major industry events like NAB and IBC, revealing the lessons learned from connecting with global peers. This episode offers a deep dive into the world of video tech and entrepreneurship, illustrating the perseverance needed to succeed in a competitive market. Whether you're an aspiring entrepreneur or a seasoned tech professional, JP's story is sure to inspire and inform, providing a firsthand look at the intersection of technology and business growth.
Stay tuned for more in-depth insights on video technology, trends, and practical applications. Subscribe to Voices of Video: Inside the Tech for exclusive, hands-on knowledge from the experts. For more resources, visit Voices of Video.
Voices of Video. Voices of Video. Voices of Video.
Speaker 2:Voices of Video.
Speaker 1:Without further ado, I want to welcome JP, jp Sibeni from Qualab. So hey, jp, welcome to Voices of Video.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much, mark, so happy to be here.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's great, we're really happy to have you on the show. And you know, you and I connected, I guess probably a year and a half ago or so, and in reality I think we were always you know sort of you know shaking hands and exchanging pleasantries at various cocktail parties right Through the industry.
Speaker 2:Totally, that's what the industry is about, yeah that's right.
Speaker 1:That's right. Yeah Well, you are a very social person. You always have a huge smile on your face, social person, you always have a huge smile on your face and you know, so I can always find you. At any event, you know wherever, it's great. But no, in all seriousness, you know we connected about a year and a half ago over, you know, some development work that your team was doing with a partner of NetEnt and, as a result, we got to know a fair amount about who your company is, and I made a mental note we need to have them on the show and let them tell their story. So here we are, so it's great to have you.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much, Mark, and actually I would say exactly the same about you. You're everywhere. It's impossible to go to NAV, IVC, CES, whatever industry or trade show we go. You're there Also, smiling and bitching about encoding.
Speaker 1:Talking about video. Good, well, you know, let's dive in and start with. Tell us about Qualabs. You know, tell us about the company, the. You know the founding story, what your journey has been, and let's start there.
Speaker 2:Awesome. So actually, my journey video started about 15 years ago, when I was just getting out of engineering school and I worked for 80 years at a local company here in Uruguay. I'm based in Uruguay, south America. That's why I drink mate.
Speaker 1:That's great.
Speaker 2:And seven years ago, after being an engineering manager for several years building all sort of technology, from broadcast, multicast, DVV headings and monitoring systems, and then streaming and platforms and OBPs, then, together with Nico, we decided to found Qualabs Seven years back. We started being three of us at the beginning. Well, it's been such a journey. Let's say we have a strong background in video tech and software engineering. I'm not a software engineer, I'm a telecom engineer, software engineer and I'm a telecom engineer and. But we identified that there was like a growing need of a moving video and media technologies into. Uh, with the software. There was a growing market there and but the the uruguayan market was so small. You're why we're only three million people, so you can imagine it's not enough for a market. So we have to look for to the rest of the world immediately. If not, we would be like what? Three, four people in the company? Yeah, and well, it's, it's been a journey. Um, we're mostly based in uruguay.
Speaker 2:We have some people in argentina too and now we have over 100 people working, uh, from here from south america, but mostly working globally, primarily to the us. Um, and actually how it's been a challenge to to get into a market because we were like locals and we had no access to the industry you mentioned. I had never been to nab ibc amazing, maxed my high video before, so it was like it's huge, you know, um, yeah, it's, it's always amazing.
Speaker 1:so I I've been, you know, I feel really honored, um, throughout my career to have worked really almost exclusively with technical founders, generally engineers or very heavy, we would say, product people, and I really enjoy that.
Speaker 1:I love it because it puts you closest to the center of where the real stuff is. It's not marketing hype and fluff and hand-waving, it's like they're building real products. But everybody has the same challenge because a lot of times the founders that I've worked with throughout the years and supported were sometimes in much larger organizations and they were quite removed from what it takes to actually then sell. Because at the end of the day you can be the very best team or you can build the best product, the best solution, etc. But if you don't have a market for it, if you don't find a market, if you don't develop a market, unfortunately the best doesn't just win automatically, you know. And so it's a real fascinating journey. I'm sure we could probably do a whole nother podcast of what it's been like being an engineer and then you know, dare I say, sort of learning the sales and the marketing and the business side.
Speaker 2:That's probably quite an interesting conversation definitely and and we've seen, I think we've navigated different um market changes, because in 2021, that's right yeah, you recall like it was all video, like 2020, like video was going to be the the only thing left.
Speaker 1:We were going to be a full remote yeah, yeah, we were all going to just stay in our houses, never leave. Food was going to be delivered to us and we were just going to like interact with the world through video screens. I remember, and that's how we started growing.
