THE IMPORTANCE THE INTERNET HAS WITH LIVE EVENTS AND PRODUCTIONS

Hello, this is Les Goldberg, and welcome to The Road Ahead. The Road Ahead podcast is dedicated to the future of the live events business, bringing together industry experts. Hello, production world, this is Les Goldberg in The Road Ahead. Today I have two amazing guests. I have Marty Rubin, who's the chief executive officer for Smart City. And I also have Dietrich Covington, who's the operations production manager for Spectrum News. Guys, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Les. Well, today we're going to talk about the one and only internet. And I think the internet is this big mystery. And so we just need to kind of inaccurate it. So I want to throw this to Marty as the first question. The first question is could you just describe what is the internet? This is like the biggest mystery for people other than, you know, if you could just explain it to the layman's person other than it's ones and zeros. The simplest way of explaining it is that the internet consists of billions and billions of devices. It could be a large mainframe computer sitting at a university, or it could be a small device sitting in someone's home. But the internet allows all these devices to connect into one network. And it's used a protocol which is TCP, IP, or the shorthand of it is Internet Protocol. So the fact that it's standardized through billions of devices allow all the devices to communicate with one another. That's why you can communicate with your garage door to open, or you can communicate with your university to get to the mainframe or to your office, because that same protocol, which allows manufacturers and software manufacturers to standardize on one set. So that's why you have ubiquity throughout the world. Well, that explains it. I finally got an explanation. Marty, thank you for any of those people who might not know it. So, you know, I'm going to throw this to Dietrich. Dietrich, you know, in the production and Spectrum 13 is a you know, you are an internet provider for many people in the world. Spectrum is could you describe, you know, how the internet is used in whether it's live events or doing production in media production? Maybe you can talk about how you guys use it and and how the world of the internet impacts you. Absolutely. No. It has absolutely flipped the game for us and really the world. We you know, back in the day, everything was satellite. Everything was tape. Now it's all over the internet. We don't roll any satellite trucks. We don't, you know, and everything we everything is, you know, fed through the internet back to the house. We everybody stays out in the field. We don't roll our production trucks anymore. We all we as long as we have a gig switch that we can plug into, we can roll six cameras back at the station. And it's really made us lean. It's gotten us out of the business of rolling production trucks, burp trucks, satellite trucks, just to do a six, 6 to 8 camera shoot. Just a little antidote. We did the first man launch back that space did a few months ago, and we did a whole production out at Kennedy Space Center with just AA1 switch. We had eight cameras that were feeding the network for the entire United States, for Spectrum News, all the way out to LA. And what we did was we put it up on a matrix, and you were able to grab it whenever you wanted it. And you you got a custom live shot ready to go out of Kennedy Space Center for your for your local news. And it's been a game changer. It really has. Everything's IP based now. And I mean even our we have our our in-house YouTube channel that we, that we use internally. It's on a latitude network. If, if you're familiar with that and it is a everything's uploaded and it doesn't matter where you are in the country, as long as you're connected to the internet, you can you can pull down the source and send files and it's almost instantaneously. It's great. Well, it's interesting Marty had mentioned that everything has to be compatible in the protocol, but what you mentioned to me was, you know, a gig switch. Marty, could you elaborate about how important speed is and the pipe size? And, you know, Smart City delivers internet to thousands of people. And I don't know how many trade shows annually, but but how important is the pipe size and access to the internet, whether it's a gig switch, I think Dietrich's at a gig or or ten gigs or whatever it is. What is the what is that speed and how does that impact your delivery and people's functionality? Well, the different needs need different speeds. So for video, the needs is far higher than for a voice communication. So if you're doing high definition video at a at a trade show or any event, you need quite a bit of bandwidth to deliver all the pixels that's needed for a high quality picture for other requirements of its massive amounts of data. Big data. They need large amounts, but for lots of things, it's far smaller amounts of internet. I mean, to put things in perspective, when we did the first computer trade shows using the internet back in the late 90s, the entire trade show would run and maybe ten megs of internet bandwidth. And now the typical home in the United States could have 50 or 60 megs per second. And that's, you know, a large part of it is because we have our video, like Netflix coming over the internet. So that's why it's critically important. And that will continue in the future as we move to more megapixels for a higher quality 4K TV