Devo Harris

At this year’s Google I/O, we showcased the impact of our cutting-edge research to build the most helpful AI that’s more intelligent, agentic, and personalized. And I’m incredibly excited by what that means for ​us at YouTube.  We announced a powerful suite of breakthrough models, products, and features designed to enhance creativity, discovery, and community engagement on our platform​. ​I am especially thrilled about Flow (seen in action in the video below), an AI filmmaking tool with direct camera control, built for creatives to craft ​beautiful cinematic stories​ that I know will make creator storytelling even more compelling than it already is. Imagen 4, will deliver stunningly detailed images directly from prompts, and Veo, our new state-of-the-art video generation model that brings rich audio to life. Crucially, responsible creation is paramount​ to the health of the YouTube ecosystem. SynthID now watermarks over 10 billion AI-generated assets, and with SynthID Detector, we're empowering users to identify AI content​.  ​We mapped out everything you need to know about everything that was announced in our Keyword blog here:  https://lnkd.in/e7AvuHHr Check out also our 10 min summary video 👇 . It will tell you all you need to know! Curious to hear which of these features are you most excited about? #GoogleIO

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One the most pressing questions Venture Capitalists ask is what happens when the established giant in your space decides to do the same thing and crush you. Most investors are risk averse and they can never get beyond this. When we started the first online ticketing company years ago every investor said this is great. But what happens when Yahoo or Microsoft builds this and crushes you. So you say in return that’s not going to happen. But the investors can’t make the leap. The first answer to this question is that you have to build a product not a feature. Lots of products are just features masquerading as products. That is hard to defend. But the real answer lies in the ability of the giants to want to or be able to do the non scalable thing that you can do to start. In the world of online ticketing we built relationships with club owners, waded into beer stained basements to set up, fielded calls at midnight and forged friendships with band managers and promoters. We were pretty sure Bill Gates would not be found in the basement of the Bowery Ballroom at 2am on a Tuesday for a Superchunk show. For Overtime we went and talked to millions of fans. We responded to every single message and comment. Sent our team on the road to visit high school gyms around the country. People saw Overtime and we took our stories to them. We were pretty sure that Stephen A. Smith wasn’t logging into the ESPN main account as an admin and responding to a DM from a 17 year old that simply read “yo.” You can call this non scalable. Or guerrilla marketing (like Red Bull leaving empty cans around clubs in London) or growth hacking or whatever. But the incumbent rarely gets out of the office. If you do you can persevere and win, despite what an investor thinks. It’s not a clever answer but it’s a great one.

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It was only a matter of time before Netflix shared more details on its live streaming infrastructure. Today, in the first of a series of tech blog posts, [https://lnkd.in/e8YsxmjC] Netflix provides a detailed examination of the architecture behind its live streaming events and the lessons learned during their development. As Netflix rightfully points out, a unique position for the company is the ability to build support for a single product and have control over the full live lifecycle, from production to screen. Netflix leverages AWS MediaConnect and AWS MediaLive to acquire feeds in the cloud and transcode them into various video quality levels with bitrates tailored per show. Their cloud-based approach enables dynamic scaling, flexibility in configuration, and seamless integration with their DRM, content management, and content delivery services, which are already deployed in the cloud. Netflix built a custom packager to better integrate with its delivery and playback systems and also built a custom live origin to ensure strict read and write SLAs for live segments. Content is delivered via its own CDN (Open Connect), with more than 18,000 servers located near viewers at over 6,000 locations and connected to AWS locations via a dedicated Open Connect backbone network. Netflix utilizes HTTPS-based live streaming due to its widespread support among devices and compatibility with delivery and encoding systems, bypassing UDP even though it would provide ultra-low latency. They utilize AVC and HEVC video codecs, transcode with multiple quality levels ranging from SD to 4K, and employ a 2-second segment duration to balance compression efficiency, infrastructure load, and latency. Netflix delivers the manifest from the cloud instead of the CDN, as it allows them to personalize the configuration for each device. Netflix said its real-time QoE monitoring is built using a mix of internally developed tools, such as Atlas, Mantis, and Lumen, and open-source technologies, such as Kafka and Druid, processing up to 38 million events per second during some of its largest live events while providing critical metrics and operational insights in a matter of seconds. See their post for more detailed information: https://lnkd.in/e8YsxmjC #netflix #SVOD #AVOD #openconnect #contentdelivery #cloudvideo #videopipeline Thanks to Sergey Fedorov, Chris Pham, Flavio Ribeiro, chris newton, Wei Wei and the entire Netflix team, of which there are too many to list, for getting more details out to the industry.

