Navigating Media, Legal Tech, and Public Service with Keith Eich
In this episode of the Tech in the Arts podcast, Keith Eich shares insights from his career journey with AMT Lab’s Technology Manager, Jinghong Gong, exploring his experience at NBCUniversal, the founding of Hulu, and his transition from media to legal tech and public service.
Keith Eich is an experienced media and technology executive with over 20 years of expertise in innovation and product development. He served as Director of Digital Distribution Operations at NBCUniversal from 2004 - 2011, playing a key role in deals like the original Hulu partnership. After his time in media, he transitioned to LegalTech, leading product development for a startup that revolutionized consumer access to legal services. Keith is a Carnegie Mellon graduate and holds an MBA from USC. He currently serves as a City Councilman and former Mayor of La Cañada Flintridge.
Show Notes
Keith Eich - Faculty Profile
Transcript
Jinghong Gong
Welcome to a Tech in the Arts podcast of the Arts Management and Technology Lab at Carnegie Mellon University. Here, we connect you to the innovation happening in the field. I am Jinghong Gong, the Technology Manager and Podcast Engineer here at AMT lab and I am very excited to speak with Keith Eich. Keith is an alumnus of Carnegie Mellon University's Heinz College Master of Information Science Management program, often called "MISM" -- the same school where I am studying Entertainment Industry Management, a program referred to as “MEIM.” Keith worked as the Director of Digital Distribution Operations at NBCUniversal from 2004-2011. After his time in media, he transitioned to legal tech, leading product development at Legal Zoom. He currently serves as a City Councilman and former Mayor of La Cañada Flintridge in California.
Today, we will talk about his experience at NBCUniversal, including the founding of Hulu, the “behind the scenes” of digital distribution, and what the future holds for legacy media. I would also like to learn about how Keith’s experience in media translated into the legal tech space, and eventually local government. We will be using some jargon and acronyms in today’s podcast, and you can find more information about them in our show notes. Without further ado, join us for a discussion on leadership, innovation, and how you can navigate the ever-changing landscape of media and technology.
Jinghong Gong
I feel like your career - spanning from NBCUniversal into the legal tech space, and currently in the politics space - I think it's a fascinating transition between all these different fields. I want to just get your perspective first on NBCUniversal. You worked [there] from 2004 to 2011, and there were a lot of big changes during that time in the industry. There were a lot of mergers and acquisitions. How was that for you as the Director of Distribution Operations?
Keith Eich
Yeah, I mean, Carnegie Mellon really prepares you for a lot of things. I don't know that it completely prepared me for everything that I've gone through in life, but I think it has served me well. I joined GE, who owned NBCUniversal. they had purchased Universal a few months before I started there. I went through a leadership program at GE, but primarily focused at NBCUniversal. In a rotational program, my first job right out of Heinz [College] was merging the two different TV production groups and looking at their finance process and systems and, you know, hitting the ground running on something I knew nothing about. Then, I had the opportunity through several rotations to learn much more about the business.
I did some work for NBC News. I did some work for cable. And then some of my final - actually, then I did some stuff for the theme park as well, which was at the time being run by a Carnegie Mellon alum, Larry Kurzweil. It was a phenomenal experience to meet someone of that caliber. I did some stuff with HR, really got sort of dirty in terms of rolling my sleeves up and not being afraid to learn any part of the business.
But, you know, through that cable work, we were sort of taking all the cable channels and bringing them to one facility so that we could uplink them to satellite for folks like DirecTV, to have one source, one satellite for everything, one operation center. I learned a lot about distribution, specifically cable, and saw sort of where that was going. And so, I wanted to work in the distribution space, but from a technology sort of perspective. And not linear, not traditional TV distribution, you know, airwaves and satellites. I had the opportunity to go work with our ad sales team and our “dot com” teams, which were really extensions of marketing at the time for the networks.
