Bridging the Gap: Onboarding Strategies for Web2 to Web3 | KBW2023

[Applause] hi everyone how's it going all right hopefully that was a quick little taste of what web 3 will look like in the future or the present um thank you all for coming it's a pleasure to be here for for me uh for Greg um you know Korea has been such an amazing bed of culture and innov that's been taking place for such a long time you know I watched uh parasites squid games and all the fun things I you know obviously follow along with what black pink is up to but I thought today would be nice to have a little bit of Hollywood in Korea and so Greg it's it's it's a pleasure to be here together um I'm happy to here be here with you but tell me how you've been you know what you've been up to NBC's been doing some interesting things uh walk us through and and and introduce yourself to uh to Korea yeah thanks for having me um really happy to be here in one of the most Innovative cities in all the world so um really really thanks for inviting me to be speaking with you um so yeah I'm the VP of tech Innovation Partnerships at Universal Pictures so what does that involve that really is about innovating our film making process so that covers everything from uh content development production post- production uh also our marketing and distribution teams as well so everything Innovation with our film film and uh making and distribution uh business I also work with our consumer products and games team as well um that also includes the theme parks so that's really about digital experiences both in our physical destinations and anything you get at home as well so you know I have a great job I've been doing it for for seven years and the success we've had over that time period has has really been about um being recognized across the company of a as a center of excellence so um if you think about Comcast NBC Universal it's a huge company um we also span into uh Europe as well with Sky um and I'm very lucky because we have our own autonomy we have our own budgets uh we get to choose the partners we we work with which is why I'm here with Aptos today and it's been such a a great experience and you know when we think about blockchain we've been really reimagining how we can create fan experiences that cater to the masses um you know we're trying to build the most immersive compelling experiences and working with the right technology partner to do that is extremely important which is why you know we're here today with aptose and I'd love for you to talk a little bit about what aptose is for those who don't know I'm sure a lot of you do but um you know what is Aptos and how does it how does it work how does it apply to a company like ours yeah so you know Aptos is a layer one blockchain uh you know we started our journey very early on in inside of a company called Facebook or meta and we were thinking about how do you bring a protocol to billions of people and what we saw in the market was something that didn't necessarily provide a reliable safe scalable infrastructure for partners like not only NBC but a lot of the builders here that I've gotten to know over the last year and and so as we think about scaling we wanted to build a a blockchain that basically can evolve and we've done that we launched our blockchain in October of 2022 it hasn't even been a year yet and we've already done 47 upgrades to the protocol that's kind of unheard of in the world of web 3 but we want these upgrades to obviously be able to support you know the demands that developers have and users have in the market and so that's been something that we're incredibly proud of we use a native smart contract language called move we buil our own smart contract language it's designed to provide a lot of Safety and Security for developers so if you think about someone like NBC or you know again if you're a developer in the space you won't have to worry about a lot of the challenges that you might using other smart contract languages in the market so that's been amazing for abas um we you know we saw some of the numbers flash but our latency and throughput is the best in the market we're able to support 30,000 transactions per second to date and these are real transactions and all those transactions settle in under a second and you know just to give perspective you know if you look at visa for example Visa processes around 1,700 transactions per second so we can actually support money movement globally in real time and that is going to open up an incredibly amount of incredible amount of innovation and very cool use cases but you know it's it's not just about innovation in where we are in silic Valley but globally and so this is where we spend a lot of time this is actually my fourth trip to Korea Greg I know this is your first trip you're already going to come back yeah you know and and so it's it's just been incredible to see the amount of talent that we've seen in not not only Korea but in other parts of the world that have been able to innovate in ways you know other parts of what you would typically expect of the world where where they're slower we have partners that are building with us um obviously folks like NBC Universal but we focus on four different categories we have gaming social Finance of course entertainment and and within each one of those categories there's some amazing stuff that's going on we have a trillion dollar asset manager tokenizing a money market fund on the on a public permission ver uh uh chain called apos um we have Partners like Unity where we have verified a game sdks where gaming is taking full advantage of our protocol in ways that nothing else in the market can support today and then when we think about social we have applications like chingari where they were building on a previous protocol they migrated and are fully building on appts today and they've been able to get two million users in two weeks and so for us when we think about all these different use cases we need serious infrastructure to basically bring it to life and we're very excited that apos is being picked by amazing Partners like like yourselves but you know enough about me I I want