Trump, Billionaire Isaacman Said to Meet About Top NASA Job

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2:47You might remember he was nominated to be the head of NASA, but that nomination was pulled. Ed Ludlow from Bloomberg Tech has the exclusive. if he joins us on site here at Bloomberg Screen Time. This was really surprising to me. It was a surprise. What we know from sources is that Jared Isaacman, in recent weeks, has been meeting with the president and other government officials, and that the discussion has centered around a pathway for Jared Isaacman to be re-nominated to lead NASA. You'll remember he had been nominated, but the administration canceled or terminated that nomination in May. At the time, the president and the White House talked about how it was historic, how it was his historic ties to the Democratic Party that were behind it.

3:32But you'll remember we reported quite deeply that actually it had something to do with Jared's association with Elon Musk at a time where Musk had a fractious relationship with the White House. So this is ongoing. You know, we know from a White House official the president's made no decision. He's thinking about it. It could change. but they are talking, and my understanding is they'll continue to talk. Before we got going, I think we were all thinking, wait, is this also something bigger, broader in that Elon repairing his relationship with the White House, or is this Jared repairing whatever went on before?

4:06Do you guys remember I came on the show a few weeks ago when the president hosted that dinner with different technology CEOs? Jared Isaacman was present, and Tim, you asked me, was Isaacman, who was there as Elon Musk's proxy, as had been reported in some of the media, apparently somebody there was there on Elon's behalf. My understanding is no, Jared Isaacman was not there at that dinner as Elon Musk's proxy. He was there of his own accord. For whatever reason, the president invited him. But this is very recent. What's happening right now, the meetings between Jared Isaacman and the president of the United States, they're ongoing.

4:38He's meeting with other government officials. And right now, Sean Duffy, the transport sec, is a temporary leader of NASA. but at the time when the nomination was cancelled loads of people across industry and government held Jared Eisenman in very high regard as somebody very qualified to lead the agency let's talk a little bit about that because there has been criticism often times coming from the Democratic Party about many of the president's picks for his cabinet people who the Democrats argue and also people sometimes in positions of science or academia argue are not appropriate picks. It wasn't so with Jared Isaacman.

5:18You know, I don't cover politics. I don't cover the White House. I know that I try my best to break these stories. But the thing about Jared Isaacman is that he was a private citizen astronaut, right? He'd been to space more than once in projects with SpaceX that he'd funded himself. In the nomination process for the initial nomination, he had recused himself of his ties to SpaceX and sold out of any financial conflicts as is normal in that case. But people basically said he gets the technology, he knows the players in industry, he is not a legacy politician, he is a successful entrepreneur. That was the direction that the space industry was going.

5:56There was some debate about, well, is Jared Isaacman's philosophy aligned with the president and NASA's in that, are we going to the moon or are we going to Mars as Elon Musk wants to? but basically he was seen as highly competent. That's the point. Yeah, it's interesting. And it's an idea of it. Is this the right person for the job? And if it sounds like that, it could potentially go back to that. Hey, just before you go, we're here at screen time. You're going to be, you're doing a discussion here. Tell us that kind of your impressions. Yeah, I think right now there's a lot of movement in this industry.

6:28So I expected to come and talk just about AI. Actually, I think we look a lot deeper at the economics of media and entertainment. that's what I get from the Allison conversations just happened. My panel selfishly is with the Twitch CEO, Dan Clancy, and then Pokimane, one of the most followed streamers on the planet. And she's so interesting because she's making a lot of money in a lot of different ways by going live on Twitch, but also posting to Instagram and YouTube. And, you know, the economics of being a content creator are like fascinating. Isn't that the point of screen time? Like learning about the money behind all the things that keep us glued to the screen?

7:04Yes. Yes. Look, how many screens do we have here right now? Ed Ludlow, congratulations. A Bloomberg exclusive. Highly recommend everybody check out the full right through. It's on the Bloomberg and at Bloomberg.com. Ed Ludlow, co-host of BTEC right here on Bloomberg TV. Ed, thank you so much. Stay with us. More from Bloomberg Businessweek Daily coming up after this.

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11:36Amazon is a hyperscaler, cloud and stuff, but there is so much more and getting to know what you do. I mean, you're constantly talking with folks in gaming, sports, video. They're trying to engage with the consumer on all different levels. Yeah. There's so much happening and I appreciate you laying out those stats and then also watching that presentation on NAB. I very much appreciate that. I think, let me start with fundamentally, the cloud has become the backbone of media distribution globally. Without the cloud, it would be impossible for consumers to gain access to streaming services, if you're streaming this right now as an example, these types of services become fundamental for global reach.

12:11The cloud also is critical relative to content creation as well as the ability to create different types of audience engagement motions that can be monetized by organizations around the world. And so to those stats that you just described, AWS, we have the privilege of working with everyone from content creative studios to global streamers to broadcasters to game developers and game distributors. And it's been an honor to be able to work with them across this motion. One of the things I'm most proud of is that over a billion people right now are receiving their streaming content based off of the AWS services that we provide.