So, NBC Entertainment had an NBC.com. Syfy marketing had a Syfy.com. And it was largely just promotion of their upcoming shows. Maybe some additional background, you know, highlights on the executives of the network. And we were able to go from being able to show 30 second promos on their websites to being able to show full episodes with commercials dynamically playing on those websites.
It gave the ad sales team a chance of something else to sell besides the linear TV broadcast. From there, it's an explosion of how content gets out there. So being on the NBCUniversal side and distribution, we saw opportunities with iTunes, with cable providers, or set-top box. We also saw the starting of Hulu.
At the time, it was called NewCo or NewSite, and it was a joint venture between Fox and NBC figuring out how we could distribute the content on a core platform. That it was not our own “dot com” was a really interesting challenge.
It took a lot of conversations, collaboration to get people comfortable with this new idea of: we are not controlling the distribution anymore. It's not necessarily purely branded by our network anymore. We kept the watermark of the NBC logo or the Syfy logo on the content, but it was really entrusting that content with somebody else to distribute, whether it was iTunes, whether it was Hulu, whether it was the cable provider on their set top box.
Jinghong Gong
Right, so there's the TV side that's through more traditional [formats]. It streams through every family's living room. And there's also the internet side, which is iTunes and Hulu. Did you see kind of a trend that was moving more toward the internet side, during that period of time, or you know, is cable still the dominant factor?
Keith Eich
I think the emerging trend, and it was not necessarily new, but technology enabled it. The trend was that people wanted to be able to watch content whenever, however, they wanted to. So, they might want to watch it on their computer. They might want to watch it on a TV in a lean-back experience. Maybe on their cell phone at a close-up experience. And they wanted to be able to watch it whenever they wanted to, not when the TV network linear broadcast dictated it.
There were things like DVRs and TiVo at the time where people could time shift content, but they had to record it to be able to time shift it. And then it was very limited to what device it was still available on. So, we saw the need, as an entertainment company, of: this is what consumers want. Technology is becoming readily available to enable these types of activities. How do we protect our business, protect our content, but at the same time, give customers what they want, right? I mean, that's the essence of a company. If you don't have a product that people want, you're probably not going to make money and survive.
We had a product that people wanted. But maybe they wanted to consume it in a different way than we traditionally had. So there's a background here of the entertainment industry, especially TV and film, to some degree, were built upon windowing strategies. Right? So, you might show content on a linear network first, on say NBC Primetime. You get one chance to watch it, maybe two chances if you're lucky during the regular season. It really wasn't until you got to season four being complete when those first four seasons of episodes would become available in some other window. So, things like VHS or DVD tapes, you know, syndication. In the local market, secondary distribution on a bunch of different fronts. International was a little bit different. We could distribute internationally, sometimes earlier than season four, and oftentimes day-in-day was what was happening in the early 2000s.
And so, this windowing strategy protected the content, protected the value of the content, and thus the revenue streams that came from that content. And so, you can imagine, just like what happened in the music industry, where all of a sudden windows were completely collapsed because of piracy and other things. How do you respond? And so, our response was, okay, customers want it. There's technology to enable it. Let's find the right path to do these things.
The hardest part of it wasn't the technology. The hardest part of it was - how do we get everybody inside of our company comfortable with moving things around, potentially changing how revenue comes in? And, who's responsible for what?
Jinghong Gong
Right. NBC, it must be a gigantic company to manage and being the director, what were some of the major challenges trying to get everyone involved and feel comfortable with this change. What are some strategies you implemented to counter this?
Keith Eich
Yeah. So, there's sort of a centralized content clearinghouse that we developed where we looked at who has what content rights, what rights we have as a company.
And then how have we windowed those who are given different groups responsibility and how do we get them to come to the table to allow a certain thing? A lot of times, rights end up being what are called “frozen.” Which means nobody has the right to it. And so, you have to explicitly go to the studio and sort of carve it out if nobody has had it.