you to talk a little bit about how NBC's been approaching this web 3 space because you know we met a while ago and you guys have been doing a lot of deep thinking and that's something that we really liked as Aptos someone who really understands why web 3 has this m you know why do we work with a web 3 partner but what are the value that you can unlock and so I think it'd be great for the crowd to hear a little bit of that yeah um so obviously at Universal Pictures we make globally recognizable content so think of minions think of Jurassic world like everybody knows the content that we create um and when we're creating experiences for our fans it's really important to be authentic and create products that make sense um so if you think about you know web 3 and what that provides the idea of you know being able to sell a movie ticket or produce a game or sell a physical product and have those touch points those those those experiences speak to each other programmatically and a digital experience is really compelling and you can really think about the types of things that we can create that we can't do pre can't create previously um so you know and that's ultimately why you know Aptos has been such an interesting partner for us because the experiences we've had today you've mentioned a lot of the projects that we've been we've been uh you know working on um I can talk about one that's that wasn't done on the appos blockchain it was on a an evm layer 2 two Network um and it was for a project that we had with um our universal theme park in Orlando and Hollywood and it was for Halloween Horror Nights if you're any of you familiar with what what that that is it's a um it's an event that happens around Halloween and we have uh nine to 10 experiences that are set up in the evening and you go through a maze and have people jump and scare scare you to death um and it's a honestly it's the most most uh fun fun thing but what we did is ultimately created a scavenger hunt sort of experience where every that you completed you had a QR code um at the end exit and you scanned it collected the the the the digital po app um and ultimately we created a collection uh sort of behavior where fans were sort incentivized to complete all the mazes um again if you've ever been most of the lines are pretty pretty long you it's pretty difficult to complete most of the mazes in one day so there was a natural sort of behavior that we were um seeing where people were sort of exchanging the tokens that they didn't manage to collect with other users um and that sort of created this fun Community Based experience that we um that we imagined and it sort of connected the two locations together as well as you had Hollywood and Orlando was both working with the same system the challenges that we had with it though um you know we had to create a lot of work around so typically like when I'm building an experience I want the technology to work for me um you know I don't want to be you know sort of creating um you know work around with the solutions and the the experience that we're delivering to our fans um so things like you know we needed to have 100,000 tokens for one day um you know you're not going to be able to do that on an evm Network unfortunately so it what did we do we had to F build strategies to make that make that work we were Prem minting tokens to use on the flight AS and when we needed them um which created a lot of wastage it just it just was a clunky clunky exercise um so you know obviously when we met Mo and you mentioned your your Facebook days is Chris in the audience I've worked with him at Facebook for for many years so there's been sort of a a cles of um of great people coming together we know we really sort act as a sort of a product Market fit for the types of use cases that we're looking to develop as a really big company uh that reaches millions and millions of people so I I don't know if you want to build on that with the with the project that we've done most recently yeah I mean I think that was a great story for us to think about right like how do we solve these problems so you can bring that Vision to life for you know millions of people that go to to the movies and you know that I think Renfield was a very interesting use case I mean everyone kind of saw the the trailer there but we were thinking about how do you take that blockchain and put it completely in the back end for you know that experience and if you know you saw the person in the movie theater you know they don't have any offchain they don't have to deal with a web browser wallet they don't have to deal with nft management all of that gets abstracted away and sits completely in the background and you know when you talk about building technology for you I'm I also want to build technology for myself and and try to avoid having all these pitfalls and challenges that we have to deal with in it within a UI or ux um so with Renfield I I think you know you got to see people come play this game squash bugs and all that's happening in the background is they're having an app TOS wallet being created for them and you guys get could identify okay who is this person what are they doing maybe they really good at squashing bugs and they get you know a prize and now NBC knows about who that what that person has done and then eventually you can offer them things into the future and so those NF those digital assets or relics that you saw all end up being nfts within that ecosystem they sit completely in the background and you know all the complexity is off fiscated away and so it just makes it a very seamless experience for the end user which I think is very important for how we scale web 3 but you know I think that's just the start of what we're doing right and I don't know how much you can share with this crowd I think everyone's here to you know listen about some some secret stuff that you guys might be working on but how do you think about things like loyalty for example or extending that experience into other all those assets that you have at NBC yeah um yeah I mean if you think about sort of the the time we've been looking into this space um you know we were