John Ward Interview: “If we move to cloud based systems secured by the blockchain, it could revolutionize broadcasting.”
John Ward is the twelve-time Emmy® Award winning Senior Vice President of Content Operations for DIRECTV/AT&T Entertainment Group. A leading innovator in sports broadcasting, John is responsible for on-air production for the Group’s original entertainment and is a big advocate of blockchain based technology.
Hi John! So to start with, why don’t you tell the reader a little bit about your background and how you got here? How has the industry changed from when you started?
Let’s drop the age bomb shall we? I’m 48 years old and have been doing live and post produced TV for 27 years. Back when the dinosaurs walked the earth, I mainly worked with videotape. This is where cameras recorded things locally and you had to make clones, dubs and transcribes of tapes to move them around for editing.
Back when I started out there was a lot of manual leg work. You had to rummage around physically looking for things, instead of just using a search feature online. I thank God that technology has done away with labyrinth like physical libraries and rows upon rows of shelves filled with data storage units.
Another thing, you didn’t just simply create and post content back then, you had to get it approved and launched by a plethora of stakeholders and executives. Some of the stars these days just film on their phones, edit from their laptops, post to YouTube or other platforms and then they’re off making the next clip! The beauty of it is that because it all moves so fast, they only really get told off if something is wrong after they’ve gone viral, by then the desired impact has already been made. Previously, provocative and new material struggled to get out.
But sure, I’ve always proudly been a big nerd, and loved exploring new and interesting ways of doing things. That’s because I was taught early on that it’s not enough to do things the same way. Even if you or your industry have been doing things the same way for years, there’s always a way to make things more efficient.
When I look back at our workflow in the past, the industry was beyond archaic even ten years ago. The money we spent on labour, the money we ploughed into camera gear and lighting rigs was obscene. I mean the quality of images now with the advent of 4k is amazing. The amount of gear you need to capture good shots, in a way that reflects how the creators want their eyes to see it, is significantly less.
In regards to how I got here, I mean it was naturally because of the evolution in video technology. If you work in the top end of the industry you’ll always be introduced to the latest technology and methods, but in a lot of cases I wasn’t just shown these things, I had to go out there and find them. I’d always be heading to trade shows and bouncing ideas off of innovators there. I was always on the hunt for the next best thing and my managers always appreciated ways of doing things at a lower cost. Even now I still like to go to remote filming sites, and every time I go I learn something new .
Video and TV is truly a great space to work in, and the way it’s evolved has been amazing.
That’s great! So, let’s focus on why you believe bringing video and crypto together is an exciting project? Why should people care?
Well, for starters, what an infrastructure saving it’s going to be!
Every time I’ve been on large scale projects we’ve had to spin up multiple storage systems to be able to hold our assets and designs. Using blockchain cloud-based systems we’ll be able to do this at a much larger scale, with a reduced cost. This has the potential to decrease the barrier to entry for smaller budget video-based projects, as well as save capital for existing ones.
I think of it like this: just imagine your project is on a remote site and you’re doing a live event. There’s a lot of infrastructure you need to make it work. From a video replay standpoint and a content storage standpoint, we are accessing a lot of content and data through physical hardware at this moment. If we move to larger, and faster, cloud based systems secured by the blockchain it could revolutionize broadcasting, allowing us to drastically improve production quality across the world.
From a sports perspective, a lot of these channels have access to the same sports and the same leagues these days. The competition lies in production quality, and how exactly they analyse and present these events. Having better blockchain based content retrieval systems will allow broadcasters to innovate in the way they present these sports, developing a new competitive advantages.
Why are you excited personally to be involved with seeing video and crypto be brought together?
A lot of my career has been based in content production, and I can’t even begin to tell you the amount of money some of the projects I’ve worked have had to allocate towards cloud storage technology. Small things add up, like having to have a mobile truck that you can bring on site, or basing a lot of broadcasts on physically stored replays. Having these based on a blockchain network, with high-speed connectivity, will be exponentially cheaper. That, for me, is going to be huge from a cost-saving perspective. It’ll mean more projects can become a reality.
Why is now the right time for Video and the Blockchain to come together?
Especially in content production, reducing the amount of physical hardware and replacing it with cloud based systems is naturally where our industry is going.
The fact is that TV as we know it is becoming more competitive than ever before. There’s hundreds of channels, a variety of platforms, and they’re all competing for eyeballs. Producers and creators want to be able to allocate more funds to hiring stars, doing crazy stunts and having quality effects, rather pay over the odds to simply deliver the video.
Additionally, we can see that linear TV is also dying a slow death and moving towards on demand sites. The idea of hosting these sites on blockchain based networks has been put forward as the best, and most cost effective solution. I know there are still millions of people who enjoy linear television but the younger generations are consuming media in a dramatically different way than before. The video content industry is certainly making moves to meet these demands which makes it the right time in my book.
What future do you see for the industry?
I truly believe that the future will be all cloud.
The local storage of clips, the recording and cataloguing of them will become almost non-existent. The newly available space in broadcast centres will be used for better experiences and facilities, with the need for physical servers (and the cooling systems to keep them running!) being diminished.
Perhaps this will even eliminate the need for a “main” broadcast centre, because your broadcasting capabilities will come from everywhere. Anywhere you have connectivity, anywhere you can monitor what you’re doing and what your transmitting (to an audience) you’ll be able to broadcast from.
Again I keep going back to this point, but in the future I imagine these broadcasting networks and companies will focus only on producing compelling and groundbreaking coverage/content. The best new drama series, the latest documentaries, covering sports in a way that has never been seen before. The hardware and ‘heavy lifting’ portion will be carried out by specialist data farms. All you need to do is connect up!
We’re going back to the creators here, but what about modern platforms such as Netflix, Amazon Video, Hulu etc.? How will this future you envisage affect them?
I haven’t got the data here, but Netflix has gotta be one of the world’s biggest content creators one way or another right?
So, for them, it’s only going to get easier. With cloud based systems these guys can work on productions 24 hours a day with teams from around the world. There’s no downtime to making content available, so projects can get out the door super-fast. This makes production a lot more inexpensive considering they’ll be taking up less of the cast and technical team’s time.
One thing I will say though is that they’ll become super crazy about security, considering that these innovations bring in different stakeholders and that you’ll have access to important data. And that’s why the blockchain is so powerful!
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