So, forming a content clearinghouse really helped, sort of, shine a light, if you will, on who had the rights to that content at that time, who was the stakeholder that was going to need some incentive to enable that content to be in a different distribution. And so, by doing that on the TV and the film side, it really helped us explore, like: how do we get people to say yes?
Okay, so I'll give you an example. The TV network themselves, like NBC Entertainment, may have the rights to a primetime show. Their main motivation in having that show distributed on their network was to keep eyeballs on their network, primarily though to sell advertising around that content, right? They would want to be able to sell linear TV ads. When we started putting that content on the “dot com,” they're like, “you're taking eyeballs away from our network, thus away from our advertising. You've got to help our ad get out there.” So that is when this content is being watched, our ad's being watched, so that the advertiser is kept whole and we're continuing to make money. So, we had to develop a dynamic advertising system online, which I'm proud to say that we did. And I'm sure it's been improved millions of times now.
But the same thing goes true. Now the “dot com” looks at this as a revenue stream for their ad sales team. All of a sudden, we want to put it on Hulu. Well, how does that work? Well, in the linear television network of NBC, if you have an hour-long show, it's usually about 44 minutes long, there's about 16 minutes of commercial time. Of that 16 minutes of commercial time, the network, like NBC, gets a large lion's share of that, but the local station actually gets a piece of it, too. Somewhere between two, three, eight minutes, depending upon what the agreement is.
So, the local station was already selling against our network ad sales. And so there was already some competition, and so we could draw upon that existing structure to say “that's how Hulu's going to work.” You know, we'll put the content out there on Hulu, just like we do on NBC.com or NBC and maybe time shift it a little bit, but the advertising can be sold by Hulu and we'll get a revenue share of that. Or maybe parts of it can still be sold by our ad sales team. And, you know, then we're sharing revenue with Hulu. So, you create those structures based on the historical norms and how that sort of windowing revenue strategy works.
Jinghong Gong
Right, so it's kind of like giving Hulu the autonomy to find those advertisements themselves and you guys, on the bigger level, just get a share of that revenue.
Keith Eich
Yeah, and a little bit more complicated than that. There's tons of personalities and rules. Different ad sales groups, for instance. You don't want two different ad sales groups competing against one another. So, some may have been able to sell demographically, like the users that you're showing an ad to. Some might be able to sell a show-specific ad. Some might be able to sell, you can focus on, you know, this geography or whatever the different cohorts are. But you don't want to create a situation where two ad sales teams are trying to compete against one another because that probably causes a lot of dynamic issues in terms of incentives for those ad sales teams.
Jinghong Gong
Right. So, because you talked so much about ad sales, advertisement is kind of the main source of income for [NBCUniversal], is that the main source of revenue, or?
Keith Eich
That's a great question. So, there's a lot of different revenue streams, right? Traditionally, a studio is sort of in the business of licensing.
So, you license a show for a period of time on a particular distribution platform. You get license fee back from networks, right? You see linear broadcast on our websites, or aggregators like a Hulu or a Netflix, oftentimes, license content from a studio and pay a license fee, and then they're responsible for monetizing it several different ways.
So, like a Netflix does a subscription fee, right? Hulu may do a subscription fee or advertising. YouTube, for instance, is a pure advertising play. Now they have subscriptions and stuff like that, too. But if you really go back to, you know, the early 2000s, cable television served as a great model.
Cable television had a subscription fee. Right? So, let's say you were the network Syfy. You might get 50 cents a subscriber from Comcast to whoever has Syfy on your cable package. The consumer's relationship is with Comcast. Comcast has a relationship with Syfy. Syfy is getting a subscription fee back. They're paying the studio a license fee for that content. Syfy has the rights to advertise around that content and get advertising revenue. So they have what's called a dual stream revenue model: subscription fee and advertising.
Comcast, or the carrier, the end up aggregator, the distribution partner, also usually typically gets a little bit of the advertising revenue too. And they're obviously making money from bundling a bunch of these different channels, and then charging a slight premium on top of that to run the network and all those kinds of things.
