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
Game Over for Traditional Gaming? Not Quite Yet.
The cloud gaming revolution is already here, quietly transforming how games reach billions of potential players worldwide. But unlike previous digital transformations, this one isn't about replacing high-end gaming setups. It's about expanding the gaming universe to include the massive, untapped audience who access digital content primarily through mobile devices.
What makes this moment different from earlier attempts? According to David Cook of Radian Arc, we've reached the convergence point of three essential ingredients that power any digital transformation. First, content availability has expanded dramatically, with publishers increasingly recognizing the enormous opportunity of reaching new markets. Second, the user experience has been revolutionized by solving gaming's most crucial challenge: latency. By placing GPU infrastructure directly inside telco networks instead of distant data centers, the connection becomes virtually instantaneous. Third, the economics have become sustainable through groundbreaking density improvements - combining traditional GPUs with specialized Video Processing Units to achieve nearly 10x the streaming capacity per server.
This technical innovation translates to real-world business impact. Across 63 telco partnerships representing 2.5 billion potential customers, Radian Arc is demonstrating how cloud gaming serves as the perfect showcase for 5G networks. Rather than competing with consoles for hardcore gamers, they're opening gaming to entirely new audiences across Latin America, Southeast Asia, and beyond - regions where mobile is the primary computing device and traditional gaming hardware remains out of reach for most consumers.
The most compelling insight might be their approach to market entry. "We start our discussion in the CMO's office, not the CTO's office," explains Cook. While technologists might focus on amazing capabilities, successful cloud gaming requires solving the business equation - reducing customer acquisition costs and maximizing lifetime value. By aligning with telcos' primary objective (selling more 5G connections), they've created a sustainable model that meets everyone's needs: telcos, publishers, and most importantly, the billions of players eager to experience gaming in an entirely new way.
Ready to explore how cloud gaming is transforming entertainment distribution? Discover how the right infrastructure can unlock new markets and create seamless gaming experiences for audiences worldwide.
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. Good morning or afternoon, wherever you are joining us from, welcome to this edition of Voices of Video, and I'm Mark Donegan. I have David Cook here from Radian Arc. David, welcome.
David Cook:Welcome. Good to see you. It's been a while since we chatted. I'm excited to be here.
Mark Donnigan:It has it has. Well, at some point we'll have to do a session and we can reminisce about the history of building some of the very first, you know, VODs, SVOD, streaming services Absolutely.
David Cook:Fun times. It would be fantastic yeah.
Mark Donnigan:Yeah, yeah, that would be. That'd be a lot of fun. Well, let's dive in. You know this is a super exciting session, and I know that cloud gaming is obviously your core business, and you know that's what we're here to talk about today. It's something that's near and dear to NetEnt's heart as well, so we are very well aligned with this subject. You know why don't we start David? Give us the one two-minute overview of Radian Arc, what you do, who you're serving, and then let's dive into our agenda today.
David Cook:Yeah, happy to. So Radian Arc is an infrastructure. As a service business, service business we walk into telcos mostly as our customer base and we basically provide them with three different things. The first is the actual infrastructure. So think of that as being like a mini GPU farm that we actually put inside the telco network. The second thing we bring them is a range of applications, typically with application partners you know people like Black Nut. And then the third thing we do is actually help them with agency services. The last thing we want to do is bring into a telco a cloud gaming kind of solution and not really help them to actually go out and engage with their consumers. So yeah, those three things it's the infrastructure, it's the application partnerships that sit on that infrastructure, and then the marketing to enable them to reach out to their consumer base.
Mark Donnigan:Yeah, it's interesting and I want to touch on all three of those components, but I think today we're going to mostly focus on the technology, the infrastructure, the platform, and then the content, which is, of course, very relevant, and I know that that's a major piece that you bring. Maybe a good place to start is you know, there have been some, there's some successful offers in the market, obviously, and, and you know you can tell us about some of those case studies, hopefully. And then you know there's been some attempts that someone has gone into the market, and I'm thinking of what Google did, for example, and and then, and then pulled out, and, and so, anytime that happens, especially when there's a new distribution format, a new technology being developed, there's those that stand around and say, hey, well done, you know, you're like, you know, this is new, this is cutting edge. It's the innovator, you know.