Speaker 2:We grew like from from 10 to 50 people in a couple of years, just because, wow, we're saying I need to launch these new, I need to launch application for move to the cloud. For these we need to scale to millions. Everyone was doing everything.
Speaker 1:Yeah, okay, so we just lost Juan Pablo. He will come back. Looks like a quick little technical glitch there, so I will improvise. Hey, there we go, you're back all right, perfect.
Speaker 2:You know this is part of the technical challenges, for some reason.
Speaker 1:That's right, that's right and and, by the way, less somebody you know say well, the internet must not be that good wherever jp is. That's not the case, we can assure you. There's just some configuration issue. We've been trying to get to the bottom of it, but anyway.
Speaker 2:Actually, Uruguay is the fourth country in the world in mobile Internet speed.
Speaker 1:Yeah, amazing, amazing, and you know I love. So we're going to get back. You know I'm not going to take this over because I want you to finish your story, but I just love a couple things and you know. First number one you come from a small market and yet you're dealing with global leaders. I love that, you know. I love it because there's so you know there's so much. I guess you could say almost like assumption that oh, if you want to go to the biggest markets, you know like, say, america, or, you know, western Europe or and, and, by the way, latin America is a very big market. So. But the point is, you know, if you want to go to some of these markets, you kind of have to be there or have come from there, and yet you know you come from, like you say, a very small market and yet you're servicing all these massive players in these big markets. I love it, I, I really love that.
Speaker 2:so that's cool and and actually that's thanks to these great community we have, that they have embraced us because they've let us in as if we were part of it, like yeah, yeah, we do travel a lot and we are there all the time and events and so.
Speaker 1:But yeah everybody's so welcoming, so yeah, yeah, so, um, so tell us then, let you know. Let's get back to the story. So you, you started with three yourself and essentially two other, I guess, co-founders. Uh, in 2017, um, sounds like during the pandemic, you know, went from you said 10 to 50, and that was 21 to 22. Was that roughly the time span?
Speaker 2:It was mostly that, and then we grew to 100, even in 2023. Sorry, by the end of 2022, but then 2023 and 2024 have been rough, yeah, and we've seen sort of a shift in the market, yeah. So we kind of consolidated in larger clients, either in video technology companies or like technology vendors, or in media entertainment. We're working with some of the largest streaming and broadcasters in the world largest streaming and broadcasters in the world.
Speaker 2:But mostly, the shift we see is that if we had the same clients in 2021, we would be a thousand people. They would be building everything, and now everyone's taking care about profitability and making things that have an impact in the next quarter. So it is, yeah, it's been a shift, but thankfully we're working in innovation and product development and engineering with quite interesting companies and projects.
Speaker 1:You hinted at the fact that, like you said, during that video internet streaming frenzy era the, you know, 2021, 22,. It sounds like you were building like full solutions, maybe even like end to end. Now you're maybe building portions. Can you describe, like what your projects look like today, what you're being called in to do and why, why companies are calling you and not, you know, building it themselves or even buying commercial solutions? Because I think that's also always a consideration, right, you know, do we build or buy? And if we're going to build it, do we use our internal team or use an outside external team like yourself, like Qual Labs?
Speaker 2:Excellent, yeah, so it's a great question actually. And so in what we specialize, we do software engineering and product engineering around video technology. So we do backend and platform engineering, we do frontend and client-side applications, we do cloud infrastructure and devops, we do data engineering and and vdr and d, but always around media workforce and streaming. I would say we specialize from the content to the consumer. So we're not like in the production side of things, like that's not our expertise, but yeah, we do work in so many different platforms with because we we build cms, we build security systems, delivery, we work on on encoding and processing with like we work in all the chain, and so normally video technology companies call us when they need to augment their engineering with the teams that might specialize in one of these areas but that have expertise in video. So it's that not just software engineering, it's software engineers that know about video, and also, I think it's we're not just selling hours, we really focus on teams and I think that's what makes us different from a software engineering standpoint. We focus a lot on and I think that's a challenge in the software industry as a whole and not just in video it's that at some point everyone needed resources and treated people as resources and started saying like you were like players and that you want to senior, these and this yeah full stack these yeah
Speaker 2:and we've seen that we can complement each other way better if we build teams, and that's where we focus on building teams. For that, the reason have have buried a long time. So at the beginning, everyone was saying we need more resources and we don't have enough. Yeah, and now it's been more like either needing flexibility, with changing priorities all the time, bringing in and hiring I don't know React Native specialists to build applications, and then you don't know if React Native is going to be there in two years.
Speaker 2:Or you need people that know these or that, and the same happens in data and DevOps and everything you know. Everyone was moving to the cloud. Everyone's going back from the cloud.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and now people are actually moving off the cloud, or at least they would like to.