Jinghong Gong
Right. So, you said you guys were involved in the start of Hulu. I think it was towards 2011 by the time you were about to leave the company. Did that collaboration come into place when you were still there?
Keith Eich
Yeah. I don't know the exact time offhand. I feel like it was like 2007 or 2008 when we were sort of starting NewCo and things of that nature. But I think the very first meeting at a hotel in Santa Monica where a bunch of folks got together and started brainstorming this stuff.
I can remember, we formed NewCo, and NewCo rented a space in Santa Monica. I would drive down there with bagels sometimes and donuts other times as we were hiring people and building a team. And then eventually I was able to fade away and just be on the NBCUniversal side as sort of a content liaison or a liaison, quite honestly, to almost every other department operationally at NBC. Like, “hey, we need this content. Hey, we need this ad. Hey, what's going on with this licensing?” I would serve as, sort of, a liaison to the Hulu staff as it grew up. I can remember sending hard drives full of content down to Hulu and it was a lot of fun. I would say, the hardest challenge for me was this recognition that we can collaborate and find ways to incentivize distribution. One of the underlying problems that we had a difficulty with was music rights. So, a lot of times our TV shows would get broadcast music rights. So, Friday Night Lights is a great example of this. Heroes, I think, is as well. But they would have music in it for the broadcast TV. And that music was extremely expensive for online distribution. So, a lot of times we would actually have to end up paying for a second cut with different music substituted in so we could actually afford the music to put onto online channels or set top box channels or iTunes. And that realization, that it's not just content rights and, you know, talent rights. There are additional aspects of things that you see on the screen, primarily through what you hear, that can really change the structures behind the scenes.
Jinghong Gong
Yeah, so, I'm curious, when Hulu was starting out versus the Hulu now, is it still similar or division-wise I imagine, you know, distributed through the internet, but did it look the same or very different?
Keith Eich
Hulu's grown up so much. You know, they have a set top box app. They have a internet-connected app, they're everywhere. They have distribution everywhere. They've got multiple revenue streams and different packages. It's not the same Hulu that I saw, you know, birthed at the time when I was at NBC Universal. They're a very mature, grown up distribution company. I would look at them now as sort of how I looked at cable distribution partners back in the day, like a Comcast or a Time Warner or a Charter. Mature, you know, professional staff, professional technology. A lot of different things going on, not just a completely obsessed focused on “how do we get content on a web page?” Very different business.
Jinghong Gong
Right.
Keith Eich
And they have different owners. There was, you know, I was still at NBCUniversal when the ABC/Disney aspect came in, and all those things have changed now.
Jinghong Gong
Ownership and everything. Yeah. I want to move on from NBCUniversal and talk about you transitioning to the legal tech space. You talked a lot about, you know, your expertise in operations. How do you feel that experience in media translated into that legal tech space?
Keith Eich
Yeah. My experience in media - it was around a couple different fronts. The first way of thinking about it was technology, because of my engineering background. I was a MISM student at Heinz. So, technology has always been sort of a part of my framework. Operations and just, sort of, rolling up my sleeves, getting stuff done, knowing how to move things around efficiently and effectively has always been from that engineering background too.
But, what I really learned at NBCUniversal was how to think like a product leader. How to think about shaping features and benefits that come with things to hopefully be able to sell to customers. Now at NBCUniversal, our primary customers that I was dealing with were these third-party aggregates, Comcast, Time Warner, Charter, Hulu, iTunes, Amazon, you name it, right? Other distribution partners. So, I was primarily in what's called a B2B role. Business-to-business role. So, I only had a handful of customers that I needed to keep happy and sort of that product half.
I got to see them though those partners really focus on consumer facing product. And I always thought that was super interesting. And so part of me leaving NBCUniversal to go to a startup in 2011- it really wasn't a startup at the time, but it still had, you know, a handful of people - to go to LegalZoom. Legal tech was super interesting to me, democratizing the law in a really interesting way. There were similar structures like you had in the entertainment industry that were being broken down because of technology.
