You Can Deploy VPU Encoding In Seconds Without Lock In

Spinning up high-performance video encoding should not require a weeks-long infrastructure project or a hyperscaler feature request.

Mark Mahle, co-founder and CEO of NetActuate, joins Voices of Video to discuss a network-first approach to global infrastructure as a service, and why the “plumbing” of the internet still determines whether video workflows feel fast, flexible, and resilient.

In this episode, we look at where NetActuate fits between public cloud, co-location, and private data centers, and why infrastructure choice is becoming a key driver for video teams. Cost matters, but so does the ability to run the right workload in the right location with the right hardware. That includes predictable capacity, low-latency connectivity, and specialized compute like NETINT VPUs.

Mark explains how NetActuate’s global footprint and highly peered network support real-world services at scale, then we move into what this means for streaming, transcoding, and live event workflows.

The episode also includes a hands-on demo: deploying a virtual machine with a NETINT VPU attached, selecting firmware, viewing accelerator details, and using observability signals across the deployment. We also look at managed Kubernetes nodes with VPUs for cloud-native video workflows.

Then comes the “wait, what?” moment: controlling NETINT’s BitStreams media processing framework through an AI assistant using plain language. The demo shows Claude creating an adaptive bitrate ladder, applying overlays, and starting a DASH output that can be played immediately.

If you are building video streaming infrastructure, evaluating VPUs for hardware-accelerated encoding, or trying to lower cloud spend without giving up speed, this episode is worth watching.

In this episode:

• Why network-first infrastructure matters for latency-sensitive video
• How NetActuate fits between hyperscalers, co-location, and private data centers
• Why teams want more flexibility, custom hardware access, and cost control
• How NETINT VPUs can be deployed through NetActuate’s global platform
• VM provisioning with an attached VPU
• Firmware selection and accelerator visibility
• Observability for VPU-powered deployments
• Managed Kubernetes nodes with VPU access
• Using an AI assistant to control BitStreams workflows in plain language
• Creating ladders, overlays, and DASH output through natural language commands

For cutting-edge video encoding solutions, visit NETINT at https://netint.com.

Subscribe to Voices of Video for more hands-on conversations with the people building the next generation of video infrastructure.

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.

Transcript

Mark Donnigan, NETINT 0:07

Voices of video. Voices of video. The voices of video.

Voices of Video 0:12

Voices of video.

Fast Things And Shared Origins

Mark Donnigan, NETINT 0:17

Welcome back to another episode of Voices of Video. I am super excited for this guest, Mark Maley, who is one of the co-founders and CEO of NetActuate. Now, Mark and I over dinner at NAB realized that we both have a passion for things that go fast. So welcome, Mark. Maybe we'll have to do another episode on cars and motorcycles and that kind of stuff. But uh hey, welcome to Voices of Video.

Mark Mahle, NetActuate 0:46

Yeah, thanks, Mark, for having me. That's right. You know, whether it's cars or motorcycles or, you know, transcoding or encoding on a VPU, we definitely like things that go fast.

Mark Donnigan, NETINT 0:56

We like things that go fast. Now, I uh you know, if it's not uh powered by electricity uh in a data center, speaking of like VPUs, I prefer four wheels, but I know that, you know, based on what you tell me, you have quite the two-wheel collections.

Mark Mahle, NetActuate 1:12

That's true. Yeah. I mean, for me, honestly, if it goes, and really that's like land, air, or sea, I'm into it. So any number of wheels, you know, a sail, a propeller, hey. That's amazing.

Mark Donnigan, NETINT 1:25

I don't think I knew as so. Are you a pilot?

Mark Mahle, NetActuate 1:28

I'm not a pilot. My wife is a pilot. Uh, it's on my list. I sail, you know, and yeah, I love motorcycles, cars.

Mark Donnigan, NETINT 1:35

Incredible. Yeah. My my dad was a pilot. So I grew up in an aviation household. You know, I used to joke uh while my you know, my friends were doing the cool stuff with their dads, like hunting and fishing, because I grew up in Colorado. So, you know, they're doing all the cool stuff. I was at the airport, and actually I didn't mind it. You know, I thought it was cool, but it, you know, sometimes it was a little annoying. We're driving, you know, literally on family trips or whatever, and my dad would see just a local regional airport, and we'd, I mean, nine times out of ten, it's like there's a detour, we'd stop at the airport, he'd go meet the FBO operator, you know. It was just like, you know, we'd get a little tour, you know, invariably there was some cool, you know, airplane hanging out in the back corner of a hangar somewhere. So yeah.

Mark Mahle, NetActuate 2:25

Yeah, I think that's pretty cool. That's an interesting note. I mean, it really is the Mark and Mark show today. I I was actually born in Colorado, so we've got something else.

Mark Donnigan, NETINT 2:32

Really? Wow. Okay. All right. And I know we were comparing before we hit hit record that we both taught ourselves basic, you know, reading some of those very, very early PC and I wouldn't even say home computer, personal computer, hobby computer magazines, you know.

Mark Mahle, NetActuate 2:50

Yeah.