Speaker 2:Yes or doing hybrid. I'm going to do some stuff in the cloud in the edge, some stuff on-prem, so you need and you cannot hire and fire people all the time. So companies are tending to have this changing environment like a core team, and then the staff around the edge.
Speaker 1:They tend to outsource it. So does this mean that you typically, once you begin to engage with a company, you're working beyond just that initial engagement or project? Do you work with your companies for like a long time or do you do kind of more project-based come in, you know, deliver something, and then you know you're done and you move on work with someone else?
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, I'd say that 90% of our work is more like long-term engagements, like teams that might shift the composition, might shift the priorities.
Speaker 1:Sure, sure, sure Again, based on the needs of that client and what their priorities are.
Speaker 2:Right, yeah, exactly so even some companies we have like what we call pools, which is a set of teams three, four teams Because what they know for sure for the year is not the priorities, they know the budget, yeah.
Speaker 1:So they know I have this amount of money to spend.
Speaker 2:This is my, my, my burn rate.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But they may even change from quarter to quarter, like the priorities, the technologies, and sure that's what we do. Yeah, sure.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 2:Several clients that have been there three, four years already.
Speaker 1:Amazing. Yeah, let me ask you a question. I'm curious your perspective.
Speaker 1:We went through an era where engineering teams bulked up and I like to call it again. I spend a lot of time in kind of the startup side of the ecosystem, which means that I have a lot of exposure to companies that are generally venture funded, even private equity, but you know kind of venture money, and so during the zero interest rate period you know the Zerp era, as we like to call it in Silicon Valley it was easy to go out there and build huge teams and there was, and there were, some very good reasons to do that. There also was, I think now we can look back and see a lot of over building. You know people. You know the engineering managers wanted 25 people because that's better than 12, right, meaning a lot of teams bulked up, maybe bigger than they should have. Is that still the case? Or have those teams been paired back, and are those teams still doing engineering work, or are they more or less doing some internal projects but then coordinating with firms like yourself, like you know what's happening. So what do you see happening?
Speaker 2:It's interesting and actually that's that's a big shift we've seen from 2022 to 23 and four, and I don't know if we're going to have a new serp era in three or four years and maybe we're back in this crazy exactly, yeah, yeah and then free money, but um yeah, free money yeah, but there's no free money now there's no free money, no free lunch.
Speaker 1:no for lunch, yeah for anyone.
Speaker 2:And we've seen two shifts. One is engineering versus software development. Previously everyone was talking about software development and about stacks. We need more React people, we need more Java people, we need more. They needed builders only, and now they need engineers because they're refocusing. So it's not that we're doing the new UI thing, the new data thing and they need 100 people building all that.
Speaker 2:They're definitely focusing on smaller teams, focused teams, more capable teams and actually that's a differentiator for us compared to, I don't know, the massive Asian low cost outsourcing development houses. We don't do that, we cannot compete with that, with our costs. We're engineering house.
Speaker 1:Yes, yes.
Speaker 2:And and also, yeah, what we're seeing is that everyone's so conscious about how they're building and that's why I say that we're growing in the size of the companies we work for. We're working with the Fortune 500 companies at the moment, yet they're not buying 100 engineers, they're buying like five for the three. Let's build a data platform it's four engineers. Let's build a workflow it's three engineers, it's not 25 as before. I hope that time's not coming back, because that seemed crazy too, because then they had all these overhead because they needed the project manager and the scrum master and the and the coordinator and the.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know, and all the overhead a lot of overhead.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly, yeah. Yeah, it's super interesting. I am a student, I think I would say, of product management and you know, of course I spend my time really on the marketing side. But I believe that you can have the very best marketing initiatives and if your product isn't good or if it's not what the market needs, then none of it matters. You know, interestingly enough, conversely with an amazing product, you can barely know how to sell it and barely know how to market, and you'll be successful. It's pretty interesting.
Speaker 1:So, at the end of the day, you know, product is crucial, is absolutely everything, and there's a, there also was a trend on the product side, and I'm talking about, you know, kind of larger tech orgs. So you know, smaller, medium-sized companies never had this luxury. But you know, you would literally have a senior product manager, you would have an associate product manager. You would have like to support that person. You might have two or three or four people and they all I mean everybody had their little role and it just it.
Speaker 1:What it led to was a lot of bulk, a lot of inefficiency, a lot of lack of decision and, frankly, it just moved the product further away from the market, from the real user. And that's why in some cases, we, you know, we can all think of examples where something was built and you scratch your head and go how could they have built that? Like, that's not what the market needed. They did a wonderful job, they built an amazing, but the solution's not what the market needed. So so I think getting lean yeah, getting lean is a good thing. So go ahead.
Speaker 2:Definitely. And I said that's something, that's something that that uh surprised us when we started working in the industry because, uh, we came from working for an operator, so we operated a satellite and cable and streaming network yeah and so so we actually had built solutions for ourselves, but actually based on our own pains, sure.