Mark Donnigan:And then there's those who, you know, with sort of furrowed brow, stand around and go see, we told you this could never work. We have to stick with consoles. That's the only way this can happen. Firmly believe and I know you do that gaming is going to go online. Um, but you know, my parallel is that, just like there's still blu-ray discs being manufactured, there's still blu-ray players like just look at consumer adoption, look at what they're doing. You know? Um, obviously it's a teeny, teeny, teeny tiny. You know, know of the entertainment ecosystem, if you will, but why don't you start by giving us a preview, you know, for those who may not really be aware of kind, of where we are in this transition from physical disks, consoles, pcs, to where everything's being streamed effectively?
David Cook:Yeah, look, I mean you know you almost touched on this at the very beginning, mac that you and I have been around this a couple of times now. Yes, we have. I remember 20 plus years ago, I'm sitting in the office of a record executive who said Mark, my words, david, you will never be able to buy an individual music track, right, and you know that wave is coming on and we both talked to that same person.
Mark Donnigan:I think Exactly.
David Cook:You know, that wave has come and gone and you know, then we saw a video happen next right. And what we notice inside video is that there's always three things that need to align. Same with music, same with video. Three things that need to align. First of all, we need content. Right, right, the right content has to be available. Content is king, which will be. The second thing is you need the right user experience.
David Cook:Um, and you know, the right user experience was always a challenge. It was a challenge in the and music moving over to digital. It was a challenge in video, uh, with streaming quality and rebuffering and all those kind of terms that we got used to. And then the third was the economics had to work. There was a moment in time when it costs more to deliver a movie than you could ever make from that movie, from a consumer, and so you can't just have one of the three, you have to have all three. And the three have to come together at the same time.
David Cook:And I think what we feel like is that the ingredients of all three of those are ready right now. It may take a little bit more time for it to really gel, but they're ready right now If you look at it, you go clearly the body of content is always increasing. There's line of sight, I think, to significant move forward in terms of content over the next 12 months. I think in terms of the user experience, it really is. As we all know, in gaming, if bandwidth was the key ingredient in the user experience for video, then latency is the key ingredient in the user experience for gaming right, and if you can really leverage the investments that are taking place in 5G, then there's something, I think, very unique there. And then the economics have to work, and the economics have to work in multiple markets, not just higher ARPU markets, but a lot of these developing markets as well. And so we look at it and we're not surprised that there would be a lot of stumbles that have happened along the way, because there hasn't been all three of those ingredients there until now.
David Cook:But we do believe that kind of the shift is happening where those ingredients are coming together, and so it's a fantastic and exciting time and, frankly, part of the reason that we got into this business was I'd sat down with Oliver from Black Nut and we talked about these three ingredients and said what's the one thing that we can help with and we came to the conclusion actually it was probably two he clearly is doing a fantastic job. On the content side, we really felt like we could help with the latency, with our experience dealing with telcos. And we really felt like we could help with the latency, with our experience dealing with telcos, and we really felt that we could help with the economics in terms of creating a solution that would drive down the OPEX side of the business in order to make sure that there's enough margin that you can not just deliver the content, but you can do it. So that's where we feel like the industry's at. We feel it's right on the cusp of those ingredients coming together.
Mark Donnigan:I think there's something in this, too, that's important not to miss, and this is just sort of natural human behavior. I guess I don't know, I'm not exactly the right word, the right word, but is it? You know, we often think with innovation, that it's not innovative unless you have flipped the entire paradigm that exists today into this new mode of working or operation or onto this new technology. So, for example, we have to take all gaming experiences online, or else it's not really transformative. Well, the reality is, is it? No, you don't, and in fact, you know, I think that's potentially, and you know I'm not, I don't have any inside views, so I might be totally wrong here, but Google was super ambitious and I applaud them. That's basically what they tried to do with stadia right was to provide, you know, their marketing promise even though I think they never really got there with 4k 60 frames. But the marketing, you know, process was 4k hdr, 60 frames per second. I mean by all rights, that's high-end console gaming experience. And do it streaming. Well, well, that is a huge, heavy lift.
Mark Donnigan:There's this whole other part of the market that aren't the hardcore gamers, that are just looking for a new entertainment experience, and so one of the things that you know I'd be curious to get your perspective on is how much of the telcos bringing gaming onto their networks.