Mark Donnigan, NETINT 2:51

Almost were self-published, some of these, you know, the audience were just so small back in the days.

Mark Mahle, NetActuate 2:57

Yeah, that's right. Yeah, I think a lot about how far we've come and how fast we're moving now, especially. Um, you know, I've been in the industry for for a long time. Um, and you know, I think it's it's just such an exciting time to be alive and to be involved in what we're doing.

Mark Donnigan, NETINT 3:14

Yeah, very, very cool. I saw a post today from uh uh uh you know industry luminaire we all know from uh Dave Ronka that he was commenting about I think his first like computer science classes, you know, maybe freshman year. And um it took me back, you know, and how he was handwriting, and I believe he was even punching cards. Well, guess what? Um 1986, Colorado State University, when I would go into the computer lab, I would stand in line to get cards punched. Now, I'm dating myself, but at the same time, I was learning Fortran, COBOL, and wow, Pascal, that was the new modern language.

Mark Mahle, NetActuate 3:59

Absolutely. Yeah, I was sharing with you my my co-founder um, you know, started a YouTube channel called the Serial Port. And so if you like vintage computing and want to see these things work, we actually operate a computer museum in uh Raleigh, North Carolina that you're welcome to come visit. You you can you can probably punch some cards actually if you if you want to.

Mark Donnigan, NETINT 4:19

Yeah, that's right. Yeah, yeah. We um, you know, you know, the the card punch was just to get the experience. So in reality, that but but I did have to turn in some projects and I turned in my cards. Like that was the the assignment, the deliverable, you know. So, and it had to run. Yeah boy, those are those are the days, you know, it's like you know, kids today, they've discovered like vinyl records. You know, they've discovered, you know, there's this, you know, I guess move to nostalgia in a way. But, you know, there is something about the physicality, you know, of those experiences, you know, which is why, you know, I actually do believe vinyl, it just sounds different. You know, you can say it sounds better. I believe it sounds better, but it sounds different, you know, and there's something about the experience, you know, of taking the record out and putting it and, you know, getting the needle on the groove and dropping it down, and you know, so all right.

Punch Cards Vinyl And Early Tech

Mark Donnigan, NETINT 5:16

Well, enough nostalgia. Let's talk about uh about you and about the company that you have built and NetActuate. So we're just, I guess, three weeks or so past NAB. It was an amazing show. I know that you guys uh, you know, were book solid, a lot of activity around the cloud, but really this whole idea of infrastructure as a service. And so, you know, without further ado, why don't you give the story? You know, who is NetAx8? How did you come to be? What do you do? And then we're gonna move right into some over-the-shoulder demos, which are are quite cool. So for the viewers, don't click away. And if for some reason you're listening to this in audio, this is an episode you're probably gonna want to go back and watch on YouTube or watch on LinkedIn. You're gonna want to see the video. But tell us about NetActuate.

Mark Mahle, NetActuate 6:12

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks, Mark. I wasn't expecting to get so philosophical to kick things off, but it's great. I know, I know.

Mark Donnigan, NETINT 6:19

I mean, I think that's the first time we've done that here on Voices of Video. So that's kind of funny.

Mark Mahle, NetActuate 6:24

Yeah, and I have direct experience. You know, my son was very into Tovinel, he's off at college. My daughter's going to college now, and um, interestingly, she and her generation got stuck on CDs. I was like, why are you buying all these CDs again? That Wild. Um Yeah, they just they just love. So I think the Walkman, right? Didn't Sony release that? And it was like $2,000. They released it a few years ago. Well, you know, yeah, big perfect.

Mark Donnigan, NETINT 6:49

You know, okay, all right. The last, the last nostalgia. Um, so I actually didn't finish my computer science degree. I decided I wanted to be a rock star, and so I went to music schools, you know, so I so I switched colleges, switched universities, and I, you know, um, I did two years of computer science and I went and finished the rest of my time uh, you know, in music. I spent, I think it was $300 of my student loan money because $300 back then, well, I mean, it's still $300 is nothing to laugh at, but it was like, it was a lot of money. Like my rent, I think, was like $125, you know, that I was sharing a house with a couple guys, you know. So like I was spending the equivalent of almost three months' rent on this really high end. And it was a Sony Walkman, but it was one of their, when it, I don't remember the model number, but it was high-end. And of course, I'm a music major, so I really cared about audio quality, but it was super small, super compact. You know, it was one of those that, you know, you could shake it and the pitch wouldn't change, you know, those things with cassette tape. Boy, I I love that thing. I had it for many, many, many, many years. But anyway, interesting, interesting time. Let's talk about NetActuate.