Speaker 2:And then when we started working for for technology companies, we we met, uh, we actually started working at the beginning for our own previous vendors. That's the people we knew, yeah, like previous vendors, and and, uh, um, I was surprised that none of their in product engineers, engineering managers, had ever used their product, even didn't even know how their product was used by the clients. I know, like we were giving feedback all the time about the pain points we had previously because, yeah, they, like someone from support, had tickets that was given to the product manager that actually had the product owner, was processing from a roadmap and at some point it got to an engineer like you got to build this feature, but didn. I didn't know why. What the client needed, like they have poor visibility, so disconnected, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I, I so. So we're going to move past this, but I actually you know this subject of, like you know, a product in the business side, but I really love the fact that we've spent you know 20 minutes or so talking about this, and here's why, because we're hitting on. I really hope for the listeners that you consider carefully what we've just said, and that is that there are too many things being built in our industry, in the market, that do not solve real pains, and we hear the expression a lot I hear it anyway of it's a solution looking for a problem. Well, let me tell you, a solution looking for a problem is a failed product and ultimately, probably a failed company, just plain and simple. There's no easy way to put it. So it doesn't matter how cool that solution is. If it truly is a solution looking for a problem, it's failed. And I see there's actually a question in the chat that I'm going to sort of answer, but maybe we'll loop back around to it, and the question was someone just asked it when do you think this shift in the market will end? I am assuming, just based on the time that the question was entered in the chat and where we were that you know they're sort of talking about this shift from the go-go era to the, you know, to the more lean era, and certainly companies, you know, pulling back their investment in R&D and engineering, et cetera, et cetera. So I'm going to assume that that's the shift this person's talking about and I have to say that, obviously, you know, we all hope and you know, depending on the part of the world you're in, it really is a tale of two kingdoms. It feels like when you talk about the economy. So there's certain markets, certain industries that maybe you can't say they're absolutely booming, but they're doing well, they're certainly more than surviving, and there's others that are really struggling. So I always have to put that out there when I'm asked this question. But the fact is is that there has been a slowdown. But I really think that there is an element of this slowdown that we are not going to go back to the previous era Because, as referenced, there was a lot of bulking up, there was a lot of building big teams because, just candidly, people wanted big teams.
Speaker 1:I want to be able to feel proud that my group is 200 people when in reality it probably should be 35. I mean, that's just the reality. But it makes me feel better as a manager, et cetera, as an executive, to say I've got 200 people in this org or that org or in this team and that team, and so there's that element, and I do not believe that we're going to go back just suddenly to bulking up. Justification for resources is kind of never going to go away. But related to that is that then, as a result, there were a lot of products being built that were solutions, looking for a problem, because, hey, you've got to keep these 200 people busy, right, they need to be doing something. We're paying them, we're paying them well, so let's put them to work.
Speaker 1:And so then what happened was, especially on the vendor side, the market just began to get flooded with either a lot of me too products, a lot of products that just simply didn't really get to the to, to the real core need of the market. And so, consequently, when there was cash flowing down the street, you could, you could sell some of those. Because there was cash flowing down the street, people like, ah of those, because there's cash flowing down the street, people are like, oh, I don't know, there's this one feature that looks kind of cool. All right, let's buy it Now, when there's not cash flowing down the street. I mean, it's just the light switch is turned off on selling any of those. So I don't know if you have a reaction, jp, to what I just said.
Speaker 2:I totally agree and my personal wish is that it kind of stays that way, knowing the slow down, because I know that's impacted a lot of people in their jobs, but really to the, let's build something really valuable. Yeah, because I think there was a trend in the market to just build everything. Yeah, and maybe if I go back to IBC 2017, 18, 19, and I see now there used to be like one trend Because in 2018, everyone was building the OTT apps. Yes, Like do we need 85 companies building OTT apps for smart TVs Do we Like?
Speaker 2:is there a market for that? Or is it that people have a solution and looking for a problem and now you go and it's difficult now to find. Like one trend, like one thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the trend is now profitability. That's a good trend yeah, that's a good, I know. And isn't it weird that we have to say, oh, this is a trend like hold on, isn't it? And you know you're a business owner, you know you're a founder, so hey, at the end of the day, you are. So hey, at the end of the day, you are for profit At the end of the day.
Speaker 2:But I think it is also because of the purpose companies have in the industry. We exist in the market as an organization to create value. So we've got to have some resources and build something more valuable. Yeah, If we're just spending more than what we make in the long term, then we're destroying value actually.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, that's awesome. Okay, well, this leads perfect into something I can't wait for you to talk about. So you really invest in the industry and community, and I would love for you to talk about a couple, a couple initiatives that you guys are leading and driving. So tell, tell us about what you're doing to build the tech community and, yeah, Definitely.
