December 19, 2024 • 61 mins
What if your TV was the only gaming console you ever needed? Join us for an eye-opening conversation with Vesa, the CEO of Return Entertainment, as he takes us on a journey from the nostalgic days of the Commodore 64 to revolutionizing cloud gaming today. With nearly a billion connected smart TVs globally, Vesa's vision is to transform these screens into gaming portals, breaking down barriers and expanding access to immersive gaming experiences. Listen in as we explore how Return Entertainment is leveraging smart TVs to unlock new gaming potential, directly in your living room.
Discover the allure and obstacles of cloud gaming platforms, such as Google Stadia, and learn how Return Entertainment is navigating these challenges. Vesa shares his experience as an early adopter of Stadia, highlighting the convenience cloud gaming offers compared to traditional consoles. We delve into the technical intricacies of delivering seamless gaming experiences on TVs, discussing dynamic buffering and AI upscaling, which enable smooth gameplay even on devices lacking a GPU. By simplifying processes for game developers and utilizing innovative streaming technology, the future of cloud gaming looks promising.
As we reflect on the evolution of streaming services, we draw parallels with the early days of platforms like Vudu and examine how Netflix is innovating with mobile phones as gaming controllers. The collaboration with partners like Samsung is paving the way for multi-screen gaming experiences, exemplified by games like Rivals Arena. Explore the strategic approaches to monetization, including the use of in-game ads and infrastructure optimization, which offer a glimpse into the economic potential of cloud gaming. Don't miss out on this exciting discussion about the future of interactive entertainment right from your television screen.
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.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:07):
Voices of Video.
Voices of Video.
Voices of Video.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Voices of Video.
Speaker 1 (00:17):
Good morning, good afternoon, good evening to
everyone who is here for thisnext edition of Voices of Video.
As always, we're so happy tohave you join us.
We have a great time on apretty regular basis every week
or two.
We talk with industry insiders.
(00:38):
We talk with people who aredoing a lot of very interesting
things in the areas of video andso today I'm super excited to
talk about cloud gaming who aredoing a lot of you know very
interesting things in the areasof video, and so today I'm super
excited to talk about cloudgaming, and we are, you know,
going to explore what ishappening in that space.
And so I guess, without furtherado, visa, let me first of all
(01:01):
welcome you to the show.
So welcome to Voices of Video,thank you.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
Mark.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, you know we connected, Ithink, maybe a couple of years
ago now and in the context of,obviously, NetInt, and you know
what we do with cloud gaming.
So as we got exposed to whatReturn Entertainment is building
and has built, it made a lot ofsense to have you come on and
tell our audience what you'redoing.
(01:30):
So why don't you introduceyourself and tell us a little
bit about Return Entertainment?
Speaker 2 (01:38):
Sure.
So once again, thanks forhaving me.
It's super, super cool thisvideo series you are hosting.
So my name is Vesa, I'mcurrently the CEO of Rittan
Entertainment and basically myentire career I've been spending
in technology, pushing thelimits, what's possible, when
(02:01):
you really kind of design andinnovate new ways to do things.
And it's kind of what drives meto kind of really trying to
envision a future that is notpossible today.
But then you kind of plan yourway how to get there.
And I've also kind of alwaysbeen a I've also kind of always
(02:25):
been a very kind of avid gamer.
So I basically grew up withvideo games.
So I think kind of I feel luckythat I happened to born in the
times when the video gaming wasmaking its breakthrough, in the
80s, yeah, and I grew up kind ofwith my first computer gaming,
(02:45):
like with the Commodore 64, big20.
Then the kind of different kindof Nintendo portable game
consoles came and that was kindof a really, really big
breakthrough.
I remember kind of buying myfirst PC.
I think it was 1994.
(03:05):
And I remember the kind of thefeeling when the Doom game came
out kind of in the 90s and youwere having the first experience
, a first person shooter kind of.
Speaker 1 (03:19):
It was amazing.
Speaker 2 (03:20):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (03:21):
I'm with you.
I'm with you with that sameprogression.
Yeah, exactly, brings, I'm withyou with that same progression.
Speaker 2 (03:25):
Yeah, exactly, brings back a lot of nostalgia.
Yeah, so having lived throughthis kind of evolution of video
games has been kind of amazing.
And now, of course, being partof the industry and kind of
being part of defining what'scoming next is really what
drives me, of being part ofdefining what's coming next is
(03:47):
really what drives me.
So I've been working in thegaming industry and kind of
really following my passionsince more than 10 years now.
I joined Robio Entertainmentinto mobile gaming like 10 years
ago.
I was running kind of all thecommercial operations for
Rovio's business, so dealingwith our biggest partners.
For example, I made thelicensing deal with Lucasfilms
(04:13):
for the Angry Birds Star Warsfranchise games In 2015,.
I was the GM for Rovio China,based in Shanghai, and really
kind of a great experiencepersonally being personally
experiencing the reallyfast-paced, totally different
market dynamics when it comes tokind of publishing games and
(04:36):
you know there's no Google PlayStore in China at all that was
really fantastic and kind of theliving and breathing, really
the totally different pace ofmaking things happen.
It was super, super amazing.
And I also kind of considermyself as a cloud gaming pioneer
(04:57):
.
I was already kind of soon 10years ago, co-founding a mobile
gaming cloud gaming studiocalled Hatch Entertainment, and
that time we were basicallyreally innovating how you can
actually deliver mobile games ina totally new way with
streaming, and we built atotally new technology and
(05:19):
platform and we licensed morethan 500 titles from different
publishers and studios to bringto the service what we then
rolled out to 21 markets aroundthe world.
So really kind of learned a lotthrough that process.
What does it really take tobuild a scalable cloud gaming
(05:42):
platform and launch it acrossthe different geographies and
how do you really kind ofoptimize the entire experience
and all that?
So a lot of work there and fromthat perspective.
So we were a bit too early withHatch and it didn't really kind
of succeed in the end of theday.
(06:03):
But, like I said, we learned alot.
And now I've been with ReturnEntertainment, where we are
again continuing the cloudgaming agenda but now focusing
on smart TVs.
That's such a massiveopportunity that really kind of
drives me day in, day out.
Yeah, like, think about it thatthere's soon one billion
(06:27):
connected smart TVs around theplanet and only a small fraction
of those are being used forgaming today.
Yeah, so there's this massiveopportunity to kind of bring
gaming to hundreds of millionsof big screens sitting there
waiting to be kind of unlockedfor gaming, and I truly believe
(06:48):
that cloud gaming streaming isthe only model that can unleash
this massive opportunity.
Speaker 1 (06:54):
Yeah, well, you would expect that I would nod very
strongly in agreement with whatyou just said, especially about
the opportunity on connectedtelevision, and I think there's
(07:15):
a lot of things that we're goingto unpack over the next 25, 30
minutes or so that I know willbe really not only interesting
but, I think, helpful to theaudience, because it feels like
or it seems like, as we're outtalking to the market, there's
two camps.
(07:35):
There's the camp that is cloudgaming will never succeed it.
I always sort of shake my headand wonder how in the world can
someone really believe that?
But I continue to be reallysurprised, even at some large
publishers, and you know peoplewho now you know, if you look at
(07:59):
where they are in the ecosystem, as some of it makes sense,
right, you know, you know well,your business model is based on
selling a 60 physical media.
You know physical media, a game, and you get to do this.
You know once a year or onceevery 18 months or two years,
when your new game comes outlike I guess, yeah, that's a
(08:20):
revenue model that you reallylike and it works pretty well
and it has worked for many, many, many, many years, and so when
you convert to streaming.
All of a sudden it's like, oh,wait, a second.
You know I'm only getting paidas someone plays.
Or you know, it's like thelicensing works.
Very different, of course.
Um, and and I'll get to why Ibelieve that, um, you know,
(08:40):
those folks need to look athistory, uh, and the movie
business, the entertainmentbusiness, to say you're going to
get disrupted.
So hello Blu-ray, hello DVD.
But so there are those folksthat aren't quite convinced,
shall we say that it'seconomically viable, or that can
(09:01):
really work, or that consumersare really going to quote like
it, viable or that can reallywork, or that consumers are
really going to quote like it.
And then there are those, youknow, like, like, like you and
me and and, and probably a lotof our audience, who are like oh
yeah, you know, this isabsolutely the future.
So I wonder, you know, as youhave a lot of experience, you're
(09:21):
out there every day, you know,talking to the publishers.
You have a lot of experience,you're out there every day, you
know, talking to the publishers,you're talking to the device
makers, you're talking to themarket.
What is your perspective?
You know, maybe you can, maybeyou can help shed some light.
You know, even saying, hey, Ican understand why people who
(09:44):
don't believe cloud gaming isviable.
Here's some of the reasons why,and those may be true today,
but they're not going to be truetomorrow or, you know, in the
near future.
And then let's talk about theoptimistic side of it.
You know why this is going tobe the way that consumers
ultimately consume gaming.
You know participate.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
Yeah, I think the fundamental thing here is that
it's not either or, so it's notthat you know, either it's cloud
gaming or it's the traditionalmodel.
I think they will kind ofcoexist and I think a good
analogy is that you know, likemy background, being with Robio
and mobile gaming, is that whenthe mobile gaming era started,
(10:24):
it wasn't that you took theexisting console games or PC
games and put them onto themobile screens, so we had to
basically create totally newways of creating games, like for
touchscreen devices.
Also, if you think about mobilegaming, free-to-play became
(10:45):
quickly the dominant way ofmonetizing gaming on mobile
devices, totally different whatwe have seen before in the
different gaming platforms.
So I think, in the same way,what has kind of been a bit kind
of a failure in the industry,that cloud gaming has been
seeing just yet anotherdistribution channel for the
(11:07):
existing games and the existingmodels and that hasn't worked
and that will never work.
And I think you need to kind ofin the very same that way that
you know you, you had to kind ofrethink what is gaming for
mobile.
I think now we need to thinkwhat is gaming for cloud?
That kind of is fully designedand kind of the technology and
(11:32):
the user experience.
The monetization has to be madefrom the ground up for this
market and for this model.
And if you think about thefailures in the past, like I
think, google Stadia comes tomind.
I think that's where they gotit wrong that they tried to take
the very same AAA console gamesand deliver those to the very
(11:55):
same hardcore gamers whoprobably already had their game
consoles.
Speaker 1 (12:00):
Exactly.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
And say, hey, play these same games with a bit more
compromised experience.
That will never play.
Speaker 1 (12:07):
Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (12:08):
And like personally being a gamer, one of my
favorite games is Elden Ring.
I love the Souls games and Iwould never play Elden Ring with
the cloud gaming platform,because it can be a matter of
milliseconds whether you beatthe boss or you will die.
So I think, if you, if youthink about audience like myself
(12:30):
, hardcore gamers who love toplay this kind of really, really
demanding, fast-paced,real-time, sensitive games,
you're always better off with adedicated gaming rig, whether
it's a console or gaming PC orwhatnot.
But then there's this kind ofmassive mainstream market out
(12:51):
there, people who don't identifyas gamers.
We could call them players.
They might be playing mobilegames with their phone, but they
haven't taken that step or theleap to extend their gaming to
big screen.
taken that step or the leap toextend their gaming to big
screen and for that audience, webelieve cloud is the right
model because that will make theexperience so much more simple,
(13:13):
easier, more accessible andalso cheaper to start with you
don't need to invest, to buy a600 bucks PlayStation 5 or
subscribe to a kind of very,very expensive kind of
subscriptions or whatever, butwe can just kind of offer a very
simple and easily kind ofaccessible way to kind of play
(13:37):
games on your TV, for example.
Speaker 1 (13:39):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally agree and I think that's
a really good insight.
The gamer versus players.
You know I, interestinglyenough.