Mark Donnigan:How much is you know them saying, oh, we think and it's a little bit of a rhetorical question because I'm leading you to the answer, but you may disagree but how much of it is you know, oh, we think, that the think that the, you know that the there's a shift happening and, just like we went from physical delivery with, you know, with disc and you know we went to streaming, the exact same things happening with gaming. So we want to be there. How much is that thinking and how much is is another line of thinking which is, say, look, consumers, you know, with social media and tiktok and all the you know, with social media and TikTok and all the various you know, along with video, there's so many ways that they're entertained. Today, we just want to give them another option, which is, on whatever device they're in front of, they could play games which today, you know, at least through their platforms they don't, do you understand? Like kind of the line of thinking.
Mark Donnigan:So I mean, is that what you're hearing, or is it that people are really there because they're looking to replace the console, you know, the game console that is?
David Cook:I think that's a very insightful observation. You know, if you go back to the beginning of a statement, say innovative for who? Right. So it may not necessarily be innovative for the guy who has a $3,000 rig with all of the latest pieces in it, but, you know, for a kid who's in Latin America, southeast Asia, who's been playing very low end Android games, it's extremely innovative for him to have access to catalogs of games he's never been able to play. For. That's right. So I think you're hitting the nail on the head in terms of that observation.
Mark Donnigan:Let's talk about the platform, because I really think you did characterize it very well in that, just as with video delivery and streaming bandwidth, especially in the early days, delivery and streaming bandwidth, especially in the early days, was the constraint, both the cost of it and, frankly, just the bits. I've said this publicly before, but I can remember when we were building Voodoo and David I think we crossed over right around the time you were building Cinema Now and remember how we had to assume that our consumer had 768 kilobits, right, kilobits, and, and, and it was becoming more dominant to get like 1.5 megabits. Whoo, this is like. This is like broadband for the super techies who were willing to pay, whatever it was 200, 300 bucks a month in san franc they could get five megabits, but like we had to engineer the services for like 768 kilobits. So bandwidth was a constraint. Now, I mean, bandwidth is always a consideration and I'm not suggesting that that's like quote unquote a solved problem on the video side, but it's largely behind us. It absolutely is not a constraint, right, but now it's latency, yes.
Mark Donnigan:So what I'd like you to do is describe for the listeners. I think you have a very interesting approach because a lot of platforms today come to market built on a public cloud generally, or it could be a private cloud that somebody is, you know. Come onto our platform. We've purpose built this, fine tuned it, you know, for this application, we're talking about cloud gaming, but you have a different approach and I want you to describe that, because your approach is to put hardware into the network and so describe architecturally what you do. Talk about how you got there, what were the trade-offs, you know, why didn't you just go build this on I don't know AWS or whatever? Tell us about that.
David Cook:Yeah, so actually a little bit of a history here. We've done a project around edge computing, putting edge compute inside of telco networks, and you know, you saw that actually take place. A lot of Netflix servers are sitting inside the telco networks or cable companies network.
David Cook:A lot of Google servers are sitting there, a lot of Facebook servers are sitting there, but actually it's pretty hard to get in there. There's not a lot of real estate. These are not like the big data centers, right. These are oftentimes smaller, regional data centers spread all out around the world, and so you know, what we observed was there was an opportunity to put GPUs inside the network, and so what we did was we focused on telcos that were making an investment in 5G, and the reason for that was very specific you don't need 5G to watch TikTok, as you were just saying. Bandwidth is generally available in many markets not all, but in many. The key piece is the latency right, and the beauty of the 5G connection is that it does give you low latency, and actually a lot of the telcos had a dearth of applications that really leaned into that right. So as they were looking at, they were saying, okay, the applications that we see are great for 5G are things like drones, self-driving cars, iot all fantastic use cases. I would always joke with them. Look out the window, you don't see too many drones, and if you do, you're calling the police, exactly, but what you all have is either kids or nieces and nephews, and what are they doing? They're playing games, right, so it's kind of a inbuilt audience that cloud gaming could be the quote unquote killer use case for the consumer side of the business, and it really is built around that question of latency. Right, and again, we're not trying to replace that $3,000 rig that's sitting in some kid's bedroom. We're not trying to do that. We are trying to bring a fantastic gaming experience to the rest of the world. Right, and so what we focused on was telcos. That we had had the experience of putting servers in their network before. We knew all the challenges of that. There's a lot of security challenges around that, there's a lot of data challenges around that, and we crafted a solution where we could go and put AMD GPUs inside the telco network and that architecture really has a number of benefits and to say, on the consumer side, going back to our beginning of the conversation, it creates a much better user experience.