Speaker 2:And so so you know, we we really depend on on, for the business we do we really depend on on trust and business we do. We really depend on trust from others because it's difficult for us to show the value of our work, product and service before. So we have a strong presence in the industry through our community that actually validates our work. It's a way for us to show what we do because, of course, most of the work we do is NDA protected work. It's a way for us to show what we do because, of course, most of the work we do is nba protected.
Speaker 1:It's confidential exactly, by definition, you can't talk about it, so yeah yeah, and that's part of the reason why they hire us.
Speaker 2:That yeah, talking about what we do, and the internals but we've got to show what we're able to do. So, uh, in 2019 we started with the monte video technique uh community, this one. You see the logo here. Yeah, actually it's cool because the cd name monte video has video name and we haven't found other cities with the video in the name.
Speaker 2:Actually, it was inspired by san francisco video tech and all the other meetups, and then we started like shifting and creating our own events. We have meetups that focus on the technical challenges. Actually, today we have one to present the summer project. I think it's at 6 pm, uruguay time.
Speaker 2:It's 5 pm East Awesome. But then we started having the mate talks. Mate, is this what we drink here? It's like a round table, like what we're doing now, but instead of one person it's a round table for industry experts to discuss issues from different angles. And maybe our I think our most iconic event we do once a year, it's the Montevideo Tech Summer Camp. It's happening in January, last week of January, next year, 2025, 2025, which is your summer, our summer?
Speaker 1:yeah, exactly, exactly. So for now, you know, I'm in arizona, so actually january is like heaven here. But um, for those who live further north, uh, they would be very happy to escape the snow and go somewhere where it's warm and beautiful.
Speaker 2:So it's a mix of two things. One is the summer week that it's actually in your Y in person. We host industry experts and people from different angles. It's people from operations, from technology, from product. They come for a week and it's about collaboration. It's also about, of course, getting to know your why, getting to know our team. Of course, it's also good for our team to get to know people from the industry. But then we have the summer projects, which is a way to bring together industry leaders to work on open source initiatives, and we invest on on some of our engineering teams to actually work on the two projects that the community chose. So today we're presenting 12 different ideas we got from different industry leaders. Like the ideas go from, I'd say, from continuing to work on the CMCD there's a player work. There's also work around MOQ. Like, the ideas are various and what we choose is to um invest for three months four engineers working for free, like paid by qualabs, to contribute to those open source projects, and that's how we're cool back to the community.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, how cool. So how could somebody do? They just go to the Qual Labs website if they wanted to sign up or participate or learn more. How can somebody learn about that?
Speaker 2:If they go to multivideotechdev. Ah okay, okay, actually we have, and they can find us in meetupcom with the multivideotech and they have today's event. They can join. They'll see the projects we're working on and also, if they want to see what we've worked. In about 10 days we'll be in San Francisco for DMAXed.
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 2:And we're going to be showcasing a few demos of the work we did in some of the presentations. There are going to be three presentations that are showing work we've done.
Speaker 1:Yeah, amazing, amazing. Yeah, I just I love that you're investing in the community and, at the same time, you know you're connecting to, like you said, this brings people to Uruguay and you know they get to see your beautiful country and you know experience, you know the culture and the people and all that great stuff, but you're also, you know, helping to serve to build the community, support the community. You're, you know you're donating engineering resources. You know, again, like you said, those are engineers that you're paying, you know, out of your payroll, but they're actually participating on these wider open source, you know, development efforts, which is great. It's really, really amazing. Why don't?
Speaker 2:Actually, everyone is open to join. Like the idea of this open source project, is not that only we work?
Speaker 1:Yeah sure it's like this kind of manpower.
Speaker 2:Everyone can collaborate on a part-time basis, maybe as a side project from your job if you want to do. There are some architecture sessions that everyone can join. So the idea is that it's a collaborative approach to open source and not just contributing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's right. That's right, that's amazing. Well, this dovetails well into you mentioned Demuxed and that's coming up just in a week and a half or so. I will get to see you, I will definitely be there. So for any listeners, make sure you find Juan Pablo, you know, say hi, introduce yourself. You know I'd love to meet anybody who's there. So anyway, with that plug out of the way, you are actually participating in two presentations and so why don't you tell us what you're going to be presenting there at Demox?
Speaker 2:Excellent. Actually, we're going to be in three.
Speaker 1:So one is.
Speaker 2:Koti Costanza from our team. She's going to be presenting the work we did for CMF Ham, which is how you can play dash content on an HLS player, and that was actually part of the SummerCamp 2024 open source projects that we did together with Zach Cava from Disney and with Alex Zambelli from Dolby. They kind of presented that initiative and we worked on it.