laughing a little bit but you know we've been looking at blockchain technology for at least six or seven years and if you think about Consortium private permission blockchains that was like the flavor of the day back in 2016 and we were talking to you know R3 Corder hyperledger you name you name it and it it sort of was very interesting loyalty was the was the use case that stood out as being sort of the killer app for for a decentralized network why loyalty um because if you think about again like this idea of building a customer Journey that's cohesive it speaks to speak every sort of touch Point speaks to each other um whether that's in a company like ours that you know is a massive Corporation that has many many companies like that's really difficult even right now for us to speak to our own our own groups what does One customer do in one business what does it do with another like we don't we're not able to do that very efficiently it starts becoming a bit of a boring IT project honestly um a project that I wouldn't want to be involved in what H sorry just to jump back in like what happens if you unlock that yeah so if you think about um the fan experiences that we're creating like you know the the the idea a of like you've visited a theme park one day you've come back the next day you've completed all the experiences the rides and we can sort of create community and rewards and programmability around that engagement that's really really powerful um you know we've got a project that we've been sort of discussing around the idea of how we would distribute movies in the future so you know the idea that you have a token that represents the ownership of that that that piece of content you know if you are buying a movie today through one of our traditional Distributors it stays within their ecosystem that community that data doesn't flow through um so the idea that you know we can now create a an entitlement a right that says you bought a movie you rented a movie you now have access across many platforms many many many products there something we can't do today it's really really powerful that's the holy grill right there right like I think everyone wants to be able to take existing digital assets whether you know it's a rent field asset or another movie or maybe a ticket that you got to the theme park but I also want to be able to take my nfts that I have in other ecosystems and bring them to you guys as well and so we need that level of interoperability to basically exist and it's amazing that you guys are thinking about it what's what's kind of a little more that you can share in terms of how do you unlock some of that yeah so um I mean I want to mention gaming as well so gaming is a huge huge business for us too so the games that we build having assets that actually mean something you know the the clothing that you're buying the digital assets all of that sort of um experience data that you're accumulating through the games that you're playing again that all fit fits in within the model we're thinking about NBC as well it's a huge advertising company we advertise across all our linear TV networks uh we have platforms like Fandango and Rotten Tomatoes um Comcast itself is the biggest cable uh TV network in in all the US so the idea of having um you know an advertising system a settlement layer that essentially can you know prove that an adver was essentially seen you acted on it um you know and we can prove that to our partners as well that becomes a really compelling opportunity in terms of how we're like thinking about you know how we're tackling this um so it becomes a little bit of a centralized exercise within our own company you know thinking about you know The Primitives essentially that we would need to develop as a infrastructure layer for our entire company so obviously identity layers you mentioned provisioning wallets and creating that to a user identity that we we know um like that's something we want to be able to do and build and scale across the entire company and have one system that everybody can sort of tap into having a smart contract layer as well where we can program our own smart contracts our own business logic so you know essentially you've got the ability as a company to sort of have all these this programmability and composability across an organization is really really powerful and then of course access to multiple blockchain networks um of course maybe choosing one or two in the Futures that is the right way to go but allowing our customers and fans essentially to have access to the networks that they want to access as well is really important um and of course working with a network that scales is is is a key to unlocking all of that yeah I mean there's so much evolving in this space right now where you're starting to see things like ZK you're starting to see rollups you're seeing you're starting to see um all these interoperability layers From aps's perspective we think about this very very carefully we've seen the bridges that are out there where you know in order to enable this very open interoperable world we need to be able to speak with all these different protocols Y and so internally we are working on some very interesting things on how we bridge this universe together while taking full advantage of apos being that settlement layer where a lot of that value can acre um and we think that's going to be something very special that we'll probably share more in in the future so that's uh I think that's a little bit of a trailer for what's to come but you know all of this happens when you have deep Tech aligning with amazing entertainment companies like yourselves right and so you know I think working together has been a lot of fun because we get to do a lot of the stuff that we love to do which is you know nerd out help build out smart contracts uh think about how do you scale these experiences ultimately maybe one day get to a an interesting ad Network on Aptos but you know it's it's it's the goal for us um in a way to put all that complexity almost even away from you so you don't have to deal with it and so when we're working with someone like NBC which has been a lot