David Cook:Right, you do have a much lower latency gaming experience and actually, interestingly as well, because we've designed the software stack that we have to be focused on cloud gaming, we can get a lot of efficiencies that you just can't get in public cloud as well. So, for example, if you take the exact same chip that we have and you stick it in public cloud, our startup time on a game is roughly twice as fast. And it's not necessarily because we're smarter, it's just that it's a very focused software stack right. You don't kind of run thousands of applications, you're running a few, and then the efficiency of it because it is targeted around cloud gaming specifically is we can get a higher frames per second of the same physical architecture that you could get in public cloud. And then the last part is that because you're on the network of the telco and you're kind of optimizing the on-net traffic, you don't have that off-net to on-net traffic. That's around creating how do we create the best user experience for the consumer. That's that side of it.
David Cook:On the other side that we had touched on was economics right. And if we make the argument that a lot of the focus here is on bringing that large base of casual mobile gamers to be able to access these kind of products, then you're talking about markets that may not necessarily be purely US-focused or Western Europe-focused, and you're talking about a lot of markets in Latin America, southeast Asia, africa, middle East, et cetera, and in those scenarios we need even more financial flexibility in order to deliver that great service in a way that is actually economical for the content providers. So actually being inside the telco network generates additional economic benefits. You don't have the transit layer of data, which may be not that expensive in the US, but in places like Southeast Asia it's incredibly expensive, right? You don't have that expense and you have a lot more flexibility in terms of your fees around rack power to go along with it.
Mark Donnigan:It's both a user experience advantage and it's an economic advantage as well, yeah, completely makes sense, because I obviously have some experience, both as a supplier just like we are supplying you VPUs, which we'll get to talking about, then the architecture You've talked about the GPU We'll talk about the VPU, which we'll get to talking about, then the architecture you talked about the GPU, we'll talk about the VPU but as a supplier and just being, you know, in the ecosystem and talking to a lot of folks who are building platforms, and this is what kills. I think there's a very important insight and you know, for those who are listening, even and you know maybe you're not involved in cloud gaming or you know it's not something that you're. You know, for those who are listening, even, and you know maybe you're not involved in cloud gaming, or you know it's not something that you're, you know that you're doing. Here's a takeaway that's going to make this whole conversation worthwhile. Is that what a lot of companies, I think, where they've fallen into a little bit of a trap or a hole, especially economically, is they go build the platform with the justification of either the value of the public cloud and the scaling and the linear costs versus the initial CapEx investment, and we all understand the arguments right. The problem is where they fall into the economic hole, as I like to call it, meaning that, at the end of the day, the economics don't pan out like they thought, is that they still are having to onboard and offboard traffic from other networks, which A carries the costs you talk about.
Mark Donnigan:You know the egress and ingress and again, depending on the part of the world and this is what I think gets super complicated as well is even depending upon the network platform that you're built on. You know, not all the public clouds even have the same pricing model, pricing structures in terms of how they charge, you know, for egress, and they all have different strategies. Is my point? Two is is getting back again to latency and the fact that you still are a disconnected system that's riding on top of somebody else, which means, now that you know you don't get any economic benefit of shared data center, like you even referenced it rack, space, power, network connectivity there's there, there's so much. And so this notion of, well, we're just going to build a platform and then aggregate a whole lot of users on it and the economics are gonna be great for us and great for the user Boy. History has proven pretty definitively that that actually is rarely the case, at least in super intensive applications like video. There's plenty of examples and distributed databases and I don't know whatever else. You know where that can work. So this is really interesting insight.
Mark Donnigan:Now talk to us then about. Talk to us then about let's go to that next level of the architecture. And so inside the server that you're deploying we have you've already referenced it and I like the idea that, and I don't know if it really started this simply, but what I heard you say is the concept was hey, let's put GPUs in the telco. You know, if we get GPUs in the network or on net all of a sudden, it's not too hard to imagine oh wow, what can we do with those GPUs? And obviously here we're talking about cloud gaming. I imagine there's other things too that maybe you're even thinking about. So the GPU is critical. You're working with AMD. Do you exclusively use AMD or do you use other GPUs, like if someone came and said hey, for whatever reasons, we want to use the other guys, or is your system tied to a particular gpu architecture?
David Cook:I would say technically no, we can use anything that's always the answer these kind of questions, right?
Mark Donnigan:yeah, no. But yeah.