Speaker 1:Amazing.
Speaker 2:Also, there are two more presentations that we've done, the demos for One is from Will Law from Akamai, which I'm sure everyone knows.
Speaker 2:Yes, he's quite famous in the industry, so it's his presentation I don't want to spoil. But it's going to be the CMCD version 2 implementation that has new operation modes and integration with the players and all that. We built that as an open source contribution actually to not only be working on the spec but actually, while we build the spec, which is still in construction, it's a way to actually test it, understand the challenges. We build the spec, which is still in construction. It's a way to actually test it, understand the challenges, the implementation challenges, the ambiguities in the draft. So we're building a reference platform while we're all working on the spec. And the second is on Alex Gilati's presentation from Comcast, also a very well-known guy in the industry for.
Speaker 2:Dashif and we work with him on some overlays for Dash, which again I think it's his idea. It's very interesting. On avoiding reprocessing and costs for the reuse of VOD assets for different life scenarios, so it's a quite interesting approach.
Speaker 1:Amazing. Yeah, yeah, it's great, yeah, really really good. Well, jp, this has been an amazing discussion and I really enjoyed, you know, especially kind of the first half of it or so, where we, you know, just really, I think, got practical and I would even use the words real about why the industry is in the state it's in need to do that. We can do that. You know whether we are ICs. You know individual contributors working inside these. You know large companies, these large organizations. You know, or we're managers or you know we're. You know, looking at strategies and looking at how we're going to build. I think it's really helpful. I want to transition.
Speaker 1:We have some questions, so should we go to some Q&A and continue the conversation that way? All right, good, good, yeah. So sometimes we get some very creative questions and it's not always easy to tell what the real question is. So I'm going to do my best here and again, if you happen to write one of these, submit one of these questions, but we didn't quite hit it. You know, I know that JP is very accessible on LinkedIn. I'm accessible. There's a lot of ways to get in touch with us. You know, come introduce yourself at Demuxed or, you know, the next show, so okay. So here's a question that came in. Scroll up here. Okay, what can we expect from AI in the video space, with all of the profitability discussions?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I have the same reaction.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's deep, let's see.
Speaker 2:So in general, I think and that's what every marketer would say that I think AI will drive efficiencies. It is already doing so. I think now we're seeing it more on the content creation side. There's a lot of ai applied on encoding and you know about it because you you actually promote it a lot yeah and um.
Speaker 2:So I think there's being ai applied in in different parts of the workflow. Yet in the short term and actually last year we were really worried about it it's like are we really um, getting behind on falling behind on the ai, innovation, um and? And then we start asking all of our clients, like what their initiatives were in the short term? How much of your budget's going to be there? Where are you going to invest it? Yeah, and no one was even investing one percent of their budget in a, not even by far.
Speaker 2:I mean not the ai companies, I mean, like general companies yeah, yeah, exactly understand so everyone has like initiatives, pocs, and I'd say that something similar happened many years ago with the, when the big data thing came out, and then you would go to a bank and big data analytics yeah, and they had like one data guy and now, you know, data is out there.
Speaker 2:Actually, what we're seeing in the short term is that now companies are starting to work a lot on data, like now they realize they need to grab data from everywhere. So that's what we're seeing now actually happening and investment happening. And I think what's happening with AI and profitability is that now companies are not willing to invest. There's no free money, so no one's willing to invest. Crazy amount of money is just to find the thing. That's going to be the hit, like yeah, I see everyone cautious, building pocs. Yeah, trying to figure out where to put their money. That's what I'm seeing.
Speaker 1:I don't know what you're seeing, mark largely the same, and my um both you know my observations like what I really am seeing in the market, line up with exactly what you just said. And then my personal feeling is I actually think I have a little bit of a higher perspective is that I think that the transformation and I don't want to say, you know, is it over the next one year, two years, three years, I don't know the time horizon but the AI transformation within companies is at the personal employee or resource level. And so what do I mean by that? And we could go department by department. Marketing is kind of an easy one, and that's the domain that I primarily work in, so I'll start there. We'll talk about engineering.
Speaker 1:So what does it mean? Well, it means that you used to need to have a small team of writers If you were really going to be producing high quality content on a regular basis. Now, you know, it didn't mean you had 25 writers, but you probably had two or three. You certainly had one, and then you probably had some freelancers that were supporting you, and that was required. Now, the reality is that, because I'm building it, we have a very small team here at NetEnt, and people are always amazed at the volume of content that we push out and the assumption is wow, netin's really investing in marketing. Yes, we are investing in marketing, but not in ways maybe people would think. In other words, it isn't a big team, and what is it? It's a handful of knowledgeable people who understand the market, who are able to translate that into prompts and or into some basic content frameworks. That then ChatGPT, cloud, et cetera, produces incredible content.