So, even though I referenced inthe beginning when you were
talking about your journey, youknow, even from those popular
games in the 80s and 90s and andall I, you know I wasn't, I'm
(14:05):
not really a gamer per se.
You know, I've never invested awhole lot of time, you know, in
mastering, but I always findmyself gravitating, you know,
towards, if I'm in a room or youknow, around other gamers like,
oh, you know, show me thelatest game, and you know.
So it's like I have an have, anaffinity, I guess, and the
reason I say that is that Iwould be a player and so it's
(14:28):
very interesting.
Uh, what you point out aboutstadia.
So I jumped on stadia, I hadthe very first um.
I think they called the founderspat and it wasn't the fact
actually I think it was yeah,yeah, yeah, anyway, you know I
had the first controller and Iwas, you know I was so excited.
Now, in all fairness, you know,even at that time I was, you
(14:54):
know, I was working in andaround, you know, selling
technologies to, you know, ontothese large platforms and you
know, talking to Google, etcetera, platforms, and you know
talking to Google, et cetera.
So you know you could say, well, you know, in reality, that was
kind of, you know, part of youtrying to, you know, license
technology and sell Google orothers technology, and that
certainly was true.
But, frankly, I became a littlebit of a gamer during that time
(15:20):
.
And why Is it because and Ithink a lot of our audience can
relate to this, you know, is itbecause I can't afford a console
?
No, I can afford a console, youknow, thankfully.
So it's not that there's abarrier for someone like me, and
there are millions and millionsof people like that too, where,
ok, four or five hundred bucks,you know that's not, I'm not
(15:44):
suggesting it's notinsignificant money, but it's
possible, right, you know, a lotof times it's about what you
choose to spend your money on.
Rather, can you, you know, um,so it's not because I couldn't
afford the console, um, but it.
And not even because, oh, thenyou know, I have to buy some
games.
Ooh, you know, like, okay, Icould buy a few games as well,
(16:06):
but it was the every time Iwould think about it, ah, I
think I should go get the newPlayStation, I should get the
new Xbox, you know.
Or it'd be like, oh, then I gotto unhook my entertainment
system, I have to connect it.
Literally, this went through mymind, you know, like, oh, then
I got to connect it, then I'vegot to figure out how I'm going
(16:28):
to get an Ethernet cable to it,because my Wi-Fi is not that
good, and so, guess what?
So I would never do it right.
Now people can laugh and go, oh, come on, you know, it's like
those things are and, yes,they're easy to solve.
Of course, no-transcript.
(16:52):
And I was actually a little bitsad when they, when they killed
it.
You know, I had great funbecause I could sit down just
and within 45 seconds it wassome of the games, even a little
bit less than that, you know itwas, you know, the stream
started and I was playing, youknow, and so 20 minutes before
my wife had dinner, you know,I'd be like, hey, I'm going to
(17:15):
go play a game, you know, andI'd sit down at my desk and I'd
fire it up, you know, and I'dplay, you know it was fun, so.
So okay, let's, let's come backto return entertainment and
tell us then what exactly?
Because the the challenge, whatexactly?
(17:36):
Because the challenge I thinkalso with cloud gaming is that
you have all the technologyrequired to deliver that gaming
experience, and that has to bebuilt, or you need to leverage a
(18:00):
platform that can deliver thatfor you.
But then you need the contentand you know, unfortunately it's
not quite as simple aslicensing a mezzanine file.
You know, like, like when youlicense a movie, for example,
from you know, from, you knowuniversal pictures or something,
it's not quite as simple astaking mezzanine file, encoding
it and then you stream it out.
You know You're mesing, filing,coding it and then you stream
it out, you know.
So what have you built atReturn Entertainment?
(18:20):
You know how much of theend-to-end experience have you
built?
What are you, you know,leveraging other solutions?
Like, why don't you tell?
Speaker 2 (18:32):
us what that looks like.
Yeah, sure, and I think, like Iwas saying earlier, that we
really try to walk the talk here, that we believe that in order
to be successful with providinga great gaming experience for
the TV audiences, you reallyneed to build the technology and
(18:53):
the whole user experience fromthe ground up for this new
audience and this new way ofplaying games, targeting these
players, not the gamers.
And that's what we've beendoing.
And cloud gaming is also aperfect delivery model for TVs,
because if you look at the TVinstall base, there are multiple
(19:18):
different manufacturers, thereare multiple different platforms
, there are varying specs interms of what are the hardware
capabilities on those TVs.
The replacement cycle of TVs isreally long, so it's more than
10 years.
So people have these very oldTVs still sitting in one wall in
(19:40):
one of the rooms and they don'tkind of renew those.
Like mobile phones.
The renewal cycle is like lessthan three years.
So it's much, much faster thatyou always have the latest,
consistent hardware there.
But with TVs that's not thecase there.
(20:02):
But with tvs that's not thecase, so there's no way you
could run modern, demandinggames natively on those devices,
because it's just such anightmare.
You can, you can never get it.
Yeah, and, and, yeah, and, andthat's why I I truly believe
that the only way to serve thismassive market is streaming,
because it's also so much moresimpler and less complex model
(20:23):
for the game publishers.
Like you just mentioned, howyou get the games.
If you would need to ask thegame developers to build a new
version for every singledifferent TV platform, they
would never do it because themaintenance burden is just too
much.
I remember during my Rovio dayswe got always asked there was
(20:47):
some big company in India whohad some own kind of mobile
platform that, hey, we can payyou this many millions if you
just make a new version of AngryBirds for our platform.
And we always said no, becauseit's not about the money you get
initially, but you're actuallycommitting yourself to a very
long maintenance kind of riskand it's just going to kill you.
(21:10):
So that's why we believe this isthe right model.
And there are a couple of thingsthat are critical when you
think about building a businessaround cloud gaming.
So one thing is, of course, theuser experience and, like I was
saying earlier, that you cannever win or be successful if
you try to offer something thatis a compromise or a mediocre
(21:35):
experience compared to thealternatives.
So you need to have theexperience right.
And then the other thing, whatis super important, that you
need to be able to run thebusiness with profitability.
Also, design and architect your, your, your system in a way
that you can actually scale itand run it with cost efficiency.
(22:00):
And these have been kind of thetwo cornerstones for us when
we've been building our Smart TVgaming platform that we're
designing the whole userexperience so that it's super
easy, simple and the visualquality is there and the
gameplay is super smooth andjust works.
(22:21):
And then, on the other hand, wehad to kind of reinvent a bit
how do we do the streaming sothat we can do it cost
efficiently enough that we canmonetize at the level that makes
the equation hold water.
So that's kind of the being thekind of the cornerstones of
(22:42):
what we've been putting together.
Speaker 1 (22:46):
Yeah, yeah, it makes sense.
And so, getting into thespecifics, then let's talk about
how you actually deploy andwork with your partners, and so
my question is this is this likea white-labeled platform that
(23:06):
you bring to a TV manufacturer,for example, or to anybody who
wants to just stand up a store agaming experience, or are you
bringing them the technology andthen they are implementing it,
they operate it?
You bring them the content.
Maybe they bring content, or isthere some third model, like
(23:29):
what's your approach here?
Speaker 2 (23:33):
Yeah, I would call our model kind of a platform as
a service.
So we operate the platform.
We provide the fundamentaltechnology that you can use to
offer gaming on TVs tomainstream audiences, build a
(24:02):
consumer-facing subscriptionservice or kind of starting to
build a game catalog that we canthen basically start marketing
directly to consumers.
We are primarily working withsmart TV manufacturers, so our
main partner today is Samsung.
It's been such a great thingfor us to work very closely with
the biggest TV manufacturer onthe planet and they are fully
(24:24):
aligned with our vision ofserving these players, these
mainstream TV viewers, who don'town a game console and who are
not necessarily willing to goall in to video games but who
might want to kind of experiencebeautiful gaming on their
Samsung TVs.
(24:45):
And that's what we are doing.
So we've been now live in theUS market on Samsung TVs with
our debut game, rivals Arena,and basically validating the
technology, testing thateverything scales, collecting a
lot of user feedback on the userexperience, and also kind of
(25:07):
what we've been testing now forthe last few months is that we
have also now enabledfree-to-play monetization on the
platform.
So we are monetizing the gamingexperience with in-game video
apps.
So these are all the kind ofthe building blocks that we need
to get right before we startscaling more massively.
(25:30):
But really, of course, I'm notable to talk about the other
potential partners we areworking on at the moment, but
it's basically many of these bigsmart TV manufacturers which we
are discussing at the moment,plus also there's a lot of this
kind of other kind of connectedTV device brands out there,
(25:50):
without naming any, but itreally seems that there's kind
of a lot of momentum at themoment around TV gaming.
Everybody's kind of trying tofigure out what's the right way
to do it and at least because,you know, I've been running
around the world for the lastfew years meeting basically
(26:12):
everybody, it's been at leastvery interesting to see that
that, uh, there is not that muchcompetition and we are actually
in a pretty unique positiontoday with what we are offering
and hence we have a lot ofinterest from the major industry
players to kind of trying tofigure it out together so are
(26:34):
you guys actually delivering thethe game and the streams, or is
samsung, for example, orwhoever your partner is?
Speaker 1 (26:42):
uh, without being specific, running the
infrastructure, like that's?
One of the things that we hearis um, is, there's two major
hurdles?
Uh, there's more, but there'stwo.
One is the content, you know.
So everything's go, go, go.
Yeah, this is amazing.
We would love it.
And then like oh, but where'sthe content?
(27:05):
You?
know, how do I license that and?
And that's not an insignificanthurdle right there, as you well
know, you know from yourbackground um, but then you get
over that and then it's like, oh, but now who's going to operate
the infrastructure?
Because, let's face it, a TVmanufacturer is not.
They don't even operate theirown streaming services.
(27:25):
I mean most don't, in fact,even those you know, even even
like a Roku, for example, it'spartnership, even though there's
Roku brand, right, you know, ontheir various services, or
they're aggregating, you know,streams and kind of presenting
them in the UI.
So what is your model?
Speaker 2 (27:47):
Yeah, we are basically offering a total
solution, like you know, acomplete package that you know,
whether it's Samsung or whoevercould actually take our platform
.
We can integrate our platformto any smart TV OS or we could
even plug it into any existingsmart TV application.
(28:07):
For example, we are discussingwith many of these video
streaming services out there.
Many of them are interested inproviding gaming in the future
for their subscriber base.
Some of them are alreadytesting it publicly, as we know.
But that's kind of how we havearchitected our solution that it
(28:29):
can either reside as astandalone app on the TV that
you download and you can thenstart offering gaming through
that app, or it could be a kindof existing app, for example, a
video streaming service app thatyou have on your TV.
We can basically plug in oursolution into the existing
(28:51):
application experience so astreaming service could actually
start and easily offeringgaming as part of their software
.
Speaker 1 (29:00):
So are you running your own infrastructure, do you
have your own data centers, orare you running this on some
public cloud?
Speaker 2 (29:11):
We are not owning the cloud capacity ourselves.
We are running on public cloud.
We are very agnostic on thecloud platform itself.
We are today, for example, thecollaboration with Samsung in
the US.
We are running on AWS, ofcourse, super high quality stuff
(29:31):
we can access, but of coursehas its limitations from the
cost perspective, for example.
Speaker 1 (29:37):
Very expensive.
Speaker 2 (29:40):
Well, everything is relative, of course, and I just
actually flew back from Bangkoktoday, so I was there for a few
days.
There was the Android TV Summitby Google.
Speaker 1 (29:55):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (29:56):
One year organizing the Android TV Summit for all
the different Android TVecosystem members.
We were demoing and showcasingour platform there, running on
Android TV OS, and we were usingthe cloud infrastructure from
our partner, aether.