NetActuate Origin Story And Mission

Mark Mahle, NetActuate 8:11

Yeah. So, you know, I started my career, geez, 30 plus years ago now. And, you know, I guess if there's there's an origin story, you know, I came to Silicon Valley in '99, right at the tail end of the boom, saw some incredible things, and then the bust. And uh, you know, I do think about that today. I mean, when people talk about AI and, you know, where we are, um, you know, oh, this feels, you know, unreal, it feels similar. Um, I think the difference is that, you know, we are using more and more of this. Like technology, it's just a ubiquitous part of our lives, right? Whether whether it's AI, whether it's what you're watching with streaming, um I mean, w we couldn't survive, right, without the technology that we have today. And back in 2000, you know, that really wasn't the case. Um and so I was fortunate to to work at a couple uh startups that were you know very successful. One was acquired by Cisco, another, you know, went public, was bought, went public again, spun out, and I think now has been bought again. But uh, you know, through that experience, um was uh I I really I really got to experience what it was like to work with smart people that um you know were parts of amazing teams.

Mark Donnigan, NETINT 9:26

Yes.

Mark Mahle, NetActuate 9:27

And so when I when I kind of left that career, or when when I left that industry, I guess, at least in terms of locations, I thought about what I wanted to do. And and that was really build something that would be based on partnerships. And so that's a very early early origin story, I guess, of of you know what we've become today, which is really focusing on engineering and partnering with smart teams that are building things. So yeah, um, happy to go into more detail.

Mark Donnigan, NETINT 9:52

Yeah, amazing. So why don't you give a brief explanation of what you're you know, what you're offering is, the platform, as well as then who you serve and then how, you know, then that will connect to the partnership with NetInts and VPUs that are that are being integrated in your data centers now. And then, you know, then we'll want to see a demo. We'll want to actually see, you know, what you build. But yeah, start start start with the offer, you know, what is it that you even have?

Mark Mahle, NetActuate 10:26

Yeah, so I I think just going back to you know how we approach things and how I think about the world, um, not to be too philosophical, but but at the core, the way I describe what we do is it's really about facilitating communication. All of this technology um that we have today, it's it's only valuable because we can do what you and I are doing right now, right? We're on in different states or different parts of the world, we're talking to each other, we can see each other, hear each other. You know, and and so uh if you look me up, it's it's kind of a joke, right? But I make my title chief plumber, and it's because I like to deal with the plumbing of things, right? It's that facilitation. And so NetActuate in its name, right? We're a network first, and we're the fourth largest network in the world by number of peers, and that's other networks that we connect to. Um we're the second largest in the United States, and we're really about you know facilitating um that communication between people and the technology that they use. And so an actuator is something that moves something forward. And so our name means to move something forward with the network. What is, you know, what does the network facilitate? Well, it's you know, it's all kinds of things. It's compute, right? It's different types of services that people are building. And so that's really what our focus has been. Um, we've just celebrated 10 years uh as NetActuate proper. Um, and we're now in 45 plus global markets, 22 in North America, but we're you know on every major continent uh and every major media market, and we really power um a tremendous number of services um around the world. So um, yeah, I mean, a typical customer of ours is you know, multinational company that has things that you know they need infrastructure in North America and Europe and Africa and South America, Asia, you know, or some combination of all of those things. And, you know, we're really like this company that most people haven't heard of because of that partnership and that engineering approach. So, you know, we power over 60% of the world's TLDs, so domains. If you just type in, you know, netInt.com, your request is actually routing through our network to figure out where do I go to get to dot com as an example. Wow. And you know, we've largely operated sort of on the B2B enterprise and the security space.

Mark Donnigan, NETINT 12:51

Yeah. So

Why Video Demands Network Performance

Mark Donnigan, NETINT 12:53

how did you you know make the leap or get into video, get into media, get into streaming?

Mark Mahle, NetActuate 13:00

Yeah, if I think back personally, it's funny. That first startup that I worked for back in 2000 was a company called WebEx, which you may be familiar with.

Mark Donnigan, NETINT 13:08

Absolutely.

Mark Mahle, NetActuate 13:09

I was responsible for like telecom uh you know partner APIs, and you know, we had a lot of things that we had to solve there with video that was pretty interesting. And just how does video flow over the network? How is it real time? Um and I think from from a network perspective, you know, what flows through the network doesn't necessarily matter. But but when it comes to video, right, it really can. And so our focus on latency, some of the tooling that we have for the kind of high performance customers that need to operate things from all over the world today use, it was really clear to us that there's a strong use case there for video. And so that's why we started to look at this space in particular and look at um, you know, how we can approach more real-time video on demand transcoding from a service perspective, as opposed to maybe just, you know, CDNs and security and and kind of the other things that don't have as much of that component to it.

Mark Donnigan, NETINT 14:07

Yeah, understand. And

Choice Beyond Hyperscaler Platforms

Mark Donnigan, NETINT 14:10

so I think probably listeners at this point are saying, wow, sounds interesting, but help them understand how exactly does your offer compare to a public cloud as an example. Um, just you know, I'm gonna say infrastructure as a service type offerings, or even just a a colo data center, you know, where where do you fit on that, you know, dare I say, continuum, you know, from like public cloud to like just a colo, you know, and everything in between. Where do you fit?