Speaker 1:Okay, so the transformation. And then you can say well, how does that affect profitability? Well, it means that now I don't have to go lobby to get an extra writer because we're falling behind, because we can't produce enough content. I don't have to go lobby to get an extra writer because we're falling behind, because we can't produce enough content. I don't have to do that. In fact, if anything, you know, it's like hey, I have almost this gas pedal and you know I'm going a hundred miles an hour. I could actually go 200, but I don't need to go 200, you know like we can crank it up, crank it down.
Speaker 1:And if you look at engineering with the co-pilots, et cetera, I think that that same level of transformation in some organizations it's already beginning or has begun. In others maybe they're I'll use the word lagging a little bit, but it's 100% coming. So it's at the individual productivity level that transformation is happening, you know with AI, and then that's going to get built into solutions and obviously, over time there is going to be real applications where AI is applied within a product, within a solution, within a video encoder, you know within a transcoding pipeline, you know within a streaming. You know video workflow, you know that is going to. You know add value, lower cost. You know increase performance, et cetera. So that's my answer.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I, I a hundred percent agree in that, and I you're also more flexible now, yeah, and you're also more flexible now, yeah, and your costs, yeah exactly yeah, exactly Exactly yeah, so interesting.
Speaker 1:So then the very next question, and I'm just taking them as they came in, so the next one. Maybe it's the same person, I don't actually know. They get copied and pasted in our chat here. They get copied and pasted in our chat here, but how do you envision AI and next-gen codecs like AV1 transforming the trade-offs between video quality, bandwidth and processing power? This is a good one.
Speaker 2:That's a good one for you more than for me.
Speaker 1:Okay, I'll keep my answer short, yeah, so yeah, this is a very good question and it is something you know. For those to know me and know the background of various companies I've worked for over the years, you know that I I did spend a period of time, you know, working on technology that was all based on taking just standard H.264 encoded content and making it perceptually identical but reducing the file size. That process, you know this, was developed many, many, many years ago and even though what was happening inside the algorithms it was, it was somewhat close to machine learning, but you know it wasn't. You know it definitely was not AI, and the way that we think about it the point is, the reason why I give that reference is that we found ourselves in the market quite often making the case that you didn't necessarily have to go to these more advanced codecs. You could use a standard that your pipeline already supported, your player ecosystem already supported, but you could get, if not all of the benefits, you could get a lot of the benefits of the bit rate reduction. So this idea that AI could take H.264 or HEVC or even AV1, any codec, make that codec be that much more efficient than it is base and there's technologies like LCEVC, there's different approaches, right, and then you don't have to go to AV2 or you don't have to go to VVC. That actually is a very, very valid concept.
Speaker 1:You know, next gen codec adoption is that there's always then the. On the one side, there is the what compute requirements are required to run these you know content, adaptive processes to run these AI driven optimizations. So it's great that you can do that. But what if I have to 3x my compute cost? What if I have to 2x my compute cost? Now, that trade-off may still make sense because in the case of like VVC AV2, of course, isn't out, the bitstream isn't even ratified yet but that is a really, really, really heavy codec. You know that is a really, really, really heavy codec. So you know I am actually not doing a lot in the area of VVC.
Speaker 1:So I don't know, but my guess is at least my hunch is is that if you look at the compute overhead from HEVC to VVC, especially if you're going to deliver with the bitrate efficiencies, in other words, really meet the promise of VVC, maybe it's a 4x or a 5x compute overhead. Now somebody's probably going to write in and say, no Mark, it's actually 2x and we're pushing it down to 1.5. Great, but the point is that it still comes back to these trade-offs. And then you have to say, okay, fine, so maybe my compute on the encoding side stays the same from using some sort of an AI adaptive process, but do I have player support for these next gen codecs? And then that's often where people go oh, you know, you're right, like HEVC now and I'm just choosing it just as an example finally has reached the tipping point where it's for the most part, ubiquitous, you know, for the most part in most markets and most player ecosystems.
Speaker 1:So there is no single answer to this question, which I, which I, I I'm sure the person who wrote this is going to be slightly disappointed, but it is absolutely contextual as to what the right choice is. And yeah, I'd be curious, you know, jp, if you know, if you're hearing similarly.
Speaker 2:Definitely that every new codec is also a challenge, not only on the processing side and on the client side, but also for like it's more storage, because now you have five times the content, now you have it six times.