But it was really this excitement towards B2C and putting myself in a product leadership role where I could actually engage with the customer directly. There were millions, not just a handful. And so, you know, the legal tech space, super interesting because, traditionally lawyers have had sort of a hold on how everything works, and that was being disrupted. You know, there were things like Intuit WillMaker that were already out. You could buy a DVD, you know, Best Buy or wherever, and you could try to do your will on your own, just like you could use TurboTax to do taxes on your own. And so we were seeing sort of an emergent area around “do-it-yourself.” Perhaps with a little bit of help, I can talk about and do basic legal things. We always called it democratizing the law, right? Making the law accessible to the average person through technology.
Jinghong Gong
Right. So, speaking of democratizing the law, it really reminds me of recently with AI and ChatGPT, you know, that kind of also give another round of democratizing. People are, I know, at least myself when I was handed a contract, the first thing I do is, “oh, this is so long, let me shoot it into ChatGPT and ask it to summarize for me.” I want to get your perspective on - how do you feel about those AI coming to place? And then, how does that play within the legal tech space too?
Keith Eich
Absolutely. AI is a great tool. There is no substitute for attorney advice. Attorneys see patterns, just like AI sees patterns, but they have the legal training and the knowledge and the regulatory status to provide legal advice and then be bound to, you know, doing the right thing for you as a client. So, you'll always hear me say things like, I'm not an attorney, I can't give you legal advice if you ask me a question. And I think that was ingrained in me at LegalZoom, like LegalZoom itself is not giving legal advice, right? AI is not giving you legal advice. They're giving you pattern recognition or a process of how to think about something for yourself. Again, not a substitute for an attorney, but it's a great tool so that when you have a conversation with an attorney, maybe it gives you, you know, a couple questions that you should ask. Whenever I look at a legal contract, I always read it. And I'm like, what comes in here? And I'm always highlighting and underlying things. So, I have questions prepared. The same thing is, if you just go to an attorney and be like, “hey, I got this 30-page contract. What does it say?” If you haven't read it yourself and you haven't come up with some questions, you know, you're doing yourself a disservice.
But again, attorneys are experts. AI is getting close to being an expert. But they don't have all the history and they don't have all the same sort of understanding of why something might be crafted. So, AI, to me, is still just a tool. It is not a replacement for highly personalized services.
Jinghong Gong Right. I imagine, you know, you want to register a small business and, you know, file taxes. At the end, you know, that stage still needs a real human being to kind of process, to file those things. But, AI or through LegalZoom, you can get some advice or it can kind of just help you understand things better.
Keith Eich Yeah, I mean to, to put it in perspective, so there are 50 states here in the United States, right? I'm sure everybody knows that. Do you know how many counties there are in the United States? Give a guess.
Jinghong Gong
300?
Keith Eich
300 counties? I think Texas alone has 300. No, there's just about 3000 counties in the United States. And so, as you break down the United States, there's legal structures and agencies at different levels, right? There's a federal government, there's a state government, there's a county government, right? And there's even a local government beyond that, and a bunch of special districts. But typically, at the county level, if you're managing the complexity of 3000 different counties in the United States. AI can research that and go look things up.
But you, you build patterns off what's going in those. And so, the beauty of LegalZoom was. If you need to do some filings that are county specific, not just state specific, LegalZoom has probably done a bunch of them. Some of them require a person walking into an office for you to file something. And then there's additional steps to keep your company in good standing.
So, you might have to file something in the newspaper to say that you formed a business, or you might have a recurring annual filing. Those types of things AI is not going to come back to you a year later and say, “hey, you know, you've been in business a year. Don't forget to do your statement of information.” AI doesn't do that. An attorney will do that. A system that is set up to send you reminders because you formed with them typically does those types of things.
Jinghong Gong
But maybe, AI can also have that reminder built in later on, you know, LegalZoom maybe incorporates AI technology in the future.