So we are partnering with Aether, which is a decentralized GPU
(30:19):
cloud provider, and it's a kindof perfect fit for our
technology, because the way Acerworks is that they are
basically pooling unused GPUcapacity from the market and
then reselling this otherwiseidling GPU capacity with a very
affordable price and since wehave developed a very
(30:43):
latency-friendly streamingprotocol that we don't need to
have the data centers very closeto the players.
We can very easily access, forexample, aether's capacity
wherever they happen to have itavailable, like now this week in
Bangkok, where we were demoingthe solution.
We were streaming from the Acerhardware in Singapore.
Also, I was testing it, liketwo weeks ago we were in San
(31:08):
Francisco, I was testing thesolution and showing it there,
streaming from Singapore to SanFrancisco, and even though
there's a few hundredmilliseconds of latency, we were
able to kind of deliver atotally smooth gameplay
experience.
So that's how we are doing it,so we don't plan to kind of own
(31:29):
our own.
Speaker 1 (31:30):
Yeah, at least at this stage.
Speaker 2 (31:32):
Of course, later on, who knows, when we have more
scale.
Speaker 1 (31:36):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, understand on who knows when we
have more scale.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I understandand we'll talk about as much as
you're able to.
You know what other largeplatforms are doing I'm thinking
of, like Netflix, and you knowsome of the others that you
probably have some visibilityinto.
But I want to ask a questionthough.
So does it mean that everyframe of that game that the user
(32:03):
is interacting with video frame, I mean is being rendered on
the TV or on the device, andthen you know, like maybe you
can explain that, because I'vealso noticed in my discussions
(32:26):
around cloud gaming it's reallyimportant to distinguish that,
because there is a veryconsiderable technology
difference and also a deliverycost difference.
If the game is entirely beingrendered Game logic, the
graphics engine, everything isin the cloud and it's being
(32:48):
streamed, or if a large part ofthe game is being rendered
locally.
Speaker 2 (32:55):
Yeah, we are fully pixel streaming, so we don't
render rendered locally.
Yeah, we are fully pixelstreaming, so we don't render
anything locally.
Speaker 1 (33:03):
Which makes sense, because a TV doesn't have a.
Gpu A mobile device does,though Exactly.
Speaker 2 (33:10):
Back to what I was explaining in the beginning,
that with TVs it would be anightmare to try to have a
consistent execution of somecode on the local device.
It just doesn't work.
But there are a couple ofthings we do differently so we
are actually having a very lowbitrate stream.
(33:33):
So on average we are streamingonly like four megabits per
second, which is like roughlyone fifth of what the kind of
the other today.
Speaker 1 (33:42):
So are you delivering 1080p?
Is that your name?
Speaker 2 (33:46):
We are streaming 30 frames per second and 1080p
resolution, but what we aredoing actually is that we have a
proprietary streaming protocolwhich has dynamic buffering, so
we are putting a bit of latencyinto the stream on purpose.
So this is kind of alsofundamentally different approach
(34:06):
.
Typically, cloud gamingservices are always trying to
fight the latency and reallytrying to force fit a really
kind of high resolution, 60frames per second stream in a
very kind of narrow pipeline,and we know that in reality it
always is not perfect.
Speaker 1 (34:27):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (34:27):
So we do it a totally different way, that instead of
fighting the latency, we'reactually embracing the latency
and we are putting some latencyintentionally into our streaming
pipeline.
Interesting, with the smallbuffer we are putting in there,
we can actually handle this kindof last mile connectivity
issues.
If there's packet loss in thenetwork or jitter or whatever,
(34:49):
we can always, with the smallbuffer, deliver a butter smooth
gameplay video on the TV screen.
And the other interesting kindof benefit what we are getting
from this buffer is thatbasically all the modern smart
TVs have AI upscalingfunctionality.
But if you are using a standardcloud gaming service which is
(35:14):
typically running on real timeprotocol, like WebRTC, with the
real-time streaming protocolthere's no time for the TV to do
the upscaling, so it's bydefault switched off.
But because we are putting thislittle buffer in there and we
are using our own proprietarystreaming protocol, the TV has
time to upscale the 1080presolution to 4K.
Speaker 1 (35:37):
Interesting.
Speaker 2 (35:38):
So this is kind of how we are handling this
situation that with very lowbitrate, like four megabits per
second on average, we can stilldeliver a 4K image quality on
your big screen TV, and that'swhat matters to the people,
because this kind of jitter andkind of slugginess of the
(36:01):
gameplay is what's killing thefeeling and it's killing the
experience.
We have chosen, rather, to kindof have a very smooth gameplay
experience and not even tryingto kind of stream 60 frames per
second, and not even trying tokind of stream 60 frames per
second or ensure it's always 4K,because it just doesn't work
(36:22):
out and it's also very expensiveif you need to render 4K 60
frames per second, so it's somany more times more GPU power
needed compared to rendering 30frames per second of 1080p.
So I guess you know how themath works.
Speaker 1 (36:38):
Yeah, exactly, exactly, interesting.
Okay, so tell us what you knowabout, for example, netflix and
you know, and any other videoplatforms, because I think this
is interesting.
You made the statement veryearly on when you were saying,
hey, we really believe in thisopportunity for cloud gaming to
(37:01):
the connected television, and Iwas very fortunate to have been
involved in streaming video fromnot the very earliest days, but
kind of the earliest days ofwhen it became commercialized
earliest days, but kind of theearliest days of when it became
commercialized.
And one platform that I was apart of called Vudu, which
(37:29):
eventually got acquired byWalmart.
We were in 2007,.
We launched this.
Um, you know, we, we kind ofpositioned it and thought it at
the time is like a blockbuster.
You know the video store, whichis very huge and in the U S at
the time, you know, for rentingDVDs, you know it was a
blockbuster on your television.
You know it was like the whole,the whole value prop.
You know I can remember thereaction and certainly from the
(38:04):
industry, you know from the,from the studios, was like, well
, we're pretty happy sellingdiscs, thank you very much.
You know like we're not thatinterested in licensing,
licensing you content.
So again the two hurdles Right.
You know we had to get over the.
You know the hurdle of likegetting content and at that time
it was pretty, it was, it waschallenging.
You know the hurdle of likegetting content and at that time
it was pretty, it was, it waschallenging.
But but then, you know, it waseven just the the the consumer.
(38:24):
You know, I I can recall somany interactions where
consumers would basically tellus like I don't understand, like
you want me to watch amainstream Hollywood movie.
You know, big, big screen movieat the quality of YouTube.
You know, because, again,youtube had just come out of the
(38:45):
ground, you know, was likeabout 18 months old at the time.
Cat videos everywhere.
So people's reference point wasthis.
So they were equating kind ofwhat they knew you know to like.
Well, this is not the qualitythat I want.
Why would I even want toconsider doing this?
(39:07):
Well granted you know our firstproduct was 480p right, but then
again we forget that was DVDquality.
You know that resolution DVDwas 480p right, and so that's
why, all of a sudden, whenBlu-ray came out at 1080p, you
know it was like, wow, this isso amazing.
And you know, of course, nowwe're like 1080p, that's almost
like standard definition, youknow so, as we're looking at 4K.
(39:31):
So the question that I have foryou is that, you know, I can
recall 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009,2010,.
When there still were, was thisfeeling like, yeah, streaming's
kind of this niche little thing.
And you know, okay, there'scertain use cases that make
sense, but certainly I believed,and we believed that Voodoo and
(39:55):
others who were building, youknow, entertainment platforms at
that time, streaming platformsthat this was going to be
dominant, this was going to bethe new way of distribution.
Well, now it would be crazy forsomeone to suggest that, oh no,
we're going to go back to, youknow, to carrying around, you
know, DVDs, right, or Blu-ray.
So what do you think, what doyou make of?
(40:19):
You know, like Netflix,introducing gaming and other
platforms that you're probablyworking with, Like you know,
what do you make of that?
What do you understand?
What their thinking is theirmindsets.
How did they view it?
Is this just sort of like anadditional add-on to, a little
cherry on top to their coreservice?
(40:39):
Is this a future for them?
Like you know what, what areyou hearing and what do you
perceive?
Speaker 2 (40:48):
yeah.
So we we have been in very closedialogue with netflix and many
other other streaming servicesfor years and, uh, it's been
really great to see that, like,what Netflix is doing is fully
aligned with our vision andwe've been comparing notes over
the years to kind of see what weare doing.
(41:09):
And it's, of course, reallyencouraging that they have now
started also testing TV gaming.
And one of the friction pointsin cloud gaming today is that,
of course, if you have a SamsungTV, for example, you can go to
the gaming hub and you cansubscribe to Xbox or you can
subscribe to GeForce Now or Lunafrom Amazon, but these players
(41:35):
we talk about people who are notgamers they don't have the game
controllers and it's a kind ofmassive friction point today
that basically, all thesepremium cloud gaming services,
they offer AAA content thatrequire a controller and it's
really limiting the penetrationof cloud gaming today,
(41:55):
penetration of cloud gamingtoday, and that's why we are
using your phone, mobile phone,as the controller which is the
same thing what Netflix is nowdoing as well, and we believe
that is part of what I wassaying earlier that to get this
right for TVs, you need torethink the whole experience,
(42:16):
and we believe that the phone,as the controller is the is the
right way to get it, get it, getit working, because everybody
has a phone and if you look what, what are the most popular
games like in mobile games orconsole games, they are
multiplayer games.
so even even though you mighthave a controller at home, you
don't have two or four of them,but everybody has a phone.
(42:39):
And that's, for example, whatwe are now working with our
partner, samsung.
We are really trying to thinkthat how do we bring people
together around the big TV intheir living room and let them
start having fun with greatgames and great interactive
entertainment and make it supereasy to participate and jump
(43:01):
into that fun, and phone is aperfect way to do that one.
And, of course, like said so,we've been happily kind of
seeing that Netflix is havingthe same model.
Of course, amazon has also amobile control app for Luna, so
it's not the kind of totally newthing, but what we believe is
(43:23):
kind of going to be new is thatyou will start seeing that games
will be built and designedaround this second screen
experience and that is also.
what really kind of makes meexcited is that when you start
thinking what all can bepossible, when you start
(43:44):
designing new types of gamesthat don't only appear on one
screen but can actually takeplace on multiple screens, like
Rivals Arena, our debut gamewhat we are now having live on
the Samsung TVs in the US market.
It's a tactical card battlerand the phone is a perfect user
(44:08):
interface for that one.
So you see these epic battleshappening on your 4K Samsung TV
and you can have two playersfighting each other and I have
my cards on my phone.
You have your cards on yourphone.
It's kind of hidden content, Idon't want you to see my cards.
Speaker 1 (44:25):
and then I can play my cards from my phone and you
are happy, interesting, wow,yeah, yeah, wow, that's, yeah,
that's fascinating, because Ican see where that also would
allow you to shift.
We talked about the latency.
You're streaming effectively.
(44:47):
I mean, I'm grossly, I'm notusing there, but it's like the
movie that's being streamed,right, you know, to the
television and of course it'sinteractive and it's being
rendered in real time.
I get all that, but the actual,maybe the interaction or some
of the more you know, down tothe 100 millisecond type action
(45:09):
is happening on your phone,right?
So oh, here we go.
Speaker 2 (45:14):
Yeah, I thought that you know this would be a
perfect-.
Speaker 1 (45:17):
No, this is great.
Yeah, I thought that this wouldbe a perfect-.
No, this is great.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, this is great.
Speaker 2 (45:21):
This is the kind of the blueprint of our cloud
gaming platform.
So the way we are doing it, thephone we use as a controller so
that we are using your webbrowser, so it's a web app.
Sure, so you're.