of fun you know we want to take care of the the stuff that we like to do so you can obviously continue to create amazing content and and build that user experience that's that's really important for us I think the other thing is there's interesting things that are happening and I know you've been talking thinking about everything happening in AR and VR and obviously AI is a massive theme um we just announced our partnership with Microsoft where we're uh building out a app TOS co uh assistant where you can write a smart contract without having to write the smart contract itself which is going to be really cool so Microsoft is building that along with a GitHub co-pilot and uh we're going to be working on some finance and Gaming use cases but I'm kind of curious right like can we give a get a little teaser of what's what like what does the metaverse look like for NBC what does uh AI look like for uh for NBC is there something you can share there so yeah the metaverse is uh I actually hate that word honestly um um but yeah I mean if you think about sort of the theme park and the the way that you know that really does only reach a subset of the world um if you think about you know how we can essentially build Virtual Worlds and games that and the economies that go with them that sort of match the the the physical theme park experiences that you you'd get you we're thinking a lot about that um it's not really about digital Twins and all that sort of stuff it's really about making Fantastical worlds that you can really sort of immerse yourself on a daily basis um Creator economies is a big big big uh play for us as well so the idea of you know allowing our fans to have access to our IP and to build their own worlds with our content in a way that you know is is Equitable for us Equitable for them these are all the things that sort of the the scalable blockchain Network and blockchain Technology will will support you know and honestly that's been why it's been such a fun fun experience working with with you all I know you've got a story about your childhood and and and I'm not gonna let you get away away with it so what is it so I mean we were talking about this and I guess you're gonna bring it up um you know one thing I loved about movies um is actually going to the movies myself um growing up as a kid I didn't have an opportunity to so I figured maybe my parents will let me go to the movies if I work there so I worked at the movie theater that was one of my first jobs actually clipping tickets you know making popcorn letting my friends kind of sneak in a little bit B uh and watch some movies um but it's it's been amazing to see that kind of extended out and and so it's a little bit of a childhood kind of reality sort of come to life but you have one well I mean the reason why I work in a film studio is because of my um relationship with with the content that we've created in the past Back to the Future is my favorite Trilogy of all time so I watch that on a on a regular basis um I annoy the people I live with watching it um because they don't like it um but it's my favorite film and like you know at the end of the day um that really profoundly affected me as a as an individual and the idea that I'm working for a company that can that creates that content and impacts people so profoundly on a daily basis is really important and I take that responsibility really um you know seriously as a as an employee of of universal I want to make sure that the experiences that we're developing are the most compelling and the most authentic they possibly can be for our fans so you know I think about sort of the things that we're talking about now next there are some projects that were cooking up um we've mentioned hint at a few a few of them but there is a another project that we're we're exploring with um The Exorcist I don't know if any of you are horror fans um so the Blum House movie The exist believer is actually going to be released on um in October um so there's a another project that we're working on right now and it's following the similar sort of track so you're going to essentially be rewarded with exclusive content for buying a movie ticket with one of our big exhibition Partners in the US so the moment you go and buy the ticket you're going to be immediately through their own internal loyalty program linked out to an appose wallet um enabled by Petra and you'll be immediately given the opportunity to claim an exclusive piece of content that only people that participate will have access to um the movie is going to scare the out of everybody I will be honest with you um and if you've seen the old old movie it follows on exactly from um that that same same same genre so super super excited about that film and honestly the the the experience with working with aptose has been absolutely amazing cuz that same passion that you have for your childhood and the same with my team as well like the idea that we've been having our Engineers go to your internal hackathons um where they didn't necessarily know move um as a programming language for your smart contracts before you embraced them taught them how to to build the build build those contracts and where you know after the races and sort of being able to iterate very quickly on the ideas that we have and making them practical and that's being brought to life in in the easis right now so I think anything else you want to you want to add before we close out no I mean I I think uh it's it's really cool to be here again and appreciate the the shout out um I think the special thing though for me is you know as I'm hearing your story it feels a little bit like we're going back to the future together so that's that's kind of special I love that do we um do we have a little sneak peek here that yeah we do um so I just want to say thank you as well for all of you listening and thanks to the producers that have sort of set all of this up I I wasn't easy to getting the the videos um here but um I hope you're on the edge of their seats because we do have the exus trailer to close out to make you all awake and with that let's uh roll the tape cool thank you everyone thank [Applause]