Keith Eich
Oh, absolutely. You know, I think that the premise of that is that you have got to ask AI to do that.
AI is probably not going to do it on its own until we build that capability, or someone is smart enough to say, “Hey, can you send me a reminder for all my compliance filings as they come due?” But, it's a good point. You know, and so when you think about 3000 counties, and managing all the patterns and the relationships and knowing which courts to file with or which judges might want things a certain way, it's complex for sure. And you know, judges change hands, Secretary of States change hands, you know, county clerks change hands. So, there's constant movement in how these things operate. So, I think what was exciting at LegalZoom was, again, that consumer facing, product leadership opportunity, but also this really complex structure, 3000 counties, 50 states, that normally, if you didn't have a lawyer that had those experiences, you're kind of left without help.
Jinghong Gong
Since you mentioned the 3000 counties - in 2020, you were elected as the mayor of La Cañada, Flintridge. I saw on the LA Times in 2017, you were running for that to start thinking about serving the community. I wonder what motivated you to go into that space?
Keith Eich
It's a good question. So just motivation, just take a step back first. You know, my grandparents and my parents always taught me to leave somewhere better than when you got there. Even when I applied to Carnegie Mellon, way back in the day over 20 years ago, I had a chance to interview with the admissions office and that was one of the things that I said, you know, “I want to come to Carnegie Mellon and I want to leave it better.” I think the same thing is true wherever you are, whether it's your work or your personal life or whatever it is.
And I looked at the opportunity to serve my local community in a way, especially with an engineering background, was a good thing. I know people call it politics. Small town government is really like the closest thing to your constituents. It's your neighbors, right? You're not serving in D.C. or in the state capitol like Sacramento or, here, in Harrisburg.
You're serving, you know, a mile down the street, and in our town it's a volunteer job, you know, part time. It's not a full-time income-earning job like most politicians might have. So it's really service to the community.
I think there are some things that come with that, beyond the motivation. You learn a different way of collaborating. So there are five of us on the council, and not every decision goes 5-0. A lot of decisions might go 3-2 or 4-1, but you're having an open, frank conversation in a hearing or in a meeting to talk about what to do.
California is a little unique. We have something called the Browns Act, so we can't actually discuss the agenda items before the public meeting. So all of our collaboration has to happen in the meeting, out in the public. There are some exceptions around closed sessions and things, but it’s different to collaborate in public. Then it is sort of, you know, at work at a conference table or taking several days sometimes to kind of iterate on an idea. It's very different. So that was a really good learning experience. To me, it comes down to knowing your values and knowing what's important, what you're willing to compromise on, what you're not willing to compromise on.
For me, for the most part, this service in my mind has been about infrastructure coming from an engineering background. You know, we've had a lot of power outages in our town. We don't control our electric grid. It's a third party that does - we have three trash providers that come around our city and pick up garbage cans.
Just on the trash, this is going to sound strange, but when I moved there, I had two little kids and I had a third one come later. We had three trash providers in our town that would come on the same day. And there's three trucks. There's a garbage truck, a recycling truck, and a green bin organic truck.
So, nine trash trucks would come down my cul-de-sac on Friday mornings. Wake up my kids. Wake me up. I was probably up already. Lots of noise and congestion. It's crazy, and I live in a cul-de-sac, so it's not like they just do a nice flip around. It's sometimes like a 3, 5, 11 point turn to get turned around.
So that was one of the things that really bothered me, like there's gotta be a better way. Now, lo and behold, there is government code that regulates that. So we had to sort of forecast five years out and say we want to have these discussions. We kind of have to wait a while now until we can potentially change that structure.
But simple infrastructure things - whether it's sewers, or the power grid, or trash - are the things that interest me. It's not politics like you see on TV with the federal government or even the state government. It's local. It’s local issues.
Jinghong Gong
Right. It's really about serving the community, serving your neighbors.