Basically, you're scanning a QRcode from your TV screen, the
controller starts out of the boxon your phone.
(45:44):
It's running on your webbrowser, so you don't need to
download anything to your phoneor install any app on your phone
.
That's kind of one of thedifferences, like with Netflix
or Luna, so you need to go to anapp store and download your
controller app, a native app.
We are running on your browserand we believe that this is the
most frictionless way to getpeople into game with the TV.
(46:07):
So there's no hassle, no extrasteps.
You start the game on the TV,you scan the code and you're on
and, kind of, the phone isdirectly connected to the cloud,
so that you don't need to pairyour phone with the TV with
Bluetooth or whatever.
You don't need to be in thesame Wi-Fi.
It's totally independent.
(46:28):
So the phone can be on cellularnetwork, it can be on Wi-Fi,
it's directly communicating withthe cloud and the controlling
experience is fully with thecloud and the controlling
experience is fully responsive,snappy, it's real time and then,
like you could even say thatthe TV doesn't know that there's
a game being played on the TV.
We are streaming a video streamto the TV and the TV is
(46:50):
basically our client app on theTV is basically only a video
player, so there's no kind ofcomplexity on the client side.
It's just kind of playing backthe video we are streaming Sure,
and that's what the TVs areperfectly made for.
So this is kind of really kindof capitalizing on the strengths
(47:13):
of every component in thissystem of every component in
this, in this system, and andand and.
Speaker 1 (47:22):
Back to you know my point earlier about, uh, when I
asked you know, are yourendering something on the
device like on the GPU?
And then I I, you know, ofcourse I went oh, I guess I
answered my own question.
Tv doesn't have a GPU, so whatwould it render on Um, or at
least um?
You know the vast majority ofTVs, maybe there's some now that
do.
But the mobile device, even anentry-level mobile device, has a
(47:45):
GPU, right, so you have moreprocessing there.
Well, this is super interesting.
Yeah, so we had a couple ofquestions come in and I think
this is a good time to hit those.
One of them is around theeconomics and this.
(48:07):
This is very applicable.
You'll have a good answer forthis because you mentioned the
ad.
You know the ad sponsoredgaming, so you know where
there's ad revenue in stream, etcetera, the ad-sponsored gaming
, so you know where there's adrevenue in-stream, et cetera.
So this person askedspecifically you know can well.
So it's a two-part questionFirst of all, how they say, how
are the economics of cloudgaming?
(48:28):
But then the second part of thequestion is can they be
profitable, meaning theeconomics with ad revenue in the
$20 CPM range.
Speaker 2 (48:39):
Yeah, that's the million dollar question.
Speaker 1 (48:41):
And that's the right question to ask.
Speaker 2 (48:44):
Yeah exactly Without going too deep in the specifics.
So currently our Rivals Arenagame what we are now running on
Samsung TVs we have in-gamevideo ads in the game.
We have both this kind ofmandatory, non-skippable video
ads which come like after everycouple of matches you play.
(49:07):
There's a kind of video playingafter the match.
And then we have alsoimplemented rewarded video ads
so that the user can opt in towatch an ad to gain some kind of
more rewards or in-gamecurrency in the game, and it's
kind of very, very well provenad format from the mobile game
(49:27):
side.
So the interesting thingactually is that with rewarded
video ads you can have muchhigher CPMs as well, because
when people are opting in towatch the ad, they are much more
engaged with the advertising.
So they are not going to thefridge to grab a beer, but they
actually they are kind of moreinto it because they feel that
(49:48):
they're getting value from theads, so they are kind of also
more engaged.
So there are ways to kind ofraise the CPMs beyond this kind
of $20 limit.
But currently we are roughly atthe level that we are showing
roughly 10 ads per hour.
So it's kind of every five orso minutes there's an ad With
(50:11):
$20 CPM.
It means that we are basically$20pn, means that one ad show is
like two cents yeah with 10, 10shown apps per hour, we are
generating 20 cents of adrevenue and, uh, that's kind of
the, that's kind of the startingpoint when you look at your
cost side yeah and with with thekind of ways we are.
(50:35):
We are kind of doing thestreaming kind of uh, not going
to the 4K resolution rendering,not going for the 60 frames per
second, and also kind ofinnovating a bit on the
infrastructure side.
We can easily go below the 20cents per hour cost mark, way,
(51:00):
way below.
So the profitability can bethere for sure, even with ad
monetization.
But then of course, when youthink about gaming and the
upside, there will be then ofcourse a lot of eagerness to try
in-game purchases as well ofeagerness to try in-game
purchases as well, and that issomething that we really, really
(51:20):
support.
We'll bring support for the IAPsas well, because in order to
really kind of make ablockbuster game for TVs and
monetize that at the massivelevel so the ads are not enough,
but you want to have the kindof upside that comes from this
kind of addictive free-to-playorganization make any sure we
(51:43):
are used to the mobile games Idon't know more increasing on
the PC and console side as well,yeah, yeah, interesting, okay,
that's, yeah, that's a goodanswer and that's good news
because I it's important.
Speaker 1 (51:58):
If you can't make the business model work, you know,
then you fundamentally don'thave a business.
So the other question that camein here is okay, sometimes I
have to decipher what the realquestion is.
So this one I sort of have to.
So this one I sort of have tounderstand ASIC.
(52:26):
But what role for AVPU?
I think I know what this personis mobile device, you know, CPU
, GPU, and then some sort of youknow of a video additional
(52:48):
video processor processingengine.
That's a different question.
Apu is a streaming appliancethat one of our partners has.
So maybe so I can give aresponse.
It's probably largely aimed atme, but I would like to turn to
give you a chance to justcomment about what does the
(53:11):
architecture look like?
So you're running x86 CPU, Iguess, for all your game logic,
and then are you renderingeverything on GPU.
Are you then using, you know,the encoder that's on the GPU to
create the stream, or like whatare you doing?
Speaker 2 (53:33):
Yeah, we are running the games on Linux machines in
the cloud, and then we are usingGPUs for the rendering and
encoding as well, so we don'thave any kind of dedicated VPUs
because we are using publiccloud.
Yeah, exactly, I do notunderstand if it is kind of a
(53:55):
publicly kind of on-demand VPUcapacity available in the market
, but definitely so I'm fullyconvinced that you know if and
when.
For example, if we want tostart building our own
infrastructure, when you havescale, dedicated VPUs can really
make it more efficient and moreperformant and also way more
(54:17):
cost competitive.
Speaker 1 (54:19):
more efficient and more performant and also way
more cost competitive, so thatwhen you really start to
optimize the entire streamingpipeline, then of course having
dedicated hardware for everysingle step yeah the problems
can really let you to fully,fully optimize the entire entire
streaming pipeline and get thecosts kind of in a totally
different level yeah yeah,exactly yeah, um, you know,
(54:43):
thank, thank you for thatcomment and I want to um
actually cycle back around toeven the first question around
the economics and just make thepoint that, um, one of the um
both challenges but but thenopportunity is is that when
you're using you know I'm goingto say I'm going to use the word
(55:04):
commodity, but when you'reusing sort of commodity
architectures or commonlyavailable that's a better word,
commonly available you have x86CPU instances running on public
cloud.
There's obviously GPU in thoseboxes or those instances are
available anyway.
You know that's standardavailable there's.
(55:27):
You know AWS has it, gcp has it, azure has it, oracle has it.
You know kind of everybody hasit right.
So you know there's a certainlevel of cost there.
However, when you go to adedicated solution and you know
can't comment on what some ofthese large platforms are doing,
(55:48):
but you know it would be veryfair and it would be accurate to
assume that they are notrunning a standard configuration
and that's why they can afford,you know, that's why they can
afford to offer cloud gaming,you know for free, and you know
some of it is they just have themassive scale from their core
(56:09):
business that they can afford toinvest right.
Speaker 2 (56:12):
But it can also be a very expensive way to do it.
Like, if you go back to theGoogle Stadia, they were
basically running PlayStationhardware in their data centers
and it didn't scale.
At least I heard that.
I don't know if it's true, butI heard this comment that at the
best times, they have basicallycapacity for 1,000 concurrent
(56:33):
players globally.
Wow, wow, interesting, yeah,yeah, I don't I don't know about
the yeah, I don't.
Speaker 1 (56:42):
I don't know about about those, about those density
numbers, but yeah, so so theway that the largest platforms
and what we're seeing isbasically what they're doing is
they are splitting apart so thatthe GPU is just rendering the
frame and then they're usingdedicated silicon for the actual
(57:05):
video encoding and just for acouple, you know, data points.
For those who are saying, well,how would that help or why
would that be good?
Because the GPU already has avideo encoder, why don't we, you
know, why don't we just usethat?
It turns out and a lot ofpeople aren't actually aware of
this, so it's important to knowthis.
(57:27):
The GPU silicon, the way thatcustom silicon works is, you
know, you only have so much realestate.
You know, literally, it'slimited by how many transistors
you can put on the chip state.
You know, literally, it'slimited by how many transistors
you can put on the chip.
And so the GPU function that is, the literal graphics
(57:48):
processing, you know, engine isabout 85%.
So it doesn't matter which GPUyou're looking at.
Obviously the designers canvary this ratio.
You know, if you're looking atH100, they don't even have a
video IP block.
You know, because that's notwhat they're designed for, right
, you know they're designed forlarge language models, et cetera
.
But if you look at the GPUs thatyou know we use in the context
(58:09):
we're talking about here forgaming, only about 15% of the
real estate is dedicated tovideo.
Now, what is maybe a little bitcounterintuitive is that the
bottleneck is actually not onthe rendering side, it's on the
encoding side, and so, for a lotof these pipelines, when you
(58:32):
really say, how do we just wringout as much density as possible
on a single box, which, at theend of the day, that's what
we're talking about If I can gofrom 40 or 50 sessions on a
server to 200, well, I've just,you know, I just improved my
density by 4x, or at least 3x,3.5x, you know, very, very, very
(58:56):
significant.
And you do that by saying I'mgoing to let the GPU only render
frames and then I'm going touse dedicated silicon to encode
those frames, and so that's, youknow, one of the techniques
that is highly highly effective.
Speaker 2 (59:12):
I can so relate to that one, because we are
currently so.
The game we have now live onthe Samsung TVs is an Unreal 5
game, and we have optimized thesystem so that we are using AWS,
g5, 4x devices and we can runsix to eight games on one GPU.
But, like you said, if we wereable to kind of take the
(59:36):
encoding away from the GPU, wecould run 10 games at least, or
more on the one GPU, so thatcould kind of bring the cost per
game massively down from thecurrent.
Speaker 1 (59:49):
Massively.
Speaker 2 (59:50):
yeah, If we were able to run multiple games on one
GPU.
We could even increase thatnumber on one.
Gp you'll be able to kind ofeven increase that number.
Speaker 1 (59:58):
That much more, yeah, so, all right, well, good, well
, wow, we've been going an hour.
Visa, this is actually, I haveto say, this is really a
testament to, you know, to theconversation and how engaged we
both are, because usually atabout 45, 50 minutes you know,
(01:00:19):
not because anybody I talk to isboring or the topic's boring,
but usually I'm like, okay, itfeels about time to kind of land
the airplane.
And you know, I looked and went, oh, I guess we better wrap up
here.
So, all right, yeah, well, itwas a, it was a great
conversation.
Thank you so much for coming onand, you know, thank you to the
listeners who hung in therewith us for an hour.
(01:00:41):
We really appreciate you.
So, visa, you know, wish youall the best and we will be
following, of course, yourdevelopment as cloud gaming goes
mainstream, which we know itwill, we know it is.
So, yeah, thank you for comingon.
Voices of Video.
Speaker 2 (01:01:02):
No, thank you so much for having me and for those
people in the audience whohappen to live in the US.