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 2:It's about distribution costs and I said so, yeah, you definitely need to get to a tipping point to actually that codec to become actually usable. But yeah, I think actually there's a lot of opportunity for AI in that area Because, yeah, I think we cannot expect more from the discrete cosine transform. Like it's done enough for us already.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely, definitely. Well, it's a very interesting space to watch and a lot of innovation in coding and, you know, codec development is in play and so yeah, so stay tuned. So hey, here's a great question. This person asked what makes you most proud of the Uruguay team and their journey. So I'm assuming now you know maybe some people would think, wait, are you talking the soccer team or actually, sorry football team, football, sorry Football team. But, yeah, but yeah, how do you answer that? You know that's a, it's a good question.
Speaker 2:I think, I'm, I'm, I'm proud of our entire team for for the I'd say in the last couple of years, for their resilience, their creativity, their commitment because I think it's been challenging times and everyone's found a way to you know um in the role, um adapt and and and, of course, about our culture and our non-transactional approach.
Speaker 2:I think that's um like this is kind of our work ethic, but um about their maybe their their long-term uh approach always to relationships to um to um, to building uh, to always thinking in the long term and not just in the short term. So it's um I would say flexibility, resilience, creativity and um long-term partnerships yeah, awesome, awesome sounds good.
Speaker 1:Well, let's um go through. We have just a couple more minutes, so if you want to get a question and make sure you you type it in. But, um, yeah, so, uh, this, uh. This next person says or asks what will be the impact of massive data explosion and the data movement limitations. Again, I'm assuming you know data. There certainly is metadata in what we do in video, but I think I assume they're talking about CDN and, as the world is moving from broadcast clearly to OTT, Well, if we assume that's it, I think there's still a huge challenge on the networking, because we were used to massive events happening like these one-to events yeah, um being broadcasted.
Speaker 2:Broadcasted using only like one resource at a time yeah, that's right and I think, um, we're we're still not there to eliminate all the broadcast, like I don't think internet would would actually support it. Yeah, um, I know there are huge efforts out there on on the on the codec side, on the cdns, and going to the edge that's right that requires massive investments.
Speaker 2:and well, we're seeing more and more of these investments of moving, also processing to the edge and like there there's all these um. So I think there is a lot of investment there, yeah, but I'm not sure we're quite there yet. I don't think we're going to be there in a couple of years.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Broadcasting is still going to exist for a couple more Olympics.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah, those are good benchmarks. The Olympics, yeah. So what are the most difficult steps for streaming and you know I'm going to kind of tack on to this question and you know, direct it to you workflow or portions of the end-to-end solution where you find are exceptionally challenging compared to others. Does anything stand out or any areas that you find universally teams not your team necessarily, but companies struggle with?
Speaker 2:necessarily, but you know companies struggle with. So I I think the the the challenge is is what is in the details? Um, like, the devil is in the details. If you want to do a video in a mobile application, that's easy, like, yeah. If you want to do a video in a web application, that's easy. But if you want to have all your content available on all devices in different regions at the same time, with the security, and when you start adding all these different dimensions to it, like oh, I want it to be available on all devices, oh, but we have people that have smart TVs that are 10 years old.
Speaker 1:Yes, and we have all these brands and then so you have all these different networking.
Speaker 2:It's like you know, in, yeah, in the us everyone has good internet connectivity. But then you go to to india and you see hot star streaming way. Larger scale on mobile networks, there are 3g, and then you say oh, okay, so it's not about ultra hd and 20 megabit per second streams, it's maybe one megabit per second streams yeah, that's right, and 25 million of them concurrent, you know, like in the case of a cricket.
Speaker 2:Uh, you know match or something yeah so if I were to say if, if you go from from the, from the us, to the rest of the world, the challenge I'm seeing is that, um, the rest of the world can be really um, different in many ways, not only cultural, different languages, different, like when you start adding like dimensions to it. It's not like english and closed captioning. It is now that you have 100 different languages, now you have 100 different subtitles, now you have 100 different mobile devices. It's not roku out there, it's not, that's right, apple first out there, like when you start becoming, you know, uh, global.
Speaker 2:I think there are huge challenges in the, in all the different dimensions. That's what I think it gets really. Um, you can struggle like, yeah, having a player in a iphone, everyone can do that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, that's true, yeah, yeah, definitely, well, good, well, we could certainly continue on. I think there's a few other questions, but they sort of overlapped with some things we already talked about, so I'm going to jump over those. But, jp, you know, thank you again. It was a wonderful discussion and really appreciate you coming on the show.
Speaker 2:Mark, thank you. Thanks, anita, for inviting me to be here. Yes, proud to be here, it's a true honor. Well, thanks for everyone for joining, and see you in a couple of weeks at the At the MUXT.
Speaker 1:That's right, absolutely Okay. Well, great, have a wonderful evening and thank you again for everyone for joining us live on Voices of Video.
Speaker 2:This episode of Voices of Video is brought to you by NetInt Technologies. If you are looking for cutting edge video encoding solutions, check out NetInt's products at netintcom.