Keith Eich
Exactly. And communicating. You know, I was elected into office shortly after the COVID pandemic started. There's a lot of uncertainty with what's going on. How are things working? So clear, decisive communication, I think, was super important at the time, and being, you know, a good communicator of, “we don't know, we're taking the county's lead, county has a health department,” and being able to share that with local residents sometimes in a contextualized way for our local community made a big difference,
Jinghong Gong
Right. Yeah, I want to go back to talking about your perspective on technology. You know, there's AI, of course. There's VR. There's also blockchain, which is coming up. This is talking about the traditional media again. What kind of role do you see them playing? Because I know recently the public, they're saying that Legacy Media is, you know, losing a lot of their viewers. What we are doing right now, it's sort of in competition with them, too. We're talking about stuff, I'm getting great information from you - people can tune into just podcasts. They can get this information through Spotify or any platform they want. What do you think traditional media is going to do? Like how do they situate themselves?
Keith Eich
Yeah, I traditionally, the studio side of content entertainment companies, it was about producing really high-quality, compelling content that people wanted to watch. And I don't think that mission changes. I think on the distribution side, there's definitely a quagmire around “how do we advance this?” and “how do we protect ourselves?” There's still going to be a lot of struggling, but I think at the end of the day, if you keep the end customer in mind, what do they want? They want to be able to watch whatever content they want, whenever, however, on any device, wherever they are in the globe. And I think if you keep that product mindset of like, what does the customer want and you tailor your products around that, your services around that, I think at the end of the day it could be legacy media or it could be new media. They both win.
And so, I think it's really important to understand the customer and, and if you lose sight of that, you're probably not going to win in the end. Someone's going to come and eat your lunch. I mean, look at Blockbuster, Netflix came and ate their lunch, because, guess what - people wanted to be able to get more content, not have to return, you know, videotapes and rewind them. And then it turned into an amazing streaming service. So again, relentless focus on the customer in general will win at the end of the day.
Legacy media still has an opportunity to do that. New media has an opportunity. There are probably new entrants that we haven't even seen that are going to do that better than anybody. And so, I think it's an exciting time in the industry. I won't disparage Legacy Media, because that's kind of where I grew up. And I think they've done some great things, and I think they're still struggling through some of the upcoming and current challenges. But everybody makes mistakes. Everybody learns. It's what you do with those mistakes that I think signals to customers what your core values are about.
In terms of those new technologies. To me, things like VR are really just new experience platforms like a TV or a cell phone. Yeah, it's much more immersive and there's probably some opportunities there around how you think about the audio and the video experience, and potentially parlaying things like “choose your own adventure” as part of the content, which traditionally is not something that we've done in legacy media.
You know, creating derivative optionality in the content. You've seen a couple things where that has come up. I remember growing up reading those “choose your own adventure” books, and I loved them, but at some point, that wasn't what I wanted to do every time I read a book. You know, those were sort of an occasional treat and I think content is probably the same way.
In terms of things like AI, I know we talked about it. To me, AI is a tool. It can be really useful for things like personalizing things that are going on. Maybe it helps you find news, helps you find content. Maybe it helps create some optionality for you. You know, alternative endings potentially based upon your own thing. Maybe it's smart enough to know that you're in Pennsylvania and makes the content a little bit more Pennsylvania-savvy versus, oh, it actually was filmed in, you know, Wisconsin or Michigan. I think of all of those, blockchain is actually probably one of the most interesting to me, personally.
I think there are tons of applications in finance, insurance,and government work. I think, you know, intellectual property and how you bind things to a blockchain for public or private consumption and how they tie things has some interesting applications. I'm excited about it tremendously.
Jinghong Gong
Recently I was doing research on how blockchain might impact the music industry. And I think blockchain is still in its early stages. It’s still closely tied with cryptocurrency. For the music industry specifically, it's still hard, you know. Like, you still have to go through streaming platforms, there are still these big record labels controlling all the talent and rights and where it goes. But it's slowly building up. Do you see any trend in the media aspect for blockchain to play, of course, you mentioned copyright, and the government too. Do you see how soon it’s going to arrive?