Mark Mahle, NetActuate 14:48

Yeah, that's a great question. I would say you've kind of underscored it. It's it's one, it's all of those things, and I'll describe how, but really, you know, again, it starts with the network. It starts with facilitating that communication between those, and then it also starts with choice. Coming out of big tech and being parts of large deployments that are in those platforms. One, there's nothing wrong, right? It's it's like the old adage like you never got fired for buying IBM. Yeah. Um, using a hyperscaler is is great, right? Using your own data center is great. Using different things around the world, depending on the market, the technology, the business requirements that you have, that's what you should do. What we really believed in from sort of a foundational approach is that you should have the choice. You should have the choice to use what you want, where you want for those business or those technical reasons. And so I think one of the big differentiators that we have in terms of, you know, not just being an IaaS, not just being a cloud, because we have all those things, is that we sort of let you pick and choose. You can mix and match. So a typical customer for us has their own data center. Uh, they're using hyperscalers for certain things. You know, they might need some types of compute or custom GPUs or VPUs, or you know, they might need different network services, but they don't need all those things in all the same places. And so I think a lot of the other platforms, they're very platform-centric. They're like, buy everything from us, um, you're gonna be in our box.

Mark Donnigan, NETINT 16:17

Yeah.

Mark Mahle, NetActuate 16:18

And instead, we say, look, what are you what do you need to be successful? Right. And and what problems are you really trying to solve, and how can we facilitate that? So we connect those things together and we kind of let you use all of them. So the things you just mentioned. If you wanted to come to us for IaaS, you know, I need compute, I need virtual machines, I need managed Kubernetes, that's great. If you say, I want to co-locate equipment in some places, that's fine. If you say I have my own data centers and I want to connect, you know, those resources to those data centers, we'll do that for you. If you need an operations team to monitor those things, if you want, you know, higher level services built on top of that, that's exactly what we do. And so that's really the core difference between all of those other platforms where where you know you really don't have as much choice.

Mark Donnigan, NETINT 17:07

Yeah, got it, got it. Yeah, it's it's interesting what you're saying because there is a a bit of a of a common refrain throughout the industry that we're hearing, and presume, presumably you are too, especially as you would be an alternative to a public cloud. And the common refrain is, you know, engineering teams, companies who are looking to move again, I put sort of in quotes, move off the cloud. Now, in reality, they're not moving off the cloud so much as they're saying, you know, we're we're looking for more flexibility, choice, you know, in the way that our systems are implemented, operated, you know, even something as simple as we want to implement VPU. And, you know, in a traditional public cloud, unless they've already done that integration work, like you, you know, you can't go and knock on the door of, you know, whichever cloud you're using and say, hey, by the way, I'm gonna ship you 500 of these net cards. I need you to install them here, here, and here. You know, they basically go, uh, no. Um, and that's a real limiting factor. It's becoming a limiting factor. So people are looking for choice. Um, of course, there's a cost component, you know, there you you hear that a lot. Hey, we're looking to cut again in quotes, you know, cut our public cloud bill, which is reality. Everybody's looking to save money. But a lot of times it's about that choice, you know, which is why I find it interesting. And I'm guessing it's why you had such a successful NAB, is that, you know, you probably were meeting people who maybe initially were attracted by, you know, some of your uh some of your costs, because they are very attractive, um, meaning they're very low relative to other offers, but it's the choice, I'm guessing. Let me ask you this question, and then I really want to get to the demo because I know some of the things you've got to show, and you know, I I think people are gonna be really excited.

NetInt VPU Offer And Economics

Mark Donnigan, NETINT 19:11

Um, but uh why don't you explain what your offer is with RVPUs? So if somebody wanted to deploy NetInt and they're saying, hey, I don't want to do it in my own data center, or I don't have data centers, or I'm currently on the public cloud, and exactly for the reasons I just said, you know, the public cloud is not, or the particular cloud I'm using hasn't made them available. What are you offering? So what does that offer look like?

Mark Mahle, NetActuate 19:42

Yeah. Yeah. Well, first, just on the price, um you're 100% right. I mean, I think that, you know, the public cloud, it has its purpose, right? But we all know that that in some cases, with how margin stacking works, you're paying 10, 15, 20x, right? What you could be. And so especially when you have predictable workloads, I think you can save a tremendous amount. And and there's a way to sort of have your cake and eat it too, right? To use maybe dedicated capacity or if you have 80% consistent capacity needs in a managed way, where on a CapEx or OpEx model, you could, you know, save a tremendous amount and still get the benefits of a team running it like a public cloud, so you don't have to worry about, you know, if things are on fire, I I'm responsible for changing them in the middle of the night or fixing them. Um and I think we've taken that same approach to to the Neton integration. Um the first option that we have is we've released um a full and a very deep kind of integration with NetNVPUs on our IaaS. And so that means virtual machines, it means things like managed Kubernetes that you can spin up. And we've enabled that in all of our 45 global markets, and we are in the process of deploying that to uh a whole slew of initial sites in the US, Europe, Asia, and South America. And so some of these things are live today, which we'll get to see in the demo. Um, and that lets you deploy, you know, that that compute resource and attach an event card to it to attach a VPU. And the performance there is amazing. I've been doing some testing, just comparing, you know, normal CPU and different technologies to the performance you get on these things. That when you look at the performance and the cost savings, you know, it's it's tremendous. It's magnitudes of you know, multiples greater than exactly.