If you have a Samsung TV, so goto the gaming hub and try
Rivals Arena out, Reallyexperience the future of TV
gaming yourselves.
Speaker 1 (01:01:18):
It's great.
Speaker 2 (01:01:19):
And I'm going to do that.
And the rest of you, stay tuned.
We will be expanding to othermarkets soon as well.
Speaker 1 (01:01:27):
That's awesome.
All right, well, good, well,have a great day everyone.
Speaker 2 (01:01:33):
This episode of Voices of Video is brought to
you by NetInt Technologies.
If you are looking forcutting-edge video encoding
solutions, check out NetInt'sproducts at netintcom.
Voices of Video.
Voices of Video.
Voices of Video.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Voices of Video.
Speaker 1 (00:17):
Good morning, good afternoon, good evening to
everyone who is here for thisnext edition of Voices of Video.
As always, we're so happy tohave you join us.
We have a great time on apretty regular basis every week
or two.
We talk with industry insiders.
(00:38):
We talk with people who aredoing a lot of very interesting
things in the areas of video andso today I'm super excited to
talk about cloud gaming who aredoing a lot of you know very
interesting things in the areasof video, and so today I'm super
excited to talk about cloudgaming, and we are, you know,
going to explore what ishappening in that space.
And so I guess, without furtherado, visa, let me first of all
(01:01):
welcome you to the show.
So welcome to Voices of Video,thank you.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
Mark.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, you know we connected, Ithink, maybe a couple of years
ago now and in the context of,obviously, NetInt, and you know
what we do with cloud gaming.
So as we got exposed to whatReturn Entertainment is building
and has built, it made a lot ofsense to have you come on and
tell our audience what you'redoing.
(01:30):
So why don't you introduceyourself and tell us a little
bit about Return Entertainment?
Speaker 2 (01:38):
Sure.
So once again, thanks forhaving me.
It's super, super cool thisvideo series you are hosting.
So my name is Vesa, I'mcurrently the CEO of Rittan
Entertainment and basically myentire career I've been spending
in technology, pushing thelimits, what's possible, when
(02:01):
you really kind of design andinnovate new ways to do things.
And it's kind of what drives meto kind of really trying to
envision a future that is notpossible today.
But then you kind of plan yourway how to get there.
And I've also kind of alwaysbeen a I've also kind of always
(02:25):
been a very kind of avid gamer.
So I basically grew up withvideo games.
So I think kind of I feel luckythat I happened to born in the
times when the video gaming wasmaking its breakthrough, in the
80s, yeah, and I grew up kind ofwith my first computer gaming,
(02:45):
like with the Commodore 64, big20.
Then the kind of different kindof Nintendo portable game
consoles came and that was kindof a really, really big
breakthrough.
I remember kind of buying myfirst PC.
I think it was 1994.
(03:05):
And I remember the kind of thefeeling when the Doom game came
out kind of in the 90s and youwere having the first experience
, a first person shooter kind of.
Speaker 1 (03:19):
It was amazing.
Speaker 2 (03:20):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (03:21):
I'm with you.
I'm with you with that sameprogression.
Yeah, exactly, brings, I'm withyou with that same progression.
Speaker 2 (03:25):
Yeah, exactly, brings back a lot of nostalgia.
Yeah, so having lived throughthis kind of evolution of video
games has been kind of amazing.
And now, of course, being partof the industry and kind of
being part of defining what'scoming next is really what
drives me, of being part ofdefining what's coming next is
(03:47):
really what drives me.
So I've been working in thegaming industry and kind of
really following my passionsince more than 10 years now.
I joined Robio Entertainmentinto mobile gaming like 10 years
ago.
I was running kind of all thecommercial operations for
Rovio's business, so dealingwith our biggest partners.
For example, I made thelicensing deal with Lucasfilms
(04:13):
for the Angry Birds Star Warsfranchise games In 2015,.
I was the GM for Rovio China,based in Shanghai, and really
kind of a great experiencepersonally being personally
experiencing the reallyfast-paced, totally different
market dynamics when it comes tokind of publishing games and
(04:36):
you know there's no Google PlayStore in China at all that was
really fantastic and kind of theliving and breathing, really
the totally different pace ofmaking things happen.
It was super, super amazing.
And I also kind of considermyself as a cloud gaming pioneer
(04:57):
.
I was already kind of soon 10years ago, co-founding a mobile
gaming cloud gaming studiocalled Hatch Entertainment, and
that time we were basicallyreally innovating how you can
actually deliver mobile games ina totally new way with
streaming, and we built atotally new technology and
(05:19):
platform and we licensed morethan 500 titles from different
publishers and studios to bringto the service what we then
rolled out to 21 markets aroundthe world.
So really kind of learned a lotthrough that process.
What does it really take tobuild a scalable cloud gaming
(05:42):
platform and launch it acrossthe different geographies and
how do you really kind ofoptimize the entire experience
and all that?
So a lot of work there and fromthat perspective.
So we were a bit too early withHatch and it didn't really kind
of succeed in the end of theday.
(06:03):
But, like I said, we learned alot.
And now I've been with ReturnEntertainment, where we are
again continuing the cloudgaming agenda but now focusing
on smart TVs.
That's such a massiveopportunity that really kind of
drives me day in, day out.
Yeah, like, think about it thatthere's soon one billion
(06:27):
connected smart TVs around theplanet and only a small fraction
of those are being used forgaming today.
Yeah, so there's this massiveopportunity to kind of bring
gaming to hundreds of millionsof big screens sitting there
waiting to be kind of unlockedfor gaming, and I truly believe
(06:48):
that cloud gaming streaming isthe only model that can unleash
this massive opportunity.
Speaker 1 (06:54):
Yeah, well, you would expect that I would nod very
strongly in agreement with whatyou just said, especially about
the opportunity on connectedtelevision, and I think there's
(07:15):
a lot of things that we're goingto unpack over the next 25, 30
minutes or so that I know willbe really not only interesting
but, I think, helpful to theaudience, because it feels like
or it seems like, as we're outtalking to the market, there's
two camps.
(07:35):
There's the camp that is cloudgaming will never succeed it.
I always sort of shake my headand wonder how in the world can
someone really believe that?
But I continue to be reallysurprised, even at some large
publishers, and you know peoplewho now you know, if you look at
(07:59):
where they are in the ecosystem, as some of it makes sense,
right, you know, you know well,your business model is based on
selling a 60 physical media.
You know physical media, a game, and you get to do this.
You know once a year or onceevery 18 months or two years,
when your new game comes outlike I guess, yeah, that's a
(08:20):
revenue model that you reallylike and it works pretty well
and it has worked for many, many, many, many years, and so when
you convert to streaming.
All of a sudden it's like, oh,wait, a second.
You know I'm only getting paidas someone plays.
Or you know, it's like thelicensing works.
Very different, of course.
Um, and and I'll get to why Ibelieve that, um, you know,
(08:40):
those folks need to look athistory, uh, and the movie
business, the entertainmentbusiness, to say you're going to
get disrupted.
So hello Blu-ray, hello DVD.
But so there are those folksthat aren't quite convinced,
shall we say that it'seconomically viable, or that can
(09:01):
really work, or that consumersare really going to quote like
it, viable or that can reallywork, or that consumers are
really going to quote like it.
And then there are those, youknow, like, like, like you and
me and and, and probably a lotof our audience, who are like oh
yeah, you know, this isabsolutely the future.
So I wonder, you know, as youhave a lot of experience, you're
(09:21):
out there every day, you know,talking to the publishers.
You have a lot of experience,you're out there every day, you
know, talking to the publishers,you're talking to the device
makers, you're talking to themarket.
What is your perspective?
You know, maybe you can, maybeyou can help shed some light.
You know, even saying, hey, Ican understand why people who
(09:44):
don't believe cloud gaming isviable.
Here's some of the reasons why,and those may be true today,
but they're not going to be truetomorrow or, you know, in the
near future.
And then let's talk about theoptimistic side of it.
You know why this is going tobe the way that consumers
ultimately consume gaming.
You know participate.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
Yeah, I think the fundamental thing here is that
it's not either or, so it's notthat you know, either it's cloud
gaming or it's the traditionalmodel.
I think they will kind ofcoexist and I think a good
analogy is that you know, likemy background, being with Robio
and mobile gaming, is that whenthe mobile gaming era started,
(10:24):
it wasn't that you took theexisting console games or PC
games and put them onto themobile screens, so we had to
basically create totally newways of creating games, like for
touchscreen devices.
Also, if you think about mobilegaming, free-to-play became
(10:45):
quickly the dominant way ofmonetizing gaming on mobile
devices, totally different whatwe have seen before in the
different gaming platforms.
So I think, in the same way,what has kind of been a bit kind
of a failure in the industry,that cloud gaming has been
seeing just yet anotherdistribution channel for the
(11:07):
existing games and the existingmodels and that hasn't worked
and that will never work.
And I think you need to kind ofin the very same that way that
you know you, you had to kind ofrethink what is gaming for
mobile.
I think now we need to thinkwhat is gaming for cloud?
That kind of is fully designedand kind of the technology and
(11:32):
the user experience.
The monetization has to be madefrom the ground up for this
market and for this model.
And if you think about thefailures in the past, like I
think, google Stadia comes tomind.
I think that's where they gotit wrong that they tried to take
the very same AAA console gamesand deliver those to the very
(11:55):
same hardcore gamers whoprobably already had their game
consoles.
Speaker 1 (12:00):
Exactly.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
And say, hey, play these same games with a bit more
compromised experience.
That will never play.
Speaker 1 (12:07):
Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (12:08):
And like personally being a gamer, one of my
favorite games is Elden Ring.
I love the Souls games and Iwould never play Elden Ring with
the cloud gaming platform,because it can be a matter of
milliseconds whether you beatthe boss or you will die.
So I think, if you, if youthink about audience like myself
(12:30):
, hardcore gamers who love toplay this kind of really, really
demanding, fast-paced,real-time, sensitive games,
you're always better off with adedicated gaming rig, whether
it's a console or gaming PC orwhatnot.
But then there's this kind ofmassive mainstream market out
(12:51):
there, people who don't identifyas gamers.
We could call them players.
They might be playing mobilegames with their phone, but they
haven't taken that step or theleap to extend their gaming to
big screen.
taken that step or the leap toextend their gaming to big
screen and for that audience, webelieve cloud is the right
model because that will make theexperience so much more simple,
(13:13):
easier, more accessible andalso cheaper to start with you
don't need to invest, to buy a600 bucks PlayStation 5 or
subscribe to a kind of very,very expensive kind of
subscriptions or whatever, butwe can just kind of offer a very
simple and easily kind ofaccessible way to kind of play
(13:37):
games on your TV, for example.
Speaker 1 (13:39):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally agree and I think that's
a really good insight.
The gamer versus players.
You know I, interestinglyenough.
So, even though I referenced inthe beginning when you were
talking about your journey, youknow, even from those popular
games in the 80s and 90s and andall I, you know I wasn't, I'm
(14:05):
not really a gamer per se.
You know, I've never invested awhole lot of time, you know, in
mastering, but I always findmyself gravitating, you know,
towards, if I'm in a room or youknow, around other gamers like,
oh, you know, show me thelatest game, and you know.
So it's like I have an have, anaffinity, I guess, and the
reason I say that is that Iwould be a player and so it's
(14:28):
very interesting.
Uh, what you point out aboutstadia.
So I jumped on stadia, I hadthe very first um.
I think they called the founderspat and it wasn't the fact
actually I think it was yeah,yeah, yeah, anyway, you know I
had the first controller and Iwas, you know I was so excited.