Keith Eich
Yeah, I think it's a longer-term horizon for entertainment, other than if there ever becomes sort of a clearinghouse for content, intellectual property, and music rights. Out of the gate, I think the applications of it that we're going to see first are in finance, like cryptocurrency. I actually think there are some huge opportunities around things like real estate title and ownership, transfer of ownership eligibility, so you can actually trace it back. Entertainment, I think, is a little bit harder on that, but we'll see. I mean, people are doing all sorts of NFTs and fun things, which are sort of adjacent to entertainment, and those have, you know, values, collector's items, and various things.
You know, I look at traditional media as, again, going back to “they need to put the customer first.” They need to make the most compelling content, but at the end of the day, they're best suited to be investors and guiders and advisors to some of these technologies that are coming up. Whether it's companies that are playing in them, you know, they can help shape that future given their expertise and their history. So, it's an exciting time. I don't know where anything's going. I am not a prophet. I am not a, you know, futurist. I am a roll-your-sleeves-up, kind of get-it-done person.
Jinghong Gong:
That's awesome. To wrap this up, what advice would you give to some of the aspiring leaders who want to enter this entertainment and media field? Of course, you talked about always thinking about your consumers, and what they want. Always keep that in mind. But, in terms of leadership, how do you go into an industry with so much change? There's the disruption from technology and all these different ideas. How can a leader or any industry professional navigate in this space? What advice would you give to them?
Keith Eich:
I think there's a ton of advice and I think it depends upon where they are in their career. The relentless pursuit of what the customer wants and understanding that is absolutely important, especially as a leader. Coming out of a program like MEIM, I would probably give advice to those graduates to work hard, ask questions, and try to learn as much as you can. Listen and silent have the same letters, and they're just rearranged. And so sometimes being silent and listening is a great way to learn.
I can remember my first, probably, month at NBCUniversal, my boss was in the TV production stuff, and we were staying late one night for, a go-live of like a merger of the finance system between the two. And there was a couple hours of downtime. And so, I just found ways to be useful sitting there watching, you know, a group of us kind of sitting there. Yeah, we ordered food in and we're waiting for things to work. I started cleaning out the freezer and like breaking ice out of it because I was like, Hey, this needs to get done.
It's not the most meaningful thing that anybody could be doing, but we're kind of in downtime, so make yourself indispensable. By the way, that leader still remembers me cleaning out the freezer and brings it up to this day - like, “you're the kind of guy that you want on a team because you're going to pitch in. Even when nobody's saying to do something, you know that there's stuff to get done.” So, make yourself indispensable. Clean the freezer, right? Pick up the trash. I think another thing is to admit when you're wrong. We all make mistakes, and I think I said it earlier. It's how you respond to those mistakes and what you do with it that makes you better.
And so sometimes owning it, humbly. Eating humble pie. Saying, you know, I did something wrong, I said something wrong, I wasn't thinking straight about this, and then moving past it is a good thing. Forgiving others when they mess up too, is important.
I think the other pieces of advice are sort of obvious, and they're instilled in you in MEIM. Read the news, pay attention to what's going on, learn the patterns, understand the structure the best that you can, and the structure's going to change over time. Look, you know, [it has been] 20 years since I started at NBCUniversal. Things have dramatically changed in that industry, but they change in every company. So, learning the patterns and trying to stay a little bit ahead is helpful, but don't spend your time guessing at what's going to happen. Then you're just going to become obsessed with different things. Roll your sleeves up, do the work, listen, make yourself indispensable.
Jinghong Gong:
That's an amazing summary of advice for graduates. And I will definitely benefit from all of the points. Thank you so much for coming to this podcast.
Keith Eich
Thank you for doing this. I'm excited to see future generations of Heinz and Carnegie Mellon students doing great work like you're doing. So, thank you.
Jinghong Gong
Thank you so much.