David Cook:So what I can say was that over the last couple of years there's been a lot of supply chain constraints.
David Cook:So the relationship that we've had with AMD has been fantastic, because they invested in the company and it's given us really great access to the GPUs at a time when you can't always get access to them, and so we've optimized. And the other thing we also believe in is standardization, because you're already dealing with a plethora of different networks. You know we have 63 telcos around the world. Now that we have deals with. Every one of those networks is slightly different. So what we've really tried to do is standardize on the bill of materials, standardize on the bond, because that standardization has really allowed us to be efficient in the supply chain at a time when there are supply chain challenges. So, you know, I would almost describe it more as there's natural exclusivity rather than this kind of written exclusivity just purely around the fact that we've tried to standardize because that works best and we've really focused on how we can scale the supply chain into many different countries around the world.
Mark Donnigan:Why don't you talk about what you're doing with NetEnt and the role of the VPU? One of the things that I'd ask for you to bring out, because this is a very natural question is well, wait a second, the GPU already has an encoder. Is well, wait a second, the GPU already has an encoder. So why in the world would you go through the cost of adding yet another board in the server? And then also the integration complexity, and doesn't that hurt latency? So why don't you talk about architecturally, then, where the VPU? Why don't you talk about architecturally, then, where the VPU, that is, the video processing unit fits in with the GPU to deliver presumably higher density, right?
David Cook:Yeah, that last sentence was the key piece. Right, it's all about density. And actually that's even more important in the telco network, because there isn't a lot of rack space on net at a telco. Like I say, these are not the huge data that we see in the us and other places. Oftentimes these are very small data centers with very limited amount of rack space. So for us, the density is incredibly important because, you know, it's not like we say, oh, just add another rack, right.
Mark Donnigan:Yeah.
David Cook:So I'll break it down into a couple of areas. One is that we definitely believe that by splitting out the rendering versus the encoding, that on the encoding side we can just be more efficient. You know, better use of codecs, more focus on the actual encoding process. You know better use of codecs, more focus on the actual encoding process, and actually what that translates into directly is less traffic over the network. And so you know, as you think about 5G, even though you know bandwidth is supposed to be the key thing in 5G, there's many, many bottlenecks in a telco's network right. So less overall traffic that you're running over it with the still having the same frame rates and the same resolution is obviously a big win for the telco right.
David Cook:The second thing is around the economics. So, as we touched on, and that economics really comes down to density, it's the total number of games, or concurrent users. We call it that you can be running from a single box, and so by having the GPU and the video processing unit kind of working together, we end up in this really fantastic world of having the highest number of concurrent users per dollar of CapEx that we spend. So I don't think of it purely in terms of total cost of the bomb. I think of it as in terms of the capex versus the concurrent users right and then on the same piece to that is actually also on the OPEX side. So if you have higher density, oftentimes what you find is that the total power drawdown that you're using on a concurrent basis actually trends down as well, and actually probably two years ago nobody would have been too worried about that, but you know recent energy crises in different places in the world. Accommodating what you guys are doing and what AMD is doing really makes a difference in terms of that as well.
Mark Donnigan:Yeah, it completely makes sense, and you know we're hearing and seeing all those same points play out in every region of the world. So, yeah, why don't we share what some of those performance numbers are? Because I know they're pretty astounding. Whenever you know I'm with somebody and I say you know you can get and I won't give away the number yet, but you know you can get this many streams out of like a two RU box or game sessions, you know. Really always I see the eyebrows go up like is this a marketing number? This sounds like a marketing number. I think we better validate this. It's like no problem, go validate it. This is what you're going to get, but maybe you could share. I do think it's a useful reference, though, because it's not that your initial GPU architecture was broken. You still were getting a meaningful number of streams just using the GPU, but then, when you added the VPU, it was not quite 10X, but pretty darn close to 10X, which is amazing.
David Cook:Look, there's many layers in that onion right, because it obviously depends on the game. Are you rendering an Android game or HTML5 game? Uh, and are you targeting 1080p or 720p?
David Cook:so there's many resolutions it's a grid that that appears there. But look, I mean, for us, I I think, uh, you kind of hit the nail on the head that we're, um, we're generally trending with the combination of, uh, your cards and the rest of our architecture together ending up in the, the, the box, being able to deliver in the hundreds of streams versus in the tens of streams, right? And that's that's the kind of order of magnitude that we're talking about.