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I spoke to the The Wall Street Journal about Shopmy's $78M raise, and the rise of affiliate commerce 👇 Below are 3 key takeaways... 𝟭/ 𝗖𝗿𝗲𝗮𝘁𝗼𝗿-𝗹𝗲𝗱 𝗮𝗳𝗳𝗶𝗹𝗶𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝗺𝗮𝗿𝗸𝗲𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗶𝘀 🔥 Later paid $250M for affiliate platform Mavely. The support ecosystem for affiliate commerce is growing w/ co's like The Creator Society, Orca, and Favored Live. And now ShopMy has raised a massive growth round. We expect more affilaite-related investment and M&A to follow, and valuations to rise. I know that many Hollywood and marketing agencies are having internal convos headlined "𝘸𝘩𝘢𝘵'𝘴 𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘢𝘧𝘧𝘪𝘭𝘪𝘢𝘵𝘦 𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘨𝘺?". 𝟮/ 𝗔𝗳𝗳𝗶𝗹𝗶𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝘁𝗲𝗰𝗵 𝗵𝗲𝗹𝗽𝘀 𝗰𝗹𝗼𝘀𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗳𝘂𝗻𝗻𝗲𝗹 IM has typically been for top-of-funnel marketing, to drive awareness for products and services. Affiliate commerce helps "𝘤𝘭𝘰𝘴𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘧𝘶𝘯𝘯𝘦𝘭" by giving creators shoppable storefronts and links, helping convert audiences and fans into paid customers of products. This will drive more marketing dollars into the creator economy. A win for all! 𝟯/ 𝗜 𝗲𝘅𝗽𝗲𝗰𝘁 𝗮 "𝘄𝗶𝗻𝗻𝗲𝗿-𝘁𝗮𝗸𝗲-𝗺𝗼𝘀𝘁" 𝗺𝗮𝗿𝗸𝗲𝘁. The affiliate market will be big enough to support various players. But TBD who will rise to the top. Key players include pure-play incumbents like LTK, affiliate initiatives from social platforms like TikTok and retailers like Amazon, and new fast-growing disruptors like ShopMy.  ...definitely a space to watch, and one our RockWater team is tracking closely. Thanks to the WSJ's Katie Deighton for the convo! -- I'm the founder of RockWater Industries. We do M&A and strategy advisory for the creator economy and digital agencies My DMs are open.

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The next few years are going to be wild. I'm speaking to so many amazing developers building products that combine AI, entertainment and gaming that have clear potential to push creators & IPs to new heights.  Here are some of the segments I’m most hyped about this year: 1️⃣ Ethical AI Infrastructure & Apps A must-have to safeguard the creator economy and ensure fair growth. 2️⃣ AI-Driven Storytelling & Worldbuilding I think of these as renaissance tools for building the next generation of IPs. 3️⃣ Decentralized IP Ecosystems Permissionless access to IP is going to revolutionize creator and remix culture while enabling innovative community-centric business models. 4️⃣ Tokenized IP / RWA (Real-World Assets) Blockchain for IP is the future. Tokenization unlocks new ways to monetize and scale IP by aligning IP with onchain primitives like fractionalization and lending and many more business models. 5️⃣ AI Agents Relevant across every industry and segment, AI Agents will transform the economy and drive massive increases in efficiency + also lead to new UI/UX fundamentals. Also going to play a role in new always-on IP experiences. 6️⃣ New Hardware for AI Compute Will help scale AI models, drive energy efficiency, revolutionise mobile and probably send us to space faster --> begin the era of transhumanism? So much more to be excited about and also big challenges to solve as we think about the fundamental infrastructure needed to support this future. What do you think?

