Connections

We are just really getting started on the journey of the power of computing. In the era of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), blockchain, and extended reality (XR), the already profound impact of those technologies will be multiplied by the speed at which these changes will impact our lives, both at work and at home, industry experts from Digital Asset Advisors, Fortinet and Paramount told the Dec. 5 Content Production Summit (CPS) at The Culver Theater in Culver City, California.

Revisiting their conversation from Fortinet’s Security Summit Championship back in September, they discussed the impact of these new technologies on our industry, businesses, and lives, now and in the future, during the CPS closing keynote “Ready, Fire, Aim – The Impact of the Increasing Speed of Technological Evolution.”

Ted Schilowitz, futurist and EVP at Paramount Global, and Seth Shapiro, managing partner at Digital Asset Advisors and partner at Alpha Transform Holdings, have an “interesting perspective that we’ve sort of come up with of ‘Ready, Fire, Aim,’ which is the way we sort of view the way large media companies very often look at their security profile and their security needs and how they tackle it,” Schilowitz said at the start of the session.

“We do our best to try and carve a more proactive path rather than a reactive path,” Schilowitz said.

The large, “well-known studio entities … get millions of attacks a day, sol you’re talking about a massive threat threshold,” he pointed out. As a result, he explained: “There are definitely people on the security side of this [whose] daily job and daily existence [are] just to keep up with it and manage it and watch where some of the biggest vulnerabilities are, which are very obvious and very overt, but very often happen when you kind of least expect it.”

Meanwhile, “one of the things that really presents a lot of challenge, both when it comes to AI, which we’ve been talking a lot about today, as well as just generally when it comes to cybersecurity and the amount of profit that can be made off of all the companies that you guys work for is the fact that there’s just a lot of volume,” according to Michael Smiley, director of systems engineering at Fortinet.

That, Smiley said, “makes it very challenging … to address all the threats that are coming in.” Another topic discussed at the event was how “easy it is to generate malware with AI” and how easy it is to make it unique.

Although it often seems as if new technologies are taking a long time to be widely adopted and embraced, Shapiro said that, in the media and entertainment industry, it “seems like things move really slowly but then when you think back [to prior] decades, you’re like … ‘That happened really, really slowly, and then all at once.”

Shapiro pointed to Web 2 as an example, noting it was discussed about 17 years ago, but, since then, “we’ve had mobile, we’ve had the app economy, we’ve had streaming and we’ve had a bunch of stuff,” he said. “The economics of that have been incredible for the media business. Now, unfortunately, for the Southern California contingent, most of the accretive value to that went to the market caps of Northern California companies, to tech companies.”

Heading into a new age, he said, the themes that will continue to be focused on include AI, blockchain, virtual environments, game engines, decentralization, data encapsulation, [and] self-organizing fan communities.”

Also, the advent of quantum computing is “going to wreck a lot of the security protocols and the way you do encryption and protection, which means it’s going to be problematic,” Schilowitz predicted. “And that’s probably coming faster than anybody realizes,” he said, warning: “If you’re not starting to get your company prepared for what quantum will do for your company, you need to. I cannot stress it strongly enough.

Produced by MESA, the Content Production Summit was presented by Fortinet, and sponsored by Convergent Risks, Friend MTS, Amazon Studios Technology, Indee, NAGRA, EIDR, and Eluv.io, in association with CDSA and the Hollywood IT Society (HITS).