12:46It's a lot. And to your point about games, 750 million people are playing games every single month based off of those same services. And we're not just talking about AAA games like Fortnite, but casual gaming as well, like Candy Crush or Wordle from the New York Times. By the way, again, all great AWS customers. I play Wordle. You do play Wordle. I know that about you. And I'm guessing you have a text string of people you compare Wordle scores with, right? Maybe, maybe. Including many of your siblings. Yes, indeed. This I know about you, Carol. I want to talk a little bit about some big customers.

13:16Netflix, for example, is a huge customer. When you look at areas of growth across AWS and kind of overlay that with consumer behavior, where is the biggest area of growth right now in terms of what people are demanding? Yeah, so two things. One is I thought Greg Peters did a wonderful job last night during the Bloomberg Screen Time presentation. I really loved how we talked about Netflix being a build versus buy culture. Yeah, he's co-CEO of Netflix for anyone who missed it. Yeah, thank you. And so it's very important that we ground ourselves on that too because at AWS, we want to be able to provide the building blocks or the primitives to allow for anyone to be able to build anything that they could imagine.

13:52And Netflix has really leaned into that very technical organization. We're delighted to be able to partner with them for so many years. And then to your second question about like what are we seeing? Fundamentally, I'm hearing three things from customers all around the world that they want. The first is they want to be able to create more content, high fidelity content at a lower price point, much faster than ever before. And this includes live content like the ones you're watching right now to episodic content to theatrical content to animated content. You name it. They want to do it faster, cheaper and better.

14:21The second is that they want to really cultivate multi-channel monetization opportunities. So this means being able to go beyond an ad impression, but really look at being able to monetize against a 360 degree perspective of how their IP shows up across different mediums. And then finally, everyone's hyper focused on next generation of fan engagement. How can you really enhance the experience so that you don't you don't just retain subscribers? Right. But you have people coming back for more and more. And I think the through line underneath all of that is the availability of generative AI and what that can help do to help to really augment our capabilities and accelerate innovation, but then also just make us so much more productive.

15:01One of the things I thought, because I've thought about your world and all the things, whether it's media, entertainment, game, sports, which thing is kind of driving demand at AWS? I'm just curious because we keep hearing so much about gaming, everyone getting into gaming. We're going to talk a lot about gaming over the next three hours on our program. It's a big theme here. Well, look, again, we have customers across all of those industries. Let's start with what's going on in the industry. PwC released a study recently saying that by 2029, the entertainment industry is going to be worth$3.5 trillion.

15:33That's up from$2.9 trillion last year. It's like an ad of$600 billion worth of opportunity out there. And I think that if you work backwards again from those generational preferences that we're seeing, like you talked about Gen Alpha, Gen Z's propensity for games, for social, for user-generated content, for music, for audio, this really signals to more traditional established entertainment brands that it's no longer sufficient for them to be good at one type of medium anymore. They really need to diversify. They need to create much more interactive and immersive experiences. And so we're seeing this convergence of the tech come together to be able to allow for new product propositions to come to market faster than ever before.

16:10And one of the things that I'm very interested in is what that type of pressure is going to do amongst startups versus that more established legacy brand. And now you had mentioned gaming. I think that some of the incredible convergence that we're seeing across game tech, if you look at what Epic did last year with Fortnite and the concert that they had with Snoop Dogg. I know you had Snoop Dogg on this program last year, but they did an incredible job. They did a live concert. Snoop Dogg was there. It was in the game. They were able to attract millions in-game, millions more across digital platforms, and they had thousands show up in Times Square.

16:45But then Roblox is also doing the same thing. And I was just upstairs with Eunice from Scopely. She's going to be on a little later with us. I'll tell her, say hi. Great AWS customer. But you look at what they've been doing with Pokemon Go. That, again, speaks to that convergence because you want to meet consumers wherever they are across all demographics. So just to follow up then, so is it gaming where you see the most growth where even like traditional media, if you will, that's where they want to go? Or is it all of it? You know, we mentioned sports has also been an explosion. You guys have done a lot with F1.

17:13So I'm just trying to, is it all growing kind of at the same levels or is it one thing, sports over gaming or something that's really leading the way? So I think the question comes down to like, where is the engagement the best? Definitely live sports has an engagement factor that's unlike other types of traditional mediums. Again, that's why we work really closely with Formula One, the PGA Tour, the NBA. Actually, just last week, we announced a strategic relationship with the NBA. We're now their official cloud and cloud AI partner because we're going to be able to launch something called NBA inside the game powered by AWS, where we're going to be able to create a platform to ingest billions of data points from these games in order to create a more interactive and insightful gaming sports viewing experience, like really get you behind the game.

17:56So that's one element of it. But then I think you also can extend it to the engagement that occurs across, again, traditional gaming, but then there's also betting and gaming as well. Yeah. So to follow up on that on the live sports part of this, early in my career, I remember covering the Yahoo NFL game that was broadcast. This was hard to believe 10 years ago at this point. And there was so much attention on this because it was like the first streamed NFL game. A tech company was doing it. Now this is table stakes. Absolutely. Especially when it comes to AWS. What goes into producing something live versus delivering content that's already recorded?