Mark Donnigan, NETINT 21:27

Yeah, yeah, it's it's it's really interesting because, you know, generally speaking, um, in in the in video encoding, you know, if you're talking like uh compression gains, uh, you know, everybody likes to say oh 50%, but no one ever gets 50%. It's like 20, 25, 30 percent, which is still can be very significant. So that you know, um, but we're talking the point is we're talking double lower double digit percentages. And when you're talking like 10x, it's Like sometimes people go, wait a second, did you say 10 times? Like not 10% or not even 100%? So you mean 10 times? I'm like, yes. Right?

Mark Mahle, NetActuate 22:12

And that's like and even more so on the cost factor, right? So you're getting that performance, but when you say the cost factor, yeah. I just ran a comparison that I I think at the low end it's 32 times better cost than a well-known public cloud. Yeah. Yeah. For doing in code.

Mark Donnigan, NETINT 22:30

We've we've we've run all those same benchmarks. And the beautiful thing is now, you know, we have we have more than 200,000 cards installed and working in the field in data centers. And so now we have a significant amount of both official and sort of unofficial data from our customers. Unofficial meaning, you know, they they haven't said, hey, here's our exact internal findings, but you know, they've they verbally said, hey, you know, our internal findings were this or that, or, you know, and it all matches. It's like, and it's beautiful when that's the case because sometimes, let's face it, the modeled, you know, the modeled cost savings or efficiency or performance numbers can be a little bit different than actual deployment. In some cases, customers are coming back and saying, you know, you say 10x, but it's actually 30x, you know, just like what you just said. And we're like, well, you know, at some point people just don't believe you when the number gets so big. So we kind of said, you know what, 10x is good enough. So that's the number that we use in marketing.

Portal Demo Deploying A VPU VM

Mark Donnigan, NETINT 23:38

But um, Mark, why don't you um, if you're ready, let's go ahead and switch to doing a screen share here and you know, show us some of the things you build.

Mark Mahle, NetActuate 23:48

Yeah, that sounds great. Um, the other thing I'll say, just in turn, what we'll show you here, or what I'll show you is we'll deploy, as we're just speaking, we'll deploy a virtual machine with a net end VPU attached. Um, I'm gonna do that, and you can kind of get a sense for for what we do. You know, we have sort of infrastructure networking, our global platform observability, but you can see things like, you know, virtual machines, bare metal, co-location, which we talked about, storage, cloud, Kubernetes. Um, I think one of the interesting things when it when it comes to our NetEnt partnership is that you don't just have to use our IaaaaS. So if you have that use case where maybe you don't have your own data center or it isn't reliable enough, or you want to be better connected, we can co-locate NetEnt hardware for you. We can do custom, you know, bespoke sort of bare metal in addition to IaaS. And you manage everything in one place.

Mark Donnigan, NETINT 24:41

Yeah, I really want to put an exclamation mark on what you just said, because um, I know that there's listeners there or there will be listeners to this interview who are looking for exactly what you just said, where um they need that hybrid, you know, they have their own data centers, they want to be able to flex, and they need a a vendor, they need an you know, a service provider who can give them all of it. Or they would like to have that, you know, rather than having to go get a piece from you know this this company, a piece from this other company, and then operate still something themselves. And so I think that's a really unique differentiator. Not everybody needs it, you know, but those who do are gonna be beating a path to your door, I feel.

Mark Mahle, NetActuate 25:34

So yeah, it's true. We're a one-stop shop. We're really, you know, that team on the ground in all these markets, whether it's import, logistics, right, cabling things that that can get that done. But you know, the power really is that you can combine that with the entire cloud platform. So as I'm I'm speaking here, I'm just kind of going through the UI of our portal. Everything is available through APIs, uh, you know, through different automations. And in fact, I'll I'll show you something that I built with Claude where you don't even have to. It's amazing today. You don't even have to.

Mark Donnigan, NETINT 26:08

Yeah, I can't I can't wait to see your Claude. You gave me a preview of that.

Mark Mahle, NetActuate 26:12

That's cool. Uh, you know, I want this. But what you can see here is, you know, I'm I'm deploying a machine, I'm gonna pick up a NetEnt card, I'm gonna say, I want to pass it through. One of the things that we do is we let you sort of pick and choose your firmware. So whether it's is your team, Mark, that's provided uh a custom firmware to somebody or an update, uh, you know, you're able to do that. Um, and it's it's very easy to apply custom firmwares. You can sort of pick how much memory you want, CPU, disk space. Go ahead and then pick an operating system. You can upload your own, obviously. You can use, you know, even bitstreams, images. I'm just gonna pick a test Ubuntu for this as we're speaking. Different networking options. Again, if you need to connect this, I think one of the advantages that we have in terms of you know our network, being the fourth largest network in the world, we are connected to almost every other platform, media company, you know, in terms of a head end, in terms of being able to get things to affiliates, right? Um, there's a tremendous uh amount of flexibility that our network offers you in terms of latency, in terms of cost savings over traditional methods. And so we give you a lot of flexibility there as well to reach your customers or your partners. I'm just gonna name this like test.bpu.com. Hey, that would be a good domain name that will deploy the server. And so on our side, um, you know, this happens pretty quickly. I think a NetEnt VM is spun up in about 20 seconds. So while that's happening, I don't know if you've got any questions, Mark.