Mark Donnigan:It's it's nearly 10x.
David Cook:You know, by adding the vpu there is no latency increase in that because the team has done a fantastic job of writing drivers together with AMD and others. That allows us to do that direct copy right and so when you put that in place you're not going from here out over there coming back, so latency actually is fantastic.
Mark Donnigan:And so for those who are wondering about well, how does this integration work when you know there, there, there's finite capacity on the bus, you know, even though the bus inside the server, you know NVMe is is super fast. You know PCIe 4, you know it's super fast. Right, these are super highways, these are autobahns, but still, you know, you can only fit so many cars on the autobahn, you know. So there's still capacity there. What's unique about this architecture and that is the GPU working with the VPU and for those who you know some of this terminology may be not completely familiar, vpu is a category that NetIn is pioneering and it's an ASIC. So this is a purpose-built ASIC for video encoding, transcoding, video processing functions, even going all the way to AI. The second generation chip actually runs really pretty much all of the major AI and machine learning frameworks, so super, super powerful. And because this is a lot more than just a silicon encoder, it really made more sense to build a standalone category that is named appropriately video processing unit, VPU. So when we say VPU, that's what we're talking about. What the NetEnt engineering team has done is, along with AMD and this is possible, you know, potentially across other platforms as well, but right now it's primarily AMD GPU that's supported is built a mechanism for peer-to-peer DMA transfer between the two cards. So what happens is literally the rendering engine. Happens is literally the rendering engine, so the GPU outputs a frame in memory, the VPU, so the NetEnt ASIC is able to pick up that frame in the memory, so it does not even hit the bus on the server, and that's why we can just get this tremendous density that David just referenced. In terms of the number of streams, it's nearly linear just by doing the math with resolution, so a couple hundred. What we're seeing as a very common benchmark is 200, 720p30 game sessions on a very you know this isn't a low end to our use server, but this is by no means a Cadillac. You know this is not one of those $60,000 boxes. You know this is an affordable and accessible server. So if you just do the math, you know 720, you know you roughly cut that in half and you can get to about 100, 1080p, you know, and then just continue to cut. If you wanted to say, well, what would 4K be? But it's just absolutely astounding performance numbers. And again, no latency. So there's no downside. So, and again, no latency. So, so there's no. There's no downside. Yeah, yeah, that's, that's great.
Mark Donnigan:Yeah, let's talk. You know we have a few minutes left here and then, by the way, feel free to put questions in the chat. Our producer is standing by and we'll do our best to monitor here and get to them. So let's talk about the publishing side, because you referenced this at multiple points, that all this great architecture is fun to build and it's cool, but if you don't have games, if you don't have content, you certainly don't have an offer, you don't have a service. So what is involved? How are you getting your content? Let's just start there. Are you going off and doing direct deals? Have you partnered with somebody? What does that look like?
David Cook:Yeah. So we're very happy and excited with our partnership with Black Nut specifically. So we focus on the architecture and helping with the economics and building relationships with telcos, and then we partner with gaming as a service platforms that go and bring the content. Our observation is that this is very similar to the same trends that you and I were just talking about in music 20 years ago video about 15 years ago. About in music 20 years ago video about 15 years ago that the quality of the content and the volume of the content is continuing to increase and I really don't think that 18 months from now that there'll be basically any content you can't get.
David Cook:It's a little bit of a bold statement. We always know this. But generally speaking, I think that the tone and the attitude towards cloud gaming is changing right, and a part of that is because the historical model was really around the addressable market of a platform right. How many of the latest Xbox are out there? How many of the latest? Or what's the addressable market of the high-end PC games? Right, and even that's a variable that has little pieces under it. Some games won't run on some cards and et cetera, et cetera.
Mark Donnigan:Exactly.
David Cook:So even that's kind of fragmented, you could say in a way, and it's a very understandable model and it's very predictable for a game publisher to say I know my audience is X, I think I can get this much of that audience right. Sure, if you look at what we're doing, we're saying look, there's billions of other users Literally, that's not an exaggeration. There's billions of other users that would like to be able to play some of these games but haven't been able.