delivery. That's going to say when you go to Best Buy, they have all the new TVs. I don't think you can not buy a 4K TV. I don't think they make the old HDTVs anymore. So, you know, I'm going back to Dietrich. Dietrich. You know, you're talking about doing live production and basically taking the cameras and hooking them up to a switch. And what do you do? You go, you actually switch the show back at a control room. Does that sound like workflow? Absolutely. What Spectrum has done in the past 18 to really and moving forward, it's a 24 month plan is we're going to have eight control rooms for North Carolina and four in Florida to Orlando and to Tampa. That can essentially do productions anywhere in the United States. We're on the Dante network for audio with our cells and our tele are all on IP, and so we can have camera controls for each studios. So and we all have the Ross visions. So everything is if, if one station is backlogged. I mean, we switched a debate for North Carolina just two months ago for one of their congressional races. They set up for cameras. They sent the feed down. We pulled it down off the matrix, used Dante and Dante is a is an audio protocol used for audio over IP. So you know, it's really it's made us more flexible and really being able to loosen the footprint when we go and kind of just crank out these shows on a regular basis. So it sounds like the internet has made it more efficient for you all to not to have dedicated control rooms and, and to be flexible. And so no matter where the production is in the world, all they have to do is feed you an IP connection 100%. We're now we're using this thing called the WPS is the remote production service from a TVU. It goes up into the cloud and you can set your delays back at your home station. It all comes synced. Audio is embedded with the video, which means it's on the same line and it's super easy. It is as long as, like I said, as long as the internet is working, it is a it's a great tool. And. Well, I think the key word you said is the internet is working. And then you also said something about the cloud. So a couple of topics to discuss. Marty, could you describe just so everyone knows because I call you an IT guru because you run a major ISP, what is the cloud? So everyone knows because we hear the word the cloud. But maybe you could just give us your Marty's definition. Well, the cloud. Maybe we should take a step back. In the past, we used to keep all our data locally. Used to have our computers sitting in our homes or our businesses, or maybe a data center that that the company owned or the university owned. And now there's been a move to use the servers of the of some of the big companies that are what we'll say is in the cloud, but they're physically located in areas where you may not know when they're backed up. So if you're using Amazon or Microsoft, you're unaware, but your data is stored in multiple locations or going throughout what's known as the cloud, but it's really away from you. It's an, you know, perhaps an unknown location in North Carolina, or it could be in Belgium or somewhere else where your data stored and your processing is handled. So there's a move away from having your own data center or storing your pictures on your PC in your house to having it in another location. And that's the cloud. It surely 4 or 5 companies that do most of the cloud, but you could have private cloud so the company could run a remote data center for others as well. Got it. Well, that explains it. Now I know what the clouds are. So so I'm going to switch this conversation and I'm going back to you, Marty, to ask this question. And how has Wi-Fi changed our world? Because we've had Wi-Fi for many years. I mean, it's evolved in its speed and delivery. But but in your opinion, how is Wi-Fi changed the world? Well, first off, you know, Wi-Fi, which stands for Wireless Fidelity, is a standard that was set by a industry alliance and by setting a standard allowed manufacturers and again, other developers of programs to work on a unified platform. And what it is in its essence is whereas the past you would have a the way to connect to the internet, it come to your business or to your house, and you'd wire it to your computer. And the Wi-Fi allowed you to have a wireless protocol. So you have what is known as an access point to transmit. And when you made it, wireless allowed mobile devices to hook up and once became standardized, became less expensive. That means you could go into a coffee shop or in your business and be able to hook up. The exciting part of Wi-Fi is, first, that it's ubiquitous right now. So we expected in the hotels we stay in in other locations. But also there's a move to what is known as hotspot 2.0, which is the next evolution of Wi-Fi, which is just beginning to occur. The fundamental problem with Wi-Fi, it's not secure at this point. People could break in and watch your messages and listen in per se, but hotspot 2.0, it'll be encrypted, you know, like you can think of like a cellular network. So that's very exciting and allows providers like us and spectrum to hand off and work together in a common platform. Whereas in the passage, as being one user in a coffee shop, now you can go across multiple. We'll be able to go across multiple providers. So. So are you saying that if I get Wi-Fi 2.0 that I don't have to worry about it not being encrypted and people reading my messages? Correct. Right. So they're being a Christian platform. So that'll be more secure to do