Now, in all fairness, you know,even at that time I was, you
(14:54):
know, I was working in andaround, you know, selling
technologies to, you know, ontothese large platforms and you
know, talking to Google, etcetera, platforms, and you know
talking to Google, et cetera.
So you know you could say, well, you know, in reality, that was
kind of, you know, part of youtrying to, you know, license
technology and sell Google orothers technology, and that
certainly was true.
But, frankly, I became a littlebit of a gamer during that time
(15:20):
.
And why Is it because and Ithink a lot of our audience can
relate to this, you know, is itbecause I can't afford a console
?
No, I can afford a console, youknow, thankfully.
So it's not that there's abarrier for someone like me, and
there are millions and millionsof people like that too, where,
ok, four or five hundred bucks,you know that's not, I'm not
(15:44):
suggesting it's notinsignificant money, but it's
possible, right, you know, a lotof times it's about what you
choose to spend your money on.
Rather, can you, you know, um,so it's not because I couldn't
afford the console, um, but it.
And not even because, oh, thenyou know, I have to buy some
games.
Ooh, you know, like, okay, Icould buy a few games as well,
(16:06):
but it was the every time Iwould think about it, ah, I
think I should go get the newPlayStation, I should get the
new Xbox, you know.
Or it'd be like, oh, then I gotto unhook my entertainment
system, I have to connect it.
Literally, this went through mymind, you know, like, oh, then
I got to connect it, then I'vegot to figure out how I'm going
(16:28):
to get an Ethernet cable to it,because my Wi-Fi is not that
good, and so, guess what?
So I would never do it right.
Now people can laugh and go, oh, come on, you know, it's like
those things are and, yes,they're easy to solve.
Of course, no-transcript.
(16:52):
And I was actually a little bitsad when they, when they killed
it.
You know, I had great funbecause I could sit down just
and within 45 seconds it wassome of the games, even a little
bit less than that, you know itwas, you know, the stream
started and I was playing, youknow, and so 20 minutes before
my wife had dinner, you know,I'd be like, hey, I'm going to
(17:15):
go play a game, you know, andI'd sit down at my desk and I'd
fire it up, you know, and I'dplay, you know it was fun, so.
So okay, let's, let's come backto return entertainment and
tell us then what exactly?
Because the the challenge, whatexactly?
(17:36):
Because the challenge I thinkalso with cloud gaming is that
you have all the technologyrequired to deliver that gaming
experience, and that has to bebuilt, or you need to leverage a
(18:00):
platform that can deliver thatfor you.
But then you need the contentand you know, unfortunately it's
not quite as simple aslicensing a mezzanine file.
You know, like, like when youlicense a movie, for example,
from you know, from, you knowuniversal pictures or something,
it's not quite as simple astaking mezzanine file, encoding
it and then you stream it out.
You know You're mesing, filing,coding it and then you stream
it out, you know.
So what have you built atReturn Entertainment?
(18:20):
You know how much of theend-to-end experience have you
built?
What are you, you know,leveraging other solutions?
Like, why don't you tell?
Speaker 2 (18:32):
us what that looks like.
Yeah, sure, and I think, like Iwas saying earlier, that we
really try to walk the talk here, that we believe that in order
to be successful with providinga great gaming experience for
the TV audiences, you reallyneed to build the technology and
(18:53):
the whole user experience fromthe ground up for this new
audience and this new way ofplaying games, targeting these
players, not the gamers.
And that's what we've beendoing.
And cloud gaming is also aperfect delivery model for TVs,
because if you look at the TVinstall base, there are multiple
(19:18):
different manufacturers, thereare multiple different platforms
, there are varying specs interms of what are the hardware
capabilities on those TVs.
The replacement cycle of TVs isreally long, so it's more than
10 years.
So people have these very oldTVs still sitting in one wall in
(19:40):
one of the rooms and they don'tkind of renew those.
Like mobile phones.
The renewal cycle is like lessthan three years.
So it's much, much faster thatyou always have the latest,
consistent hardware there.
But with TVs that's not thecase there.
(20:02):
But with tvs that's not thecase, so there's no way you
could run modern, demandinggames natively on those devices,
because it's just such anightmare.
You can, you can never get it.
Yeah, and, and, yeah, and, andthat's why I I truly believe
that the only way to serve thismassive market is streaming,
because it's also so much moresimpler and less complex model
(20:23):
for the game publishers.
Like you just mentioned, howyou get the games.
If you would need to ask thegame developers to build a new
version for every singledifferent TV platform, they
would never do it because themaintenance burden is just too
much.
I remember during my Rovio dayswe got always asked there was
(20:47):
some big company in India whohad some own kind of mobile
platform that, hey, we can payyou this many millions if you
just make a new version of AngryBirds for our platform.
And we always said no, becauseit's not about the money you get
initially, but you're actuallycommitting yourself to a very
long maintenance kind of riskand it's just going to kill you.
(21:10):
So that's why we believe this isthe right model.
And there are a couple of thingsthat are critical when you
think about building a businessaround cloud gaming.
So one thing is, of course, theuser experience and, like I was
saying earlier, that you cannever win or be successful if
you try to offer something thatis a compromise or a mediocre
(21:35):
experience compared to thealternatives.
So you need to have theexperience right.
And then the other thing, whatis super important, that you
need to be able to run thebusiness with profitability.
Also, design and architect your, your, your system in a way
that you can actually scale itand run it with cost efficiency.
(22:00):
And these have been kind of thetwo cornerstones for us when
we've been building our Smart TVgaming platform that we're
designing the whole userexperience so that it's super
easy, simple and the visualquality is there and the
gameplay is super smooth andjust works.
(22:21):
And then, on the other hand, wehad to kind of reinvent a bit
how do we do the streaming sothat we can do it cost
efficiently enough that we canmonetize at the level that makes
the equation hold water.
So that's kind of the being thekind of the cornerstones of
(22:42):
what we've been putting together.
Speaker 1 (22:46):
Yeah, yeah, it makes sense.
And so, getting into thespecifics, then let's talk about
how you actually deploy andwork with your partners, and so
my question is this is this likea white-labeled platform that
(23:06):
you bring to a TV manufacturer,for example, or to anybody who
wants to just stand up a store agaming experience, or are you
bringing them the technology andthen they are implementing it,
they operate it?
You bring them the content.
Maybe they bring content, or isthere some third model, like
(23:29):
what's your approach here?
Speaker 2 (23:33):
Yeah, I would call our model kind of a platform as
a service.
So we operate the platform.
We provide the fundamentaltechnology that you can use to
offer gaming on TVs tomainstream audiences, build a
(24:02):
consumer-facing subscriptionservice or kind of starting to
build a game catalog that we canthen basically start marketing
directly to consumers.
We are primarily working withsmart TV manufacturers, so our
main partner today is Samsung.
It's been such a great thingfor us to work very closely with
the biggest TV manufacturer onthe planet and they are fully
(24:24):
aligned with our vision ofserving these players, these
mainstream TV viewers, who don'town a game console and who are
not necessarily willing to goall in to video games but who
might want to kind of experiencebeautiful gaming on their
Samsung TVs.
(24:45):
And that's what we are doing.
So we've been now live in theUS market on Samsung TVs with
our debut game, rivals Arena,and basically validating the
technology, testing thateverything scales, collecting a
lot of user feedback on the userexperience, and also kind of
(25:07):
what we've been testing now forthe last few months is that we
have also now enabledfree-to-play monetization on the
platform.
So we are monetizing the gamingexperience with in-game video
apps.
So these are all the kind ofthe building blocks that we need
to get right before we startscaling more massively.
(25:30):
But really, of course, I'm notable to talk about the other
potential partners we areworking on at the moment, but
it's basically many of these bigsmart TV manufacturers which we
are discussing at the moment,plus also there's a lot of this
kind of other kind of connectedTV device brands out there,
(25:50):
without naming any, but itreally seems that there's kind
of a lot of momentum at themoment around TV gaming.
Everybody's kind of trying tofigure out what's the right way
to do it and at least because,you know, I've been running
around the world for the lastfew years meeting basically
(26:12):
everybody, it's been at leastvery interesting to see that
that, uh, there is not that muchcompetition and we are actually
in a pretty unique positiontoday with what we are offering
and hence we have a lot ofinterest from the major industry
players to kind of trying tofigure it out together so are
(26:34):
you guys actually delivering thethe game and the streams, or is
samsung, for example, orwhoever your partner is?
Speaker 1 (26:42):
uh, without being specific, running the
infrastructure, like that's?
One of the things that we hearis um, is, there's two major
hurdles?
Uh, there's more, but there'stwo.
One is the content, you know.
So everything's go, go, go.
Yeah, this is amazing.
We would love it.
And then like oh, but where'sthe content?
(27:05):
You?
know, how do I license that and?
And that's not an insignificanthurdle right there, as you well
know, you know from yourbackground um, but then you get
over that and then it's like, oh, but now who's going to operate
the infrastructure?
Because, let's face it, a TVmanufacturer is not.
They don't even operate theirown streaming services.
(27:25):
I mean most don't, in fact,even those you know, even even
like a Roku, for example, it'spartnership, even though there's
Roku brand, right, you know, ontheir various services, or
they're aggregating, you know,streams and kind of presenting
them in the UI.
So what is your model?
Speaker 2 (27:47):
Yeah, we are basically offering a total
solution, like you know, acomplete package that you know,
whether it's Samsung or whoevercould actually take our platform
.
We can integrate our platformto any smart TV OS or we could
even plug it into any existingsmart TV application.
(28:07):
For example, we are discussingwith many of these video
streaming services out there.
Many of them are interested inproviding gaming in the future
for their subscriber base.
Some of them are alreadytesting it publicly, as we know.
But that's kind of how we havearchitected our solution that it
(28:29):
can either reside as astandalone app on the TV that
you download and you can thenstart offering gaming through
that app, or it could be a kindof existing app, for example, a
video streaming service app thatyou have on your TV.
We can basically plug in oursolution into the existing
(28:51):
application experience so astreaming service could actually
start and easily offeringgaming as part of their software
.
Speaker 1 (29:00):
So are you running your own infrastructure, do you
have your own data centers, orare you running this on some
public cloud?
Speaker 2 (29:11):
We are not owning the cloud capacity ourselves.
We are running on public cloud.
We are very agnostic on thecloud platform itself.
We are today, for example, thecollaboration with Samsung in
the US.
We are running on AWS, ofcourse, super high quality stuff
(29:31):
we can access, but of coursehas its limitations from the
cost perspective, for example.
Speaker 1 (29:37):
Very expensive.
Speaker 2 (29:40):
Well, everything is relative, of course, and I just
actually flew back from Bangkoktoday, so I was there for a few
days.
There was the Android TV Summitby Google.
Speaker 1 (29:55):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (29:56):
One year organizing the Android TV Summit for all
the different Android TVecosystem members.
We were demoing and showcasingour platform there, running on
Android TV OS, and we were usingthe cloud infrastructure from
our partner, aether.
So we are partnering with Aether, which is a decentralized GPU
(30:19):
cloud provider, and it's a kindof perfect fit for our
technology, because the way Acerworks is that they are
basically pooling unused GPUcapacity from the market and
then reselling this otherwiseidling GPU capacity with a very
affordable price and since wehave developed a very
(30:43):
latency-friendly streamingprotocol that we don't need to
have the data centers very closeto the players.
We can very easily access, forexample, aether's capacity
wherever they happen to have itavailable, like now this week in
Bangkok, where we were demoingthe solution.
We were streaming from the Acerhardware in Singapore.
Also, I was testing it, liketwo weeks ago we were in San
(31:08):
Francisco, I was testing thesolution and showing it there,
streaming from Singapore to SanFrancisco, and even though
there's a few hundredmilliseconds of latency, we were
able to kind of deliver atotally smooth gameplay
experience.