Mark Donnigan, NETINT 28:00

So is this typical um is this spin-up time for a machine? You said 20 seconds. I noticed it said up to three minutes. What is the normal kind of time that it would take? You know, let's talk about US and then does it change if I'm in Latin America, you know, if I want to spin up in Latin America or Europe or some other region?

Mark Mahle, NetActuate 28:24

Yeah, it really doesn't. The the time, average time is about eight seconds for the resources. What ends up taking more time, let's say that you have a custom image or ISO or something that you're installing yourself. And you know, you can you can stage those things around the world, but um if if you know you have to add time to install software and things like that, that can take longer.

Mark Donnigan, NETINT 28:52

Of course.

Mark Mahle, NetActuate 28:54

And so uh you know, I just want to give a little brief overview of what it looks like in our portal and just how deep the the integration with NetEd is. But one of the things that we expose once you have your machine up, you can do all the normal things that you know you would expect in terms of managing it, right? This is kind of like that cloud native functionality you were talking about. Every cloud has the same things, they just look a little bit different. You can obviously start and stop your machines, you can do things from the network and storage. But we expose accelerators here, and so we show you what what net end cards you have attached to it. We show you the the firmwares that are available. If you're using virtual functions, we actually show you in real time some statistics that come out of the encoder, which is pretty interesting, and that is also tied into our observability platform. So you can start to get cost metrics and performance metrics over a fleet of uh machines that are deployed with NetInc cards, which is pretty interesting. And if you wanted to change the firmware, which I know you guys allow on the fly firmware uh changes, yes, we do, you're able to do that right from our UI. And it's just easy as you know clicking updates.

Mark Donnigan, NETINT 30:16

This is that that that option feature right there is much requested. You know, we all know it's it's when you're running something in production updates, it can be problematic, and you know, you have to really be thoughtful, right, about how you do that. And there can be good reasons why someone may want to update to the to the latest version, may not. And in a handful of cases, we do have customers that have their own custom firmware builds, and that can be problematic in some of the traditional infrastructure as a service platforms where, you know, because of their business models, they need to kind of be running everybody on the same firmware. So yeah. That's that's really special.

Mark Mahle, NetActuate 31:10

I'll touch on briefly is that you know, we deployed a virtual machine with a NetInc card, but coming out of NAB, one of the other things that we had some interest in is that you can deploy our managed Kubernetes stack and you can add nodes to your managed Kubernetes deployment that have NetInc cards attached to them. And that's pretty powerful because if you're using workflows or you have a stack that's you know already like Kubernetes native, now you can say, I want to have 10 NetInc cards accessible to these Kubernetes nodes, and you can expose them and then use all of your existing tooling for load balancing and managing workloads across those cards. It's kind of a cool feature, uh, I think that I haven't seen in the other clouds yet. Um it's mostly focused on just that core compute, not really on being able to have um to be able um to Kubernetes itself directly. So, yeah, so that was a deployment from uh from our portal.

AI Assistant Control With Claude

Mark Mahle, NetActuate 32:14

What is more exciting uh to me probably, and I'll stop sharing that, is that we can do the same things just by talking to an AI assistant. And so before NAB, uh I think just a day or two before, it was Kenneth on your team said, you know, um, hey, you've got an API. You were I I had another demo that was using uh an AI assistant to deploy something. And he was like, Well, can you do this with with the NetEnt APUs? And the answer was absolutely. And so I think in less than an hour of just setup work, so just you know, kind of saying to saying to an AI assistant, this is what I want you to do. We now have a playbook that within a minute or two, and this is on our GitHub, you can download this and give it to your Claude code, you can give it to Codex or or Gemini or any of your AI assistants and literally just sort of speak to it and say, here's what I want you to do. All right. Well, as you know today, everybody is working in some type of AI assistant. And so I've got Claude. Yes, we are. Up here with Claude Remote, and now with glasses and you know your phone, you can literally uh you can use Claude everywhere. Or codex, you know, or it depends. Use your favorite AI assistant, I like to say. But but just before NAB, we put together a little demo, and this is public. You can go to our GitHub and download this. That lets you take really any assistant and then deploy and manage your NetInt VPU-based uh resources on our cloud. And it also integrates with the Bitstream software, which is a pretty cool feature. So you know, got that up here. We can see that we've deployed um a NetInt quadra uh based resource. Um we're at 0% load right now. So instead of going to a web UI, instead of manually creating workflows and doing different things, we can basically tell Claude this is what we want you to do. So let's see. I am uh you know not the expert, but I'm gonna say create a new bitstreams template here called uh live source, and we'll wanna encode it with AEVC and some different resolutions and set a look at it. Very cool.