business transactions. Got it. Well, I want you to know, it seems like the internet and Wi-Fi are so important to our daily lives, and I don't know how we would function without it. You know, in very simple, simple terms. So back to Dietrich. Dietrich? You know, we're talking about doing production. You just mentioned that we can do remote cameras, remote switching, and it adds flexibility. But what happens when you get to a location where there isn't good Wi-Fi or an internet connection? How do you deal with that? Well, well, first of all, you hopefully you got some good talent scouts that aren't going out there finding those locations that don't have good internet. But if you end up in a situation, luckily, you know we are the cable company also. So we have them drop a line for us. I mean, I don't want to make it simple, but like when we were doing the rocket launch, we were on the side of on the Cocoa side, Indian River, and there was no internet out there. There was no Wi-Fi. So we found the pedestal right down the street, and spectrum came and tapped into it and dropped us. A line gave us a high speed modem and we were off to off to the races. But what happens if you're in, let's just say Yuma, Arizona, and you're in the kind of desert and maybe your cell phone works, but you don't have a spectrum box nearby to hook up to. Well, there's there's multiple ways to get things out. I don't want to go down a wormhole, but there's also bonded cellular. It's not quite the internet that we're talking about now, but it's also it it bonds cellular cards together, and it sends it out over an IP stream to a in a phone provider, which then divides it up and sends it back down on on. Be an IP stream to your home base. But I mean, that's that's definitely one way to get it done. We don't have I mean, the phone, I mean, you can tether through your phone nowadays and get the internet and just I mean, it's a if it's a very rudimentary production. Absolutely. You could go through your phone. Sure, sure. Yeah. You know what? Bonded cellular is an alternative if you have to do some production remotely. So I want to switch this conversation. Marty, I want to talk about internet speed in the future. So I had a phone at one point that said 3G. Then I had a phone that said 4G. And I see a lot of ads that say 5G. Okay, so so how many G's and what does that ultimately mean? Well, each every G is a magnitude more speed. And the there's a fundamental issue is more speed generally means that the transmission distance from where you're transmitting from the cellular transmitter to your phone, your house or business is shorter, which means that what lies ahead of us is where we saw the big cell towers in the past. And then we had micro cells. Now we're going to need hundreds of thousands of cell sites throughout the United States to handle the higher speeds, but shorter distance. So you're going to start seeing devices go up on street lamps and other locations throughout the United States. So it's going to be a tremendous amount of infrastructure going in place to truly deliver the amount of high speed. What it does mean is that you'll be able to get HD video over your cell phone and other features like that. So it's very, very exciting and at the same time, cellular speed. I mean, fiber optic speeds are increasing as well. So there's a drive towards more speed because there's a thirst for more bandwidth, which is driven by HD video. And as we move from 4K TV sets, one day of 8-K and 10-K sets. So there'll be this huge drive, and to deliver it, you need more speed. I want to ask you a question about a fiber. How does fiber play a part. And maybe you could just tell. You know I know you all the Smart City do cable systems as well for people's homes for telecom. But but tell us what is how does fiber figure into this equation. Well, fiber is important because you can deliver tremendous amounts of bandwidth long distances before you have to regenerate the signals. So it is so fiber is critical. And as you know, for both the spectrum and ourselves and others, we're delivering fiber closer and closer to the business or directly to the business or the home, because we deliver more speed. As much as you're talking about, you know, cellular, almost all cell towers in the United States are connected to fiber. So the back calls when you make a phone call, it's not entirely wireless or you cellular phone. In fact, the longest distances are over. The fiber networks and both spectrum ourselves constantly building to the cell towers as they more. As I mentioned before, we need more and more cell towers. They'll all be connected via fiber. Got it. So so my question to you is how do we know the connections that you're dealing with are safe? You know, Marty had mentioned that there's going to be internet 2.0 on the Wi-Fi. But, you know, how do you know when you're hooking up things? What safety protocols do you put in place to make sure other people aren't watching things they're not supposed? Yeah, well, we always VPN okay. Way can you explain what a VPN is just so that everyone understands? Well, it's a virtual private network. Okay. So essentially you are going to be logging into you have a remote machine, you're going to be logging into a, a hardware back at your home base that's on a private secured network, in very elementary terms. Sure. Marty could probably dig very much deeper into that than I can. But, you know, so to answer your question last, that is it. I mean, we when we're