David Cook:And if we can open up that architecture to those publishers, it's a net new addressable market. I think that's really important. If you look at that, you go. The 63 telcos that we have signed up today actually represents a footprint of 2.5 billion consumers. I'm not saying we have capacity to deliver to 2.5 billion consumers. That's the addressable market, where all of those telcos have a 5G strategy. So their user base is shifting towards 5G. We're on net, inside their network, and in many cases we've done the billing integration to be able to open up the billing side of it and we've actually done marketing integration to better target those users. So now when a publisher looks at that, they go okay, I need to be able to think of this as my historic addressable market that I had on one of these platforms, but that this is starting to develop to be a new platform and addressable market for them.
Mark Donnigan:I don't think we've mentioned this in this conversation yet, but it's certainly been implied. You've mentioned 5 in this conversation yet, but it's certainly been implied. You've talked, you've mentioned 5g multiple times, but, uh, again, kind of the western mindset for gaming is so console, big screen focused and, and you know, oftentimes that's the living room tv. You know the big 75 inch hanging on the wall or whatever. But sometimes it's just a really high end. High end like 32 inch gaming monitor. You know which in the scheme of monitors is a big screen right, but we forget, we just completely forget.
Mark Donnigan:I know you travel a lot, you know, david, you know internationally, with your work and family and all you know. I travel a lot and I just have to sometimes slap myself upside the forehead and say almost every other part of the world is a mobile first market where literally that phone in their pocket for many, many, many, many people they do not have a computer at home. They do they, they do not use, at least in the traditional senses. You know, I'm not suggesting that you know there's, you know they, there's no computers in homes and whatever. You know Latin America or you know other parts of the world. But what I am saying is is that it's a mobile first market and and you can just, you know, you travel and you just look and you talk to people and you're like, wow, it's so different. They're not going home looking at a 75 inch TV hanging on the wall, you know.
Mark Donnigan:So, when we think about that and as we're building platforms and we're looking at how we can just create more value for users, for users, when you think about you're delivering an experience to a, to a, to a handheld device, ie a mobile phone, all of a sudden what may be like oh wow, that's not a good gaming experience becomes.
Mark Donnigan:That's actually an amazing gaming experience, because I'm bringing the you know that that console game fun and interactivity and you know, and the great graphics and everything, largely to someone who's sitting there on a very, maybe even a low end, but certainly a mid-end Android device, you know, which, again, in those markets, is largely what people are going to be using. And the alternative is, is is a game app, you know, in other words, some sort of a native game that's just installed on the device. That, let me tell you, is not going to be even a 10th of the of the overall, you know, graphics capability, et cetera, because it's limited by the capabilities in that device, you know, versus a video stream. So I think that's, you know, that's, that's also really just a huge opportunity.
David Cook:Two forces coming together there. Right, on one side, the consumer expectation now is that they should be able to access any of their entertainment on any device. Right, that's the, that's the expectation that they have. You got that kind of driver on one side, and on the other side is that you know you're exactly right. Most of the markets are mobile. First market the number of mobile players is massive compared to any other platform. And actually the economics the total addressable market from an economic perspective on mobile has grown massively in the last couple of years as well. So I think those two forces are kind of coming together. Android application device from a publisher perspective is that the amount of work it takes to be able to test across a wide range of Android devices is actually pretty significant. The move to cloud gaming even helps with I'm going to just loosely describe it as compatibility across the wide range of devices that are out there. So it's not even just that you're bringing which is true the high-end game and making it available on that device. Sure.
Mark Donnigan:Wow, that's a really interesting point. I actually hadn't thought about that. Of course, I know very well the fragmentation on the Android side, but this is a way to get around the fact that you're streaming as as you have a standards compliant decoder on the device, which and that's a beautiful part too is all of this hardware, especially like H.264 decoding, is now completely commoditized across even the low end, even the low end, so they can support, you know, at least up to probably 720p and 30 or maybe even 60 frames per second on the most low end Android device can decode that.
David Cook:And once you get outside the US, a lot of telcos have made a massive investment in Android set-top boxes. So you look at that and you go. That's another very good point the same effort that you did back in the day to get Voodoo across all of those devices. The same wave is happening right now. Right, it's the same wave where it's basically all of the gaming as a service providers landing on Samsung TVs, LG TVs, Android set-top boxes, TVs, LG TVs, Android set-top boxes, and so you really can recreate both the living room experience with a game console-type experience, as well as the Nintendo Switch or Steam Deck experience with your mobile phone. And you're actually seeing that the uptake on those TVs in terms of average playing time, average session time, repeat usage is actually pretty impressive. So I think it is truly ubiquitous across all devices kind of use case.