So that's how we are doing it,so we don't plan to kind of own
(31:29):
our own.
Speaker 1 (31:30):
Yeah, at least at this stage.
Speaker 2 (31:32):
Of course, later on, who knows, when we have more
scale.
Speaker 1 (31:36):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, understand on who knows when we
have more scale.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I understandand we'll talk about as much as
you're able to.
You know what other largeplatforms are doing I'm thinking
of, like Netflix, and you knowsome of the others that you
probably have some visibilityinto.
But I want to ask a questionthough.
So does it mean that everyframe of that game that the user
(32:03):
is interacting with video frame, I mean is being rendered on
the TV or on the device, andthen you know, like maybe you
can explain that, because I'vealso noticed in my discussions
(32:26):
around cloud gaming it's reallyimportant to distinguish that,
because there is a veryconsiderable technology
difference and also a deliverycost difference.
If the game is entirely beingrendered Game logic, the
graphics engine, everything isin the cloud and it's being
(32:48):
streamed, or if a large part ofthe game is being rendered
locally.
Speaker 2 (32:55):
Yeah, we are fully pixel streaming, so we don't
render rendered locally.
Yeah, we are fully pixelstreaming, so we don't render
anything locally.
Speaker 1 (33:03):
Which makes sense, because a TV doesn't have a.
Gpu A mobile device does,though Exactly.
Speaker 2 (33:10):
Back to what I was explaining in the beginning,
that with TVs it would be anightmare to try to have a
consistent execution of somecode on the local device.
It just doesn't work.
But there are a couple ofthings we do differently so we
are actually having a very lowbitrate stream.
(33:33):
So on average we are streamingonly like four megabits per
second, which is like roughlyone fifth of what the kind of
the other today.
Speaker 1 (33:42):
So are you delivering 1080p?
Is that your name?
Speaker 2 (33:46):
We are streaming 30 frames per second and 1080p
resolution, but what we aredoing actually is that we have a
proprietary streaming protocolwhich has dynamic buffering, so
we are putting a bit of latencyinto the stream on purpose.
So this is kind of alsofundamentally different approach
(34:06):
.
Typically, cloud gamingservices are always trying to
fight the latency and reallytrying to force fit a really
kind of high resolution, 60frames per second stream in a
very kind of narrow pipeline,and we know that in reality it
always is not perfect.
Speaker 1 (34:27):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (34:27):
So we do it a totally different way, that instead of
fighting the latency, we'reactually embracing the latency
and we are putting some latencyintentionally into our streaming
pipeline.
Interesting, with the smallbuffer we are putting in there,
we can actually handle this kindof last mile connectivity
issues.
If there's packet loss in thenetwork or jitter or whatever,
(34:49):
we can always, with the smallbuffer, deliver a butter smooth
gameplay video on the TV screen.
And the other interesting kindof benefit what we are getting
from this buffer is thatbasically all the modern smart
TVs have AI upscalingfunctionality.
But if you are using a standardcloud gaming service which is
(35:14):
typically running on real timeprotocol, like WebRTC, with the
real-time streaming protocolthere's no time for the TV to do
the upscaling, so it's bydefault switched off.
But because we are putting thislittle buffer in there and we
are using our own proprietarystreaming protocol, the TV has
time to upscale the 1080presolution to 4K.
Speaker 1 (35:37):
Interesting.
Speaker 2 (35:38):
So this is kind of how we are handling this
situation that with very lowbitrate, like four megabits per
second on average, we can stilldeliver a 4K image quality on
your big screen TV, and that'swhat matters to the people,
because this kind of jitter andkind of slugginess of the
(36:01):
gameplay is what's killing thefeeling and it's killing the
experience.
We have chosen, rather, to kindof have a very smooth gameplay
experience and not even tryingto kind of stream 60 frames per
second, and not even trying tokind of stream 60 frames per
second or ensure it's always 4K,because it just doesn't work
(36:22):
out and it's also very expensiveif you need to render 4K 60
frames per second, so it's somany more times more GPU power
needed compared to rendering 30frames per second of 1080p.
So I guess you know how themath works.
Speaker 1 (36:38):
Yeah, exactly, exactly, interesting.
Okay, so tell us what you knowabout, for example, netflix and
you know, and any other videoplatforms, because I think this
is interesting.
You made the statement veryearly on when you were saying,
hey, we really believe in thisopportunity for cloud gaming to
(37:01):
the connected television, and Iwas very fortunate to have been
involved in streaming video fromnot the very earliest days, but
kind of the earliest days ofwhen it became commercialized
earliest days, but kind of theearliest days of when it became
commercialized.
And one platform that I was apart of called Vudu, which
(37:29):
eventually got acquired byWalmart.
We were in 2007,.
We launched this.
Um, you know, we, we kind ofpositioned it and thought it at
the time is like a blockbuster.
You know the video store, whichis very huge and in the U S at
the time, you know, for rentingDVDs, you know it was a
blockbuster on your television.
You know it was like the whole,the whole value prop.
You know I can remember thereaction and certainly from the
(38:04):
industry, you know from the,from the studios, was like, well
, we're pretty happy sellingdiscs, thank you very much.
You know like we're not thatinterested in licensing,
licensing you content.
So again the two hurdles Right.
You know we had to get over the.
You know the hurdle of likegetting content and at that time
it was pretty, it was, it waschallenging.
You know the hurdle of likegetting content and at that time
it was pretty, it was, it waschallenging.
But but then, you know, it waseven just the the the consumer.
(38:24):
You know, I I can recall somany interactions where
consumers would basically tellus like I don't understand, like
you want me to watch amainstream Hollywood movie.
You know, big, big screen movieat the quality of YouTube.
You know, because, again,youtube had just come out of the
(38:45):
ground, you know, was likeabout 18 months old at the time.
Cat videos everywhere.
So people's reference point wasthis.
So they were equating kind ofwhat they knew you know to like.
Well, this is not the qualitythat I want.
Why would I even want toconsider doing this?
(39:07):
Well granted you know our firstproduct was 480p right, but then
again we forget that was DVDquality.
You know that resolution DVDwas 480p right, and so that's
why, all of a sudden, whenBlu-ray came out at 1080p, you
know it was like, wow, this isso amazing.
And you know, of course, nowwe're like 1080p, that's almost
like standard definition, youknow so, as we're looking at 4K.
(39:31):
So the question that I have foryou is that, you know, I can
recall 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009,2010,.
When there still were, was thisfeeling like, yeah, streaming's
kind of this niche little thing.
And you know, okay, there'scertain use cases that make
sense, but certainly I believed,and we believed that Voodoo and
(39:55):
others who were building, youknow, entertainment platforms at
that time, streaming platformsthat this was going to be
dominant, this was going to bethe new way of distribution.
Well, now it would be crazy forsomeone to suggest that, oh no,
we're going to go back to, youknow, to carrying around, you
know, DVDs, right, or Blu-ray.
So what do you think, what doyou make of?
(40:19):
You know, like Netflix,introducing gaming and other
platforms that you're probablyworking with, Like you know,
what do you make of that?
What do you understand?
What their thinking is theirmindsets.
How did they view it?
Is this just sort of like anadditional add-on to, a little
cherry on top to their coreservice?
(40:39):
Is this a future for them?
Like you know what, what areyou hearing and what do you
perceive?
Speaker 2 (40:48):
yeah.
So we we have been in very closedialogue with netflix and many
other other streaming servicesfor years and, uh, it's been
really great to see that, like,what Netflix is doing is fully
aligned with our vision andwe've been comparing notes over
the years to kind of see what weare doing.
(41:09):
And it's, of course, reallyencouraging that they have now
started also testing TV gaming.
And one of the friction pointsin cloud gaming today is that,
of course, if you have a SamsungTV, for example, you can go to
the gaming hub and you cansubscribe to Xbox or you can
subscribe to GeForce Now or Lunafrom Amazon, but these players
(41:35):
we talk about people who are notgamers they don't have the game
controllers and it's a kind ofmassive friction point today
that basically, all thesepremium cloud gaming services,
they offer AAA content thatrequire a controller and it's
really limiting the penetrationof cloud gaming today,
(41:55):
penetration of cloud gamingtoday, and that's why we are
using your phone, mobile phone,as the controller which is the
same thing what Netflix is nowdoing as well, and we believe
that is part of what I wassaying earlier that to get this
right for TVs, you need torethink the whole experience,
(42:16):
and we believe that the phone,as the controller is the is the
right way to get it, get it, getit working, because everybody
has a phone and if you look what, what are the most popular
games like in mobile games orconsole games, they are
multiplayer games.
so even even though you mighthave a controller at home, you
don't have two or four of them,but everybody has a phone.
(42:39):
And that's, for example, whatwe are now working with our
partner, samsung.
We are really trying to thinkthat how do we bring people
together around the big TV intheir living room and let them
start having fun with greatgames and great interactive
entertainment and make it supereasy to participate and jump
(43:01):
into that fun, and phone is aperfect way to do that one.
And, of course, like said so,we've been happily kind of
seeing that Netflix is havingthe same model.
Of course, amazon has also amobile control app for Luna, so
it's not the kind of totally newthing, but what we believe is
(43:23):
kind of going to be new is thatyou will start seeing that games
will be built and designedaround this second screen
experience and that is also.
what really kind of makes meexcited is that when you start
thinking what all can bepossible, when you start
(43:44):
designing new types of gamesthat don't only appear on one
screen but can actually takeplace on multiple screens, like
Rivals Arena, our debut gamewhat we are now having live on
the Samsung TVs in the US market.
It's a tactical card battlerand the phone is a perfect user
(44:08):
interface for that one.
So you see these epic battleshappening on your 4K Samsung TV
and you can have two playersfighting each other and I have
my cards on my phone.
You have your cards on yourphone.
It's kind of hidden content, Idon't want you to see my cards.
Speaker 1 (44:25):
and then I can play my cards from my phone and you
are happy, interesting, wow,yeah, yeah, wow, that's, yeah,
that's fascinating, because Ican see where that also would
allow you to shift.
We talked about the latency.
You're streaming effectively.
(44:47):
I mean, I'm grossly, I'm notusing there, but it's like the
movie that's being streamed,right, you know, to the
television and of course it'sinteractive and it's being
rendered in real time.
I get all that, but the actual,maybe the interaction or some
of the more you know, down tothe 100 millisecond type action
(45:09):
is happening on your phone,right?
So oh, here we go.
Speaker 2 (45:14):
Yeah, I thought that you know this would be a
perfect-.
Speaker 1 (45:17):
No, this is great.
Yeah, I thought that this wouldbe a perfect-.
No, this is great.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, this is great.
Speaker 2 (45:21):
This is the kind of the blueprint of our cloud
gaming platform.
So the way we are doing it, thephone we use as a controller so
that we are using your webbrowser, so it's a web app.
Sure, so you're.
Basically, you're scanning a QRcode from your TV screen, the
controller starts out of the boxon your phone.
(45:44):
It's running on your webbrowser, so you don't need to
download anything to your phoneor install any app on your phone
.
That's kind of one of thedifferences, like with Netflix
or Luna, so you need to go to anapp store and download your
controller app, a native app.
We are running on your browserand we believe that this is the
most frictionless way to getpeople into game with the TV.
(46:07):
So there's no hassle, no extrasteps.
You start the game on the TV,you scan the code and you're on
and, kind of, the phone isdirectly connected to the cloud,
so that you don't need to pairyour phone with the TV with
Bluetooth or whatever.
You don't need to be in thesame Wi-Fi.
It's totally independent.
(46:28):
So the phone can be on cellularnetwork, it can be on Wi-Fi,
it's directly communicating withthe cloud and the controlling
experience is fully with thecloud and the controlling
experience is fully responsive,snappy, it's real time and then,
like you could even say thatthe TV doesn't know that there's
a game being played on the TV.