on, we're on set and we have to log in to anything. We definitely go through a VPN. Sure. The modems were on that spectrum. Drops for us are on a VPN. They're on a private network. Got it. So, Marty, in the trade show industry, and I think you have 38 convention centers. So you are well into it. And I know we're on a little hiatus until a vaccine comes, but but how do you deal with the when you have so many exhibitors and tradeshow attendees and provide them safe internet? How do you, you know, are VPNs very popular on the exhibit floor and versus raw data? Well, we recommend using VPNs to the exhibitors, notwithstanding the use of that. We also have a network monitoring system whereby we're watching every trade show looking for attack by foreign state actors, because there's a a concern in our industry that for given types of events, there could be people trying to disrupt the event from foreign countries or constantly on the lurk for that. So it's a combination of looking through the dark web and seeing people are planning an attack on an event using a cyber attack. So we're constantly using that. We have numerous tools that we use, and there's also the possibility that they'll try to do a denial of service attack with a massive amount of of requests coming to network and trying to crash it. So there are lots of things going on behind the scenes to keep it up and running. VPNs part of it. There are lots and lots of other tools and protocols and basically smart hands rated, you know, change or, you know, move around or IP addresses to handle the attacks. Got it. Interesting. Whoever thought going to work, you get attacked. So so guys, you know it's interesting what it sounds like, whether it's production or whether it's trade show exhibition, it's or in our daily lives, the need of the internet and the use of this is become so integral. It's kind of like the air conditioning in our houses or the power in our our rooms. Without it, we we really don't function so well. So I want to ask this question of both of you. And how has social media and movie streaming impacted the internet and how you deal with it? And I'll throw this to Dietrich, and then I'll let Marty kind of opine after Dietrich. So, so the fact that there's such a volume and social media has become such a high presence, whether it's Facebook or Instagram or Google or, you know, YouTube, I mean, oh my goodness, YouTube has so much voluminous amounts of content going through it. How does that change? And how does the how does your company like deal with that? Well, I mean, so what we do is we just keep adding gigs to in between in between everything. Right now we've got 20 gigs switches in between us and Tampa and North Carolina, LA and North and New York. And so, you know, we're lucky in a spot where we can just if if we see a, a draw down on some of our services that we're able just to call up the company and go, we need a little bit more bandwidth here. But it's definitely it's wrecked havoc. I mean, when well, we do a the post of eight shows just for these presidential debates. We had every network in every station in our network come through our hub in Tampa. And it. Whoa. It slowed it way down because they were trying to stream it. They were trying to put it up on YouTube. They were trying to get it into their local markets. They were trying to bring it into their local stations. And it was a it was a resource hog hearing. Absolutely. I mean, it's an ongoing, ever evolving situation that we're we're monitoring, because, you know, in the 24 hour news business, you know, five minutes is late. So we need it now. And so we're constantly monitoring it. And it's a it's an ongoing process. It's definitely not something you can rest on your laurels because you're going to you know, the system will definitely just shut down on you. I mean, it did. I mean, four days ago on us. That doesn't sound like fun. So, Marty, what do you think about all this streaming and these bands and these pixels that are running through your networks and and how do you deal with this increased volume and as they keep making more social TikTok. Oh my goodness. The amount of data going to China via TikTok I don't know, you know, how do you deal with this? What we do and many other companies like us do is we have direct fiber connections. We build a fiber network that's a couple hundred miles to meet Facebook and Google and all the companies like that, LinkedIn in a location, we're meeting directly with them. So we're not going over the internet per se, but it's our own fiber backbone that goes directly to their servers sitting in various locations around the country. So and right in any given day, to be 40 to 60% of our traffic goes over our private network, going directly to those social media companies and to Netflix or eating up a huge amount of bandwidth. So we're trying not to bog down the local networks with our requests, but to deal directly with the servers owned by the various companies. It's like the top 20 or so. They're the bulk of the traffic right now. So, guys, I want you to take me into the future. So put your futurist hat on, Dietrich. And and this will be our last question today. And I want to know, where do you see and what do you see going on in the in the future of the internet, and how will it change our lives? Well, for broadcast news and broadcast in general, I think it's a it's going to flip it on its head. Like I, like I mentioned, I mean, we have million dollar production trucks that don't roll