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Warner and Bain just launched a $1.2B war chest, one of the boldest plays in music IP history. It marks a shift toward capturing not just ownership, but the full lifecycle of music’s value. Here’s what it means… 👇 1. Warner is scaling its catalog ambitions With $1.2B, they can move fast, win the top-tier rights, and lead the market. 2. Bain Capital supplies funds. Warner Music Group runs the system. Together, they’ve built a repeatable model: From acquisition to sync to distribution, every part of the value chain is active. 3. Catalogs keep earning, every day. These songs aren't idle. They stream, land syncs, and drive licensing deals. Steady, diversified revenue that fuels the whole machine. 4. Artist estates want more than a payout. They want a home that grows the legacy, not just holds it.This JV offers reach, structure, and continuity. 5. The next layer is emerging, and unclaimed. Once acquired, songs get remixed, flipped, edited, reinterpreted. Across TikTok, BandLab, YouTube, AI tools, reuse is everywhere. But most of those uses aren’t tracked or licensed. Not because artists don’t want to, but because the tools haven’t existed. TL;DR: Warner and Bain are securing catalogs to capture steady, growing revenue. The real growth is in tracking, licensing, and paying every remix, edit, and reuse, most of which is currently unmanaged. The future of catalog value depends on owning this next layer. 𝗣.𝗦. What if every remix, sample, and fan edit was instantly licensed and paid? vers1ons will make that happen soon. If you want to learn more before launch, my DMs are open. ♻️ Repost if you believe in remix economics Follow Pete Madigan and vers1ons

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NO "automated" or "AI powered" or "superior matching technology" tool from any music company can claim to have 100% accuracy when it comes to matching music data with other music data. Why? Because of human error when inputting incorrect metadata to start with, which will certainly continue until humans are no longer on earth. For example, can a machine determine what splits you verbally agreed to with your co-writers? What if it was inputted on a 50% scale by a single writer? What if two writers register the same song but one registers the english title and the other registers a Korean title? There are 1,000 more examples I can give. If a company claims 100% accuracy (yes some companies will state that), stay away from them!

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EA goes private, one of the largest leveraged buyouts in history Electronic Arts (EA) Arts just agreed to a $55B take-private deal led by Silver Lake and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), with Affinity Partners in the mix. The consortium is putting up ~$36B in equity and layering on ~$20B in debt, a structure that makes this a huge LBO, surpassing TXU Energy and Dell Technologies. The valuation multiples really caught my eye: • At ~29× EV/EBITDA, EA is being bought at a higher multiple than even Microsoft paid for Activision Blizzard (~20×). • On revenue, the deals are closer (~7.4× for EA vs. ~7.6–7.9× for ATVI), but still, this is a premium investment on live-service sports IP, future growth in AI-driven game development, and the breathing room that comes with being private. (Which has been reported that the prince is a fan of all the above.) This deal also shows a pattern: • PIF has been building a gaming empire (Nintendo, Capcom, $4.9B Scopely, now EA). • Silver Lake has a track record (remember Dell’s $24.4B go-private in 2013, later flipped back with VMware strategy). Together, they’re positioning EA not just as another gaming company, but as a durable content and live-ops platform. So why am I writing about this? I enjoy video games particularly when I was younger. I grew up on Blizzard Entertainment titles and in college, Madden was a staple. There shouldn’t be a stigma in saying that. Games are culture, and understanding them is part of understanding the business model that just commanded a record-setting multiple. What do you think for both gamers and non-gamers, does this mark a new chapter in how sovereign wealth and private equity reshape gaming? #PrivateEquity #GamingIndustry #LBO #CFOlife #CapitalMarkets #EA #Activision #PIF #SilverLake #Madden #Starcraft #Nintendo #Capcom

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tBR Op-Ed - Matt Nuccio: "Tariffs aren’t exactly the sexiest topic in the world of invention. They don’t spark the same excitement as a great new product idea or the buzz of a toy hitting the shelf.  I’ve seen firsthand how these policy changes ripple through the entire creative ecosystem. …and here’s the truth, inventors often get hit the hardest. (Thanks, Matt, insightful) Read More.... #PeopleOfPlay #Inventors #ToyInventors #GameInventors #tariffs #policy #creativeecosystem #licensing https://lnkd.in/gF7xC3ke

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I've had the pleasure of talking to a lot of journalists since our Series C announcement (https://lnkd.in/gwJFKNZT) The topic du jour is what will humans do with AI? It is the other way around. This isn't the age of upskilling—it's the age of reskilling. AI isn't a tool—it's a reset button. It will force humans up the value chain. AI can research better than any human in the world. Full stop. But research without action is a hobby. Hypo: You are running a large Accounting firm, and you need to grow inorganically. Old gen: hire a consulting firm that specializes in M&A to create a target list of firms to acquire. Next gen: o3 will build that list in 0.001% of the time, at 0.00001% of the cost, and will be 2x better. BUT AI isn't going to transact the deal for you. It's not going to approach the firm, build the trust, and make it a reality. That job is, and will be, reserved for people. AI is our chance to reimagine what humans should be doing. Not to hold on to what we've done.

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