We are streaming a video streamto the TV and the TV is
(46:50):
basically our client app on theTV is basically only a video
player, so there's no kind ofcomplexity on the client side.
It's just kind of playing backthe video we are streaming Sure,
and that's what the TVs areperfectly made for.
So this is kind of really kindof capitalizing on the strengths
(47:13):
of every component in thissystem of every component in
this, in this system, and andand and.
Speaker 1 (47:22):
Back to you know my point earlier about, uh, when I
asked you know, are yourendering something on the
device like on the GPU?
And then I I, you know, ofcourse I went oh, I guess I
answered my own question.
Tv doesn't have a GPU, so whatwould it render on Um, or at
least um?
You know the vast majority ofTVs, maybe there's some now that
do.
But the mobile device, even anentry-level mobile device, has a
(47:45):
GPU, right, so you have moreprocessing there.
Well, this is super interesting.
Yeah, so we had a couple ofquestions come in and I think
this is a good time to hit those.
One of them is around theeconomics and this.
(48:07):
This is very applicable.
You'll have a good answer forthis because you mentioned the
ad.
You know the ad sponsoredgaming, so you know where
there's ad revenue in stream, etcetera, the ad-sponsored gaming
, so you know where there's adrevenue in-stream, et cetera.
So this person askedspecifically you know can well.
So it's a two-part questionFirst of all, how they say, how
are the economics of cloudgaming?
(48:28):
But then the second part of thequestion is can they be
profitable, meaning theeconomics with ad revenue in the
$20 CPM range.
Speaker 2 (48:39):
Yeah, that's the million dollar question.
Speaker 1 (48:41):
And that's the right question to ask.
Speaker 2 (48:44):
Yeah exactly Without going too deep in the specifics.
So currently our Rivals Arenagame what we are now running on
Samsung TVs we have in-gamevideo ads in the game.
We have both this kind ofmandatory, non-skippable video
ads which come like after everycouple of matches you play.
(49:07):
There's a kind of video playingafter the match.
And then we have alsoimplemented rewarded video ads
so that the user can opt in towatch an ad to gain some kind of
more rewards or in-gamecurrency in the game, and it's
kind of very, very well provenad format from the mobile game
(49:27):
side.
So the interesting thingactually is that with rewarded
video ads you can have muchhigher CPMs as well, because
when people are opting in towatch the ad, they are much more
engaged with the advertising.
So they are not going to thefridge to grab a beer, but they
actually they are kind of moreinto it because they feel that
(49:48):
they're getting value from theads, so they are kind of also
more engaged.
So there are ways to kind ofraise the CPMs beyond this kind
of $20 limit.
But currently we are roughly atthe level that we are showing
roughly 10 ads per hour.
So it's kind of every five orso minutes there's an ad With
(50:11):
$20 CPM.
It means that we are basically$20pn, means that one ad show is
like two cents yeah with 10, 10shown apps per hour, we are
generating 20 cents of adrevenue and, uh, that's kind of
the, that's kind of the startingpoint when you look at your
cost side yeah and with with thekind of ways we are.
(50:35):
We are kind of doing thestreaming kind of uh, not going
to the 4K resolution rendering,not going for the 60 frames per
second, and also kind ofinnovating a bit on the
infrastructure side.
We can easily go below the 20cents per hour cost mark, way,
(51:00):
way below.
So the profitability can bethere for sure, even with ad
monetization.
But then of course, when youthink about gaming and the
upside, there will be then ofcourse a lot of eagerness to try
in-game purchases as well ofeagerness to try in-game
purchases as well, and that issomething that we really, really
(51:20):
support.
We'll bring support for the IAPsas well, because in order to
really kind of make ablockbuster game for TVs and
monetize that at the massivelevel so the ads are not enough,
but you want to have the kindof upside that comes from this
kind of addictive free-to-playorganization make any sure we
(51:43):
are used to the mobile games Idon't know more increasing on
the PC and console side as well,yeah, yeah, interesting, okay,
that's, yeah, that's a goodanswer and that's good news
because I it's important.
Speaker 1 (51:58):
If you can't make the business model work, you know,
then you fundamentally don'thave a business.
So the other question that camein here is okay, sometimes I
have to decipher what the realquestion is.
So this one I sort of have to.
So this one I sort of have tounderstand ASIC.
(52:26):
But what role for AVPU?
I think I know what this personis mobile device, you know, CPU
, GPU, and then some sort of youknow of a video additional
(52:48):
video processor processingengine.
That's a different question.
Apu is a streaming appliancethat one of our partners has.
So maybe so I can give aresponse.
It's probably largely aimed atme, but I would like to turn to
give you a chance to justcomment about what does the
(53:11):
architecture look like?
So you're running x86 CPU, Iguess, for all your game logic,
and then are you renderingeverything on GPU.
Are you then using, you know,the encoder that's on the GPU to
create the stream, or like whatare you doing?
Speaker 2 (53:33):
Yeah, we are running the games on Linux machines in
the cloud, and then we are usingGPUs for the rendering and
encoding as well, so we don'thave any kind of dedicated VPUs
because we are using publiccloud.
Yeah, exactly, I do notunderstand if it is kind of a
(53:55):
publicly kind of on-demand VPUcapacity available in the market
, but definitely so I'm fullyconvinced that you know if and
when.
For example, if we want tostart building our own
infrastructure, when you havescale, dedicated VPUs can really
make it more efficient and moreperformant and also way more
(54:17):
cost competitive.
Speaker 1 (54:19):
more efficient and more performant and also way
more cost competitive, so thatwhen you really start to
optimize the entire streamingpipeline, then of course having
dedicated hardware for everysingle step yeah the problems
can really let you to fully,fully optimize the entire entire
streaming pipeline and get thecosts kind of in a totally
different level yeah yeah,exactly yeah, um, you know,
(54:43):
thank, thank you for thatcomment and I want to um
actually cycle back around toeven the first question around
the economics and just make thepoint that, um, one of the um
both challenges but but thenopportunity is is that when
you're using you know I'm goingto say I'm going to use the word
(55:04):
commodity, but when you'reusing sort of commodity
architectures or commonlyavailable that's a better word,
commonly available you have x86CPU instances running on public
cloud.
There's obviously GPU in thoseboxes or those instances are
available anyway.
You know that's standardavailable there's.
(55:27):
You know AWS has it, gcp has it, azure has it, oracle has it.
You know kind of everybody hasit right.
So you know there's a certainlevel of cost there.
However, when you go to adedicated solution and you know
can't comment on what some ofthese large platforms are doing,
(55:48):
but you know it would be veryfair and it would be accurate to
assume that they are notrunning a standard configuration
and that's why they can afford,you know, that's why they can
afford to offer cloud gaming,you know for free, and you know
some of it is they just have themassive scale from their core
(56:09):
business that they can afford toinvest right.
Speaker 2 (56:12):
But it can also be a very expensive way to do it.
Like, if you go back to theGoogle Stadia, they were
basically running PlayStationhardware in their data centers
and it didn't scale.
At least I heard that.
I don't know if it's true, butI heard this comment that at the
best times, they have basicallycapacity for 1,000 concurrent
(56:33):
players globally.
Wow, wow, interesting, yeah,yeah, I don't I don't know about
the yeah, I don't.
Speaker 1 (56:42):
I don't know about about those, about those density
numbers, but yeah, so so theway that the largest platforms
and what we're seeing isbasically what they're doing is
they are splitting apart so thatthe GPU is just rendering the
frame and then they're usingdedicated silicon for the actual
(57:05):
video encoding and just for acouple, you know, data points.
For those who are saying, well,how would that help or why
would that be good?
Because the GPU already has avideo encoder, why don't we, you
know, why don't we just usethat?
It turns out and a lot ofpeople aren't actually aware of
this, so it's important to knowthis.
(57:27):
The GPU silicon, the way thatcustom silicon works is, you
know, you only have so much realestate.
You know, literally, it'slimited by how many transistors
you can put on the chip state.
You know, literally, it'slimited by how many transistors
you can put on the chip.
And so the GPU function that is, the literal graphics
(57:48):
processing, you know, engine isabout 85%.
So it doesn't matter which GPUyou're looking at.
Obviously the designers canvary this ratio.
You know, if you're looking atH100, they don't even have a
video IP block.
You know, because that's notwhat they're designed for, right
, you know they're designed forlarge language models, et cetera
.
But if you look at the GPUs thatyou know we use in the context
(58:09):
we're talking about here forgaming, only about 15% of the
real estate is dedicated tovideo.
Now, what is maybe a little bitcounterintuitive is that the
bottleneck is actually not onthe rendering side, it's on the
encoding side, and so, for a lotof these pipelines, when you
(58:32):
really say, how do we just wringout as much density as possible
on a single box, which, at theend of the day, that's what
we're talking about If I can gofrom 40 or 50 sessions on a
server to 200, well, I've just,you know, I just improved my
density by 4x, or at least 3x,3.5x, you know, very, very, very
(58:56):
significant.
And you do that by saying I'mgoing to let the GPU only render
frames and then I'm going touse dedicated silicon to encode
those frames, and so that's, youknow, one of the techniques
that is highly highly effective.
Speaker 2 (59:12):
I can so relate to that one, because we are
currently so.
The game we have now live onthe Samsung TVs is an Unreal 5
game, and we have optimized thesystem so that we are using AWS,
g5, 4x devices and we can runsix to eight games on one GPU.
But, like you said, if we wereable to kind of take the
(59:36):
encoding away from the GPU, wecould run 10 games at least, or
more on the one GPU, so thatcould kind of bring the cost per
game massively down from thecurrent.
Speaker 1 (59:49):
Massively.
Speaker 2 (59:50):
yeah, If we were able to run multiple games on one
GPU.
We could even increase thatnumber on one.
Gp you'll be able to kind ofeven increase that number.
Speaker 1 (59:58):
That much more, yeah, so, all right, well, good, well
, wow, we've been going an hour.
Visa, this is actually, I haveto say, this is really a
testament to, you know, to theconversation and how engaged we
both are, because usually atabout 45, 50 minutes you know,
(01:00:19):
not because anybody I talk to isboring or the topic's boring,
but usually I'm like, okay, itfeels about time to kind of land
the airplane.
And you know, I looked and went, oh, I guess we better wrap up
here.
So, all right, yeah, well, itwas a, it was a great
conversation.
Thank you so much for coming onand, you know, thank you to the
listeners who hung in therewith us for an hour.
(01:00:41):
We really appreciate you.
So, visa, you know, wish youall the best and we will be
following, of course, yourdevelopment as cloud gaming goes
mainstream, which we know itwill, we know it is.
So, yeah, thank you for comingon.
Voices of Video.
Speaker 2 (01:01:02):
No, thank you so much for having me and for those
people in the audience whohappen to live in the US.
If you have a Samsung TV, so goto the gaming hub and try
Rivals Arena out, Reallyexperience the future of TV
gaming yourselves.
Speaker 1 (01:01:18):
It's great.
Speaker 2 (01:01:19):
And I'm going to do that.
And the rest of you, stay tuned.
We will be expanding to othermarkets soon as well.
Speaker 1 (01:01:27):
That's awesome.
All right, well, good, well,have a great day everyone.
Speaker 2 (01:01:33):
This episode of Voices of Video is brought to
you by NetInt Technologies.
If you are looking forcutting-edge video encoding
solutions, check out NetInt'sproducts at netintcom.
Popular Podcasts
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.
Ridiculous History
History is beautiful, brutal and, often, ridiculous. Join Ben Bowlin and Noel Brown as they dive into some of the weirdest stories from across the span of human civilization in Ridiculous History, a podcast by iHeartRadio.