anymore. I think everything's going to get compact. I think everything's going to be lightweight. We're going to be more flexible and agile to be be able to get in and out of locations and productions with a really, really small footprint. It's just, I mean, all, you know, we're moving to robotic cameras in these situations. We don't even need camera guys anymore. So, I mean, moving forward, if this COVID thing kind of extends out, we can show up at a location, drop six cameras with four people. And I think it's just I think that's the method we're going to be moving forward. It sounds very efficient trying to be very, very efficient. And you get social distancing that way. Not to close. So so Marty, what are your thoughts on the future of the internet? And you also do a lot of residential too. So what do you think how our lives are going to be changed? You know, I think Dietrich touched on like the production business, but maybe you could touch on maybe a bigger kind of how my life will change because of the internet. Well, the question for many of us in the future is business interaction in terms of business travel, trade shows and just conducting business in general. You know, it's affected us for the past 7 or 8 months is going to affect us long term. You know, as we've discussed, there's the rise of virtual trade shows, which were a very small part of the industry 7 or 8 years ago. And now, you know, there's a move towards not having 20,000 people show up to a business event, but maybe there could be 100,000 because it's on virtually. And what that means in terms of the air travel industry, and there's a whole equation between transportation versus telecommunications. You know, are we going to work from home and therefore not jump in our car? And how is that going to affect office space rentals? And the whole thinking of the future of American business will be conducted from home or will eventually go back to the office. And there's a whole debate on whether or not being virtual increases engagement among businesses and between businesses and within businesses, or it doesn't. And the ability to people make connections. Well worked over Zoom, and we'll have opinions as to whether we become more efficient or less efficient. We just know the fact that we're driving less, going to the office, and we all have a feel that we want, you know, that face to face. It's our favorite thing to do. But is it going to be limited in the future that maybe we visit the office once or twice a week and that five days a week, and then we have a whole, you know, the whole sense of limitation. So we don't have business travel the way we've had it a year ago. How's it going to affect us in terms of buying products and selling products? I mean, some things can easily silver the internet and some things like a, like food or a beauty product is far more difficult to do. And then the last thing with the internet is that the internet could start affecting local businesses in a major way. We've seen that, you know, in Orlando and in Las Vegas, where the theme parks and the casinos are hard hit and the hotels around them. And the question is, will there be a recovery or will people prefer to live in the the virtual world? That is helped very dramatically by the internet. So it's hard to predict all those sorts of things, but it's out there and could have a very, very dramatic effect on everything from real estate and where people live to where they work and how they commute, and which businesses will succeed or fail in the future. I just want you to know, I like seeing people and living color in three dimensions. And when we talk about doing live events, we talk about when when the world gets back to some form of normal, we're going to be doing a live event with three dimensional people that we know. We can create environments that engage senses, and then we also have to create this two dimensional world on a screen. And that's a slightly different show, and it has a different level of engagement, and it's a little different way. You have to try to get people that are watching on a flat screen, a two dimensional audience. I think a lot of people are getting either Teams or Zoom or go to PC or any of the any of the video sharing platforms. They're getting a little bit of a screen burnout from the last six months versus the in person. So, Marty, I hope that we get to do in person sooner than later. I'm doing a little Kumbaya for the vaccine, and I will add this. There's three types of people on a vaccine. There are the people that say it got approved. I'm taking it right now. There are people that say, you know, I'm never taking it. It was too fast. And then there's people that say, you know, if the vaccine has been out a couple of weeks now, I'll take it. If no one had any major impacts. And I think the demographic of our clients for live events, if they're going to show up, the vaccine is at least going to play a factor in it and convincing people to take it and creating some type of immunity will definitely have an impact. Guys, today we learned so much about the internet and I want to thank both Dietrich and Marty. You guys are super smart guys, and you added some knowledge for the people that are listening, especially about all the acronyms and how we deal with the internet. And I look forward to doing live events and continuing to have great internet service so that I can continue to function as a human being. And this is Les Goldberg on the road ahead. Thank you. Listen.