Mark Donnigan, NETINT 34:40

Yeah, you're just using natural language, you know. No need to understand FFM peg commands or yeah, that's right.

Mark Mahle, NetActuate 34:53

I mean, that's that's pretty amazing what what you can do today. And so we can see here already um we've got a template created. We have a rendition ladder and uh it's ready to go. So one of the next things I think that would be pretty common is to create an overlay, you know, to put your logo or an image on top of it. And so just uh a year ago, this would involve logging into something and uploading using a UI, clicking around, and instead we can just ask Claude to do that for us.

Mark Donnigan, NETINT 35:29

Awesome. And you're just using uh I see co-work here, um which is just so incredible because um obviously a lot of people are working in code, you know, Claude code, but uh more and more I think people are going to the chat interface because A, it's easy, it's right there, it's just it's accessible, right?

Mark Mahle, NetActuate 35:59

So yeah, no, that's really true.

Mark Donnigan, NETINT 36:01

Amazing.

Mark Mahle, NetActuate 36:02

Because, you know, the more and more people I I like to say this, when your taxi driver is, you know, telling you about something or your Uber driver, yeah, you know it's ubiquitous, right? And I've had people tell me, you know, they're they're asking co-work to you know print labels for them and and you know arrange like uh FedEx pickup and and it's working, right?

Mark Donnigan, NETINT 36:25

Yeah.

Mark Mahle, NetActuate 36:26

And so uh it really is amazing how accessible this is. And you know, we could be I could be talking to this instead of typing these commands or putting these commands in here, but because we're on video, I'm not doing that.

Mark Donnigan, NETINT 36:36

Yeah.

Mark Mahle, NetActuate 36:36

You can see what I did just now. I uh I create a new Bitstream session for our demo, and I'm gonna start uh Big Buck Bunny, our favorite. An industry favorite, yeah. And then we'll we'll take a look and see if we can actually load the the dash uh URL.

Mark Donnigan, NETINT 36:59

And let me uh I'm gonna I'm gonna make one uh comment just for the listeners and the viewers who may not be familiar with what Bitstreams is, because I'm gonna assume not everybody knows. So Bitstreams is our is NetInts media processing framework. It's uh it's a very very nice uh you know graphical interface. It allows you to control multiple VPUs, it has all of the you know, I'll say sort of traditional features that you would find in a in a transcoder. And that's what he is controlling here. So if you're kind of wondering what's this bit streams, that's what it is.

Mark Mahle, NetActuate 37:45

Yeah, that's a great point. In fact, um I'm gonna stop sharing Claude just for a minute. And what I'll do is we're gonna look at bitstreams.

Mark Donnigan, NETINT 37:58

Yeah, cool. Because that's also something else that's really nice is you know, not only do you get the cards in the network, um, and you have all of uh the software and support um that NetAxuate brings you to manage those servers, you also get the software to be able to manage the VPUs, set them up, configure them, operate them without having to go to command lines. So it's uh real nice.

Mark Mahle, NetActuate 38:29

That's exactly right. And and you know, being new to Bitstreams myself, I think it was really cool to see just how accessible and straightforward it is, whether it's you know, understanding what's happening from a dashboard perspective or the hardware. And so, you know, what we're looking at here is the bitstreams uh software deployed on the machine that uh we use Cloud to deploy. And we can see actually that you know, one job running.

Mark Donnigan, NETINT 38:56

Yeah, we're one running here.

Mark Mahle, NetActuate 38:59

This is the uh session that we created. It's live. We can come in here, we can see it's been running for two minutes and 30 seconds. Um you know, if we wanted to look.

Mark Donnigan, NETINT 39:10

Yeah, there you go. Big buck bunny.

Mark Mahle, NetActuate 39:15

Um, you know, we can see our our input details, we can see everything else. In terms of the template, you know, we can also see uh we had asked just our AI assistant to create this. We didn't do it in the web UI. Um, but we can see here that uh we have our graphic uh overlay, you know, and the ladder set up um and it matches 100% what what we asked.

Mark Donnigan, NETINT 39:37

Incredible. Yeah.

Mark Mahle, NetActuate 39:40

Yeah, so it's uh you know, it's really uh it's really like I said, it's an amazing time uh to be alive and to be working on these things and just thinking about how accessible and easy and straightforward this technology makes things.

Mark Donnigan, NETINT 39:57

Yeah, and I love you know, I love the fact that with Claude, you're just using plain language, you know, just to describe exactly what you want, just as if you were telling a colleague or coworker, like, hey, let's, you know, let's build, you know, uh a profile. Here's the adaptive bitrate ladder. I suggest these target, you know, use describe it, right? Except you describe it directly to the MCP, and then it does it through bitstreams. It's it's incredible.

Mark Mahle, NetActuate 40:34

It's tremendously powerful, right? And so this is the dash resource. I'm running it in VLC here, and we can see that it's running, but I think this is a very simple demo. We're just doing one thing. I think you know, where the power really comes into play is you can say, you know, I want to spin up 20 uh, you know, VPUs, I want to encode this, I want to, you know, I've got this live event happening, I want to be prepared for that. You know, and and it's that power where, you know, in the past, I mean, coordination, you know, technical resources, operational people, engineering, you know, you have to make sure all these things are in place. This puts this in the hands of you know, anybody, a business person, a production manager, somebody doesn't need to call IT to make these things work. They can just talk to their assistant. Right.