Mark Donnigan:Where do you see or I guess I'll phrase the question slightly different how is all of this going to unfold? And I'm not looking for a prediction of five years. Where are we going to be? But more like from what you know today and if you can share details, that'd be awesome. But from what you know today, if we were to do the same discussion in a year which probably will, even maybe before then, what are we going to be talking about? Or you know what's going to be the update, if you will, you know so a year from now. It's like all right, david, thanks for coming back. We're going to do an update on cloud gaming. So where are we?
David Cook:If we go back to the same three that we started with and we, you know, said it's about content and content being King, it's about user experience and it's about economics, I think we can make the we'll at least be able to make the argument that we're we'll be very close to being there. Quote, unquote on the content side, right, I think that the, the availability of content will continue to increase. I think that you'll see that the early rollouts of 5G will be much more widespread. The percentage of the user bases inside the telcos that have 5G will actually be a lot higher. So the addressable market that can get that low latency will be a lot higher. And I think, you know, together with the work that we're doing with you, I think that we will have moved the profitability point, running cloud gaming, into a lot more. You know, lower ARPU markets.
David Cook:I think those three things are the three things that we see, but the last one, I think is the most important We've not spent a lot of time on, but I think it's very important is that one of the I will say you used the word complaint, but one of the challenges that people have pointed to with telcos is will they actually be able to engage their user base right, so you can build a perfect solution, but if you can't really engage the user base, you don't really have a viable business, and so we are spending a lot of time actually working with the telcos.
David Cook:Think of it as like an agency service that I touched on at the beginning and really what it's about is taking the data from the telco in order to be able to really target the right users and to drive down the customer acquisition costs so that your lifetime revenue so if you think of it as you know, all of these pieces have to fit together. You know it's my lifetime revenue, which is experience, reducing churn, it's my customer acquisition costs and driving that down, and then it's the economics of actually delivering. All three of those have to work and I really think that the next 12 months, I'm about to look at you and say, hey, mark, we really feel like that. We've cracked the code on customer acquisition costs you can actually walk into the telco and sell them a complete business model right, not just a complete experience, but a complete business model that includes the acquisition piece.
Mark Donnigan:That is super interesting. I think that's a great place to wrap up. I love that we touched during this discussion, not just only on the on the technology and and the content which everybody would would expect us to, but also the business model. It's something that increasingly, I find myself you know as I'm, you know whether I'm engaging directly with customers or I'm talking to you know as I'm, you know whether I'm engaging directly with customers or I'm talking to you know, sort of industry analysts or even just peers, you know is finding myself more and more kind of saying hey, wait, wait, wait, wait. We're getting way too fixated on which technology is going to win, which codec, which this, which, that we're forgetting that, at the end of the day, if money isn't being made, none of it matters, and so I really like the fact that you know that you're putting focus on that too.
Mark Donnigan:It seems obvious, right? You know, if someone listened to us, they'd be like, well, yeah, duh, I mean you know, but I think us. They'd be like, well, yeah, duh, I mean you know. But um, I think it's natural tendency, right, to get, you know, lean forward on the technology, get super excited about what can be, how cool it is how amazing what we can do, you know, versus someone else. But at the end of the day, if we don't build a market, if we don't get a user, if we don't do that in a super efficient way that we can scale and then monetize as we scale, it's all just demos.
David Cook:I describe it like this I think we would summarize it from our side is we start our discussion in the CMO's office, not the CTO's office. The goal of the CTO's office, the goal of the telco, is sell more 5G connections, and so we really want a story that matches that. And then we also know that if there isn't a strong uptake from the consumer, there won't be a cloud gaming service in that telco 12 months from now.
Mark Donnigan:So we step into.
David Cook:CMO's office and it's all about how to acquire customers. Then on the back end, they trust us to work with people like you. They trust me to partner with you to get the right technology, the right density, to get the right cost basis. And it's a conversation in the CMO's office.
Mark Donnigan:Well, apologies, if someone has posted a question, we didn't get to it. Obviously, feel free to dm. Uh, you know, through the various channel um youtube, linkedin, facebook, wherever you're watching. Uh, love to hear from you and thank you again for listening to this week's edition of the voices of video. And thank you, david, we're super excited about what we're doing with Radiant Arc with you and we're going to be watching your development together as a very active participant by the way.
David Cook:Yeah, mark, thank you very much for having me on, and it's always good to chat with you. 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.
