December 9, 2019
By Tim Siglin Contributing Editor, Steve Nathans-Kelly
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SMW '19: DVEO Talks Cloud Encoding on the Rise

Read the complete transcript of this interview:

Tim Siglin: Welcome back to Streaming Media West 2019. I'm Tim Siglin, Contributing Editor with Streaming Media magazine. And I've got, today, with me Laszlo Zoltan. And Laszlo, you're the founder of DVEO, is that correct?

Laszlo Zoltan: I am.

Tim: Okay, the founder, Chief Technology Officer?

Laszlo: Bottle washer.

Tim: Bottle washer, well.

Laszlo: Garbage taker outer, whatever.

Tim: In any small business, it seems like that's what happens. So, we had one of your alumni on earlier, Scott Grizzle.

Laszlo: Scott Grizzle. Of course, I heard you talking about him earlier.

Tim: So you come up with some really innovative things. I think the last time we talked about some ideas that you'd had, some patents that you have.

Laszlo: Right.

Tim: What drives you in this industry? To me, the industry's a fun industry to be in. But what is it that drives you to sort of come up with those innovations?

Laszlo: That's a good question. I enjoy absorbing new knowledge all the time. I read an awful lot. I go through many, many magazines a week, a month. I read your magazine cover to cover. I read a lot of books. And what I like to do is, I connect the dots. I think I've got a brain that connects a lot of dots and synthesizes new information from little dots on the map. It's just that kind of a genetic trait, probably.

Tim: And so for you, you're looking for things where people say, "Hey, we're having problems with this, but nobody's provided a solution?"

Laszlo: Well, the motivating factor's survival. And I like to survive.

Tim: Okay, sure.

Laszlo: So the only way to survive is to innovate. That rapid innovation is something I studied way, way back. And I came to realize that, innovation is the key to survival. So our company has re-invented itself for probably, now we're on about the fifth generation of re-inventing itself. So we're in different segments of the electronics industry. And he we are now, we're now really in the cloud, which was kind of a big step for a smaller company. I'm pretty amazed at how we made that transition. But here we are, we made it to another level, another era, and I'm pretty proud of it. And other people are amazed how we do it, they can't believe that we did it.

Tim: So the hardware, of course, has been a large part of your heritage. As you moved to the cloud, does hardware become less important or more important?

Laszlo: Absolutely less important, right. It's nice to have that background, that understanding well. But we migrate from physical hardware to virtual hardware, in the sense that we put all our products into software based encoding, transcoding, servers, and some other functionality. And so, we became kind of a software company, even though we delivered a physical hardware, or physical platform. But now, in our current state, we just deliver a license, so we're a purveyor of a license . And we give licenses that enable anyone to use five, 10, 20, 30 transcode, for example.

Tim: Sure, sure. And is it primarily AWS instances?

Laszlo: Both Azure and Amazon.

Tim: Azure, okay.

Laszlo: But we're customer-drive, so if the customer wants Amazon or a customer wants Azure. Right now we're working on both. And we've not been successful importing to others, because Azure and Amazon make it relatively easy to import the data platforms. They have so much infrastructure, they help us a lot. And their GUIs and their user interfaces make it easy.

Tim: So we just finished up an analysis on a survey that Streaming Media did, and it's the 2019 State of Streaming, And one of the questions we asked is an open-ended question, was about people's use of on-premise, versus their use of cloud. And it turns out, basically, looking at the analysis, that the more frequently somebody does live events in a given week or month, the more likely they are to move to the cloud. So are you finding that you've got power users that are using sort of your cloud-based services, or people who are just starting out, or a combination of both?

Laszlo: It's kind of interesting, when you're small, which we are, we're not a very large company, we're focusing on some smaller opportunities. But strangely enough, we've been pulled into some very large opportunities around the world. So we became the finalist for a cloud application migration of a physical satellite delivery platform that is, apparently, going to migrate to the cloud. Everything came out well for us. We were in show and tells between other companies and we won. But what happened now, is that there's some political pushback at this large company, because the people don't want to be let go. Okay, so the CEO has put on hold the migration to the cloud.

Tim: Oh wow.

Laszlo: And here, in this instance, hundreds of people, maybe thousands of people, will be let go once this migration happens. And they're political ramifications, like so many jobs will be lost in the country. And let's say they get political support or financial support from the government organizations. And they throw out 20,000 people on the street, there are ramifications. So they're those opportunities and then there are suitable opportunities for us. We tend to, so far, we've received the opportunities to create the platforms for 5000, 10000 subscribers. The major companies are focusing on 50,000, 100,000 subscribers. And there's always opportunities for companies like ours. And we've successfully deployed them. And here it is, on my iPhone, we have one of them. For example, I can demonstrate it to you. And we developed the whole solution from end to end. And people are surprised, and they're really happy, and we've evolved, and now we're a credible player.

Tim: Good, good. Well, thank you again for being with us. Always enjoy talking to you.

Laszlo: Thank you for giving us a platform.

Tim: Absolutely. And we'll be right back, here in just a few minutes, for the next interview.