18:32Is it much more processing? Is it much more pressure? What is it? Yeah. How technical can I get here? You can get technical. I was also going to say, there's a whole bunch of people behind here, what it takes to put this together live. And it's tricky. And we are wearing these like the football announcers. I know. I actually feel like we're commentating a live event here. So, look, a lot goes into it, right? So, I think fundamentally there's elements that are similar, right, with, like, the distribution of the technology, especially associated to streaming. But there's quite a bit that goes into the production of content.

19:05You need to be able to ingest live feeds. You need to transcode those feeds. You need to package those feeds. And all of those have historically been done through more legacy technology stacks that have had to reside on-prem. Actually, just last month we announced the 10-year anniversary of our AWS Elemental Media Services. These are purpose-built services for broadcast and production, and they allow for us to do all those things that I just described that have historically been on-prem. You could do them in the cloud. And customers are adopting them at scale. We work really closely with customers like Fox, the BBC, NBCUniversal, just to name a few.

19:39And when you say on-prem, you mean on-premise. It's the idea of actually having this equipment with you at a certain location versus having it in the cloud. Yeah, absolutely. Because I think to your point about the transition, well, why would you want to do that? You would want to do that because there's sustainability benefits associated to it. There's cost benefits associated to it. And then if you're in a position where you have to actually roll out less physical infrastructure, it allows for you to create more content, more shows. What would be preventing you if you had infinite resources from being able to cover more events like this around the world simultaneously?

20:09That's what the COD really provides. I am curious about the AWS stack. Stay with us. More from Bloomberg Businessweek Daily coming up after this. generative AI, large language models, every industry, finance, healthcare, you name it, that are tapping into it. So we think about Amazon on that level. But then I'm hearing about all the stuff that you are doing specifically with specific clients. And it sounds like that's another in the pecking order. So talk to us about that stack. Yeah, absolutely. So I'm hyper-focused on serving the media, entertainment, games, and sports industry. Everything my team and I do is really grounded around taking the AWS services that exist.

20:45There's over 200 that have numerous features and making sure that we have a subset that are very purpose-built for the needs of entertainment customers. And then we're also focused on ensuring that we can help advance the industry associated to it. So as an example, we're active participants in the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers. We actively engage with C2PA, which is focused on provenance. We actively engage with Movie Labs, which is really focused on this vision by 2030 of being able to create entire pieces of theatrical film in the cloud. And we're the only technology provider that's been able to satisfy five of the 10 different principles that they're aiming to go after.

21:19So I share that with you because I think when you look at AWS, we are the world's most comprehensive and most broadly adopted cloud. And we have 200 services that can be used to invent almost anything. My job, my team's job is really to make sure that we bring that subject matter expertise to bear, to be able to ensure that the outcomes that matter most to our entertainment customers can be realized and that we're able to bring the industry along with us. a lot. I know we're going to continue this conversation in the future. So great to get some time with you here. Thank you. It was a pleasure to meet both of you.

21:50Same here. So appreciate it. Samira Bakhtiara, she is general manager of media, entertainment, games, and sports industry over at AWS Amazon Web Services. You're listening to the Bloomberg Business Week Daily Podcast. Catch us live weekday afternoons from 2 to 5 Eastern. Listen on Apple CarPlay and Android Auto with the Bloomberg Business App. Or watch us live on YouTube. It's Carol Masser, Tim Stenebeck, live here at Bloomberg Screen Time. We are in Los Angeles. There are several names in media, entertainment, and internet spaces that you've got to listen to, and that includes our next guest.

22:24Laura Martin, senior analyst at Needham & Company, joins us. She covers media, entertainment, internet spaces. Usually we are talking to her remotely, but we came to her home. So delighted to have you here with us. When you come to an event like this, and I'm sure you go to a lot of conferences and so-and-so, what is it that you're looking out for? You know, what's great about Bloomberg Screen Time is you have everybody that's important in media, both old media and new media, which a lot of conferences miss either one silo or the other, and they are converging, and therefore their competitive statements are relevant to both sides of the business.

22:57Who's making this convergence the best? Amazon. I think Amazon and YouTube. I think if you think about Wall Street... Which is interesting because they're both like new media first, right? They're not incumbents. Yeah, no, they're not. Maybe now they could be, but not traditional incumbents. And I think sometimes incumbents ignore them. And I think Wall Street doesn't think that's actually the smartest move. There was an interesting comment in the Jimmy Kimmel conversation last night about how Jimmy Kimmel looks at YouTube and if he's changed his show as a result of YouTube. And he said, I haven't ever changed my show for YouTube, but I do like to wake up and see that a few million people have watched it.

23:28But he did say ABC doesn't make money from YouTube. YouTube is the one who makes the money. I don't know. I know YouTubers who are sailing around the world and they're making millions of dollars a year. Sounds like a good life to me. But there's a disintermediation happening right there. So even if he's getting more eyeballs, he's not seeing the revenue. I think the important point here is we have a funnel. You need to have young people at the top of the funnel to create a TV. Let's call it a habit and not just video games or not just interactivity or not just short form on TikTok. So television has to have top of the funnel.