Mark Donnigan, NETINT 41:28

Yeah.

Mark Mahle, NetActuate 41:29

Yeah, it's true.

Mark Donnigan, NETINT 41:30

Yeah, this is this is cool. I had the opportunity to see this as I think you had just finished it that morning at NAB. And yeah, I that's when I said, okay, we have to schedule this interview, you have to show it. This is just really game changing. I mean, that word gets used a lot, you know, and sometimes, you know, if everything's game changing, nothing is, right? But this is game changing. It really is.

Mark Mahle, NetActuate 41:56

Yeah, in fact, I mean, a kind of funny adage from from you know being there um at NAB is that somebody wanted to see the demo. And, you know, I I was just walking by. I said, sure, let me let me take out my laptop, right? And I started to open it up, and several other people came around. They were like, all right, let's let's look at this. And he's like, you know, I'm gonna get a cup of coffee. And he just stepped away, he just walked, you know, five or six feet away, got himself an espresso, and he came back and the demo was over, right? Because we had used AI, we used Claude to say this is what we want to do, and everybody was kind of blown away. And it was that fast, right? And again, it's that accessibility combined with the power of what you can do with the VPU, right? That I think is something that's really special in this industry and and transformative. Yeah, totally agree.

Mark Donnigan, NETINT 42:47

Wow. Well, so what else? Is there something more to show here?

Mark Mahle, NetActuate 42:56

I think this is a good, a good, you know, stopping point. This is just an initial teaser. Like I said, I think that you know, there's so much more that's possible when you consider, in our case, right, the 45 plus global locations, the access to the network, the low latency that we have to whether it's your partners or your customers that you need, and then the infrastructure that you can stand up. So your use case might just be I need one BPU and I want to do some encoding or transcoding, right? Your use case might be I need a thousand of them, right? For for an event. Um, and it really doesn't matter. It's just as easy as what you saw here, you know, to stand up one as it is to stand up a hundred. And and that's what we're really excited about in terms of our NetEnt partnership and you know, really going back to what I said uh about you know how we operate as a company. I mean, we're successful because uh we're a team player and we we like to work with smart people. Um, and I think we've really found that with NetEnt and what you guys have brought to the market.

Mark Donnigan, NETINT 43:56

That's awesome. Well, Mark, thank you for coming and telling the story of NetActuate, but giving this demo, I am sure that the viewers and those who are listening uh are already, you know, they're the wheels are spinning as to what they can do. So hopefully you'll be you'll be getting some uh some calls and some emails and some contacts. We definitely will have you back. And I know that we're working on some some exciting things together, and you know, maybe here in the not too distant future we can talk about them publicly and uh we'll have you come back, do some more demos. But thank you again for coming. It's really amazing what you built.

Mark Mahle, NetActuate 44:37

Yeah, thanks for having me, Mark. Like I said, we're really excited to be part of the VPU ecosystem. Um, and you know, excited to work with with all of you. And, you know, if you want to come check out some old hardware, that that standing invitation uh is available. Uh, we'll have you out to our headquarters in in Raleigh, North Carolina, and uh amazing, you know, maybe compare philosophically, you know, where things were. Yeah, where things were.

Mark Donnigan, NETINT 45:01

And and you know, it's really fascinating how hardware is uh obviously the technology has advanced, the capability, you know, is advanced, right? But hardware's coming full circle, right? You know, 10 years ago it was like hardware encoder, you know, we're so beyond that. We do everything in software, and now it's like you're still encoding in software, not the best way to do it. So it's amazing.

Mark Mahle, NetActuate 45:28

It really is. That's such a great point. I mean, even when you think about things like you know, virtualization, I mean it just goes back to mainframes, right? From from the day. So that's yeah, things have come full circle, but it's the combination of all of this that you know make the time that we're living in, you know, truly transformative. And for me, it's really about you know enabling, enabling that communication um and allowing you know our mutual customers to to be successful at what they're doing.

Mark Donnigan, NETINT 45:56

Yeah, well, good. All right.

Closing Thanks And How To Engage

Mark Donnigan, NETINT 45:59

Well, to all of the listeners, thank you from the bottom of my heart, our heart here at NetInt and all the guests that we've had on. If it weren't for you, well, we'd just be talking to ourselves. And uh so thank you for coming, you know, week in, week out, listening, sharing, liking, uh, contributing. If you would like to come on the show, reach out to us. We do get a lot of requests, unfortunately. We're not able to accommodate everybody. But if you have something that you know you think that the audience for voices of video would be interested in, then let us know and we'll see if it's a fit. And if it is, we'd love to have you on. So as I always say, until next time, happy encoding.

Voices of Video 46:48

This episode of Voices of Video is brought to you by Netint Technologies. If you are looking for cutting edge video encoding solutions, check out NetInts products at netinth.com.