emily: alibaba is building its answer to netflix and hbo. we have everything you need to know about jack ma's online video plan. i'm emily chang and this is "bloomberg west." uber's main rival in china's super sizing its valuation. will it to deter the ceo's grand chinese land? ibm is putting hundreds of millions of dollars in data

technology. we will hear about their new center in san francisco. and e3 goes wild for "fallout 4." one of the brains behind it joins us on "bloomberg west." alibaba is turning up the heat on netflix, amazon prime and hbo go, entering the video streaming market. jack ma is building his own version in china and it will have its own original content and programs bought overseas. alibaba has been on the hunt for new revenue streams and has been trying to tap into their online video market, but will he be able to compete with more established streaming competitors inside china? joining me to discuss it, we have the wedbush managing director and the bda china chairman and from new york, jeff from polaris advisors. i would like to lay out the landscape in china as it is now because alibaba would be a very small player in this market.

it something $.10 has already been doing. guest: both 10 cent and baidu have been doing these forever. alibaba is kind of late to the party, but it is growing at such a fast rate now and the opportunity to use video to sell things is a big part of the plan. emily: let's talk about that. if you could talk about how this is going to fit into alibaba's business. they are searching for new revenue streams and global revenue streams. how does online video fit in? guest: two different ways. one is selling media is a big market in itself.

amazon sells a lot of media and now it has a streaming service so they are taking lessons from amazon, just like they did starting their cloud business. but there's another aspect that is ambitious, and that is the multi screen strategy. they've been able to convert half of their volume just in the last two or three years. but they think there is another step. they think tv itself can be a screen for e-commerce and that is why they have a set-top box business. that's one of the reasons they own the movie studio and visit hollywood to possibly acquire more content. they think if they own that additional screen, that can be another screen for commerce and they are thinking that far ahead. emily: in order to use the service, you have to have the alibaba set top box and alibaba's operating system.

could they bundle this with services like amazon? guest: absolutely. i think there is an absolute reason they are trying to duplicate what is going on with amazon. it is a huge opportunity. the third largest entertainment market in the world. emily: tencent is already a leader in this market. do you see alibaba following here and in other areas more than leading? guest: these three companies engage in pretty vicious competition. alibaba clearly dominates in e-commerce. but the barriers are beginning to come down between these various silos, so you will see increasingly that alibaba has a

stake in china's youtube equipment and they have put money into a cable provider and they even have an office in pasadena. so alibaba is here to stay because media is increasingly going to be the home for commerce, and they are making big investments in that area. emily: and they had talks with netflix -- this is another company backed by jack ma. what about the fact that original content and licensing deals are expensive. can alibaba make money on this? guest: just as netflix and amazon streaming only requires a portion of their content, the vast majority they don't produce themselves, but they use produced content to sell their entire streaming service. alibaba could very well follow that path and it sounds like

they could score some content from netflix. it doesn't really matter. if they have a subscription service, so long as a source some of that material in an inexpensive way, they could make it profitable. especially if it gets them toward the additional role of screen free commerce, that could be good. emily: what about the censorship issues and dealing with the chinese government? a show like "big bang theory" was not allowed in china. guest: the story behind that is interesting -- i think china central tv was trying to get the rights to show it. the back story to this is nobody is watching television and that's trouble for the main one. joking with friends that house of cards would have to be a house of cadres. the use of china don't watch tv

and increasingly, the chinese government is thinking we can't just ban it. we have to create our own content. i think jack ma is going to be useful creating original chinese content as well as being a safe pair of hands from the chinese government standpoint. emily: sounds a little like what is happening here. duncan, gil, and jeff, thank you all very much. in today's edition of drive, the chinese rival to uber is raising $1.5 billion to fend off travis: a loss grand plan. it's somewhere between 12 and $15 billion according to people familiar with the matter. just last week it was reported that uber is planning a $1 billion investment in china. it will be an uphill battle. the chinese company has a comfortable lead that accounts for 78% of ride requests and china.

uber trails with just 11%. coming up, ibm is pouring millions into what could be the backbone of machine learning. find out how is making public transportation and even space exploration more efficient. plus, the tech behind game of thrones's biggest star. the studio that rings the dragons to life. plus -- we will be hosting the bloomberg technology conference. special guests include marissa mayer, dick costolo and the actor from the hit show "silicon valley." ♪

emily: calling all pod builders -- elon musk is looking for a few good engineers. spacex is sponsoring a competition to design pods for its transit system next to its california headquarters. teams can test their human scale pods during a competition week planned for june of 2016. ibm is planning to invest hundreds of millions of dollars a year into free data analytics technology. the project is called spark and allows businesses to process

huge amounts of information at lightning speed. it's built to support computers using artificial intelligence and machine learning. the ibm vice president of product development, rob thompson, is here with more. i want to talk about this without getting too far into the weeds, but is complicated. there's a thing most companies use to do data analytics and categorize this information and another thing you guys are behind called spark. what is spark and why is it better? rob: i like to think of it as the analytics operating system of a modern enterprise. in the future, anyone leveraging data is going to be using spark. it's like ibm did with linux. it's a platform upon which anybody can build and small company, big company, it doesn't matter. and to get much greater insight

out of their data assets. emily: this came out of the lab in 2009. rob: this is one of the fastest-growing open source products in history. it became the top-level apache product in 2014, so it is still relatively new, but it tremendous momentum in the community. emily: let's bring this to life a little bit. it's already being used by nasa. how does nasa use it? rob: think of it this way -- it's been a great way to store data but most data organization does not reside here. it may reside somewhere else. so nasa was speaking at the spark summit this morning and they talked about how they have used ace as an archive. there is tons of data and they have it in other repositories. spark gives you the ability with its unified programming model to access all that data so you are not restricted to one type of technology.

emily: aren't they using it to figure out if there is life outside of earth? rob: they are. they haven't found any yet. we're hoping for some big news soon, but when you have a huge amount of data, sometimes you might go looking for one thing and find something else. who knows what you'll find when you look at something like space exploration. emily: where else do you see spark? rob: we see it everywhere. if you are at a bank doing risk analysis, scientists would have to build an algorithm for one repository and do it again for every data repository. with the technology we have continued into the open source community, you no longer have to do it. we see this in banks, retailers, we see it in health care everywhere. emily: we have heard these terms for many years now but they haven't delivered on the promise because there's so much

information and it's so difficult to organize and pull out the interesting things from it. are we having a moment where this is starting to happen? what are the biggest opportunities using something like spark? rob: we believe this is a seminal moment in data. it was the famous line in the 90's -- the dot-coms were the fireflies before the storm and we have used this for the fireflies before the storm of what spark brings. a different way of accessing data. emily: what does that mean? what's going to be possible with spark that was before? rob: much faster. you can do it 100 times faster. with spark, you can say give me the answer to this question and keep giving into me forever for ever as new data keeps coming in, so it totally changes how analytics can be used in an

enterprise. emily: a lot of the spark folks will be based in san francisco. rob: that is where we are focused on the core of the community. the code we have contributed the open source, we will be doing that work in san francisco. we also made a big commitment around educating 1 million big data scientists where we have been a leader so far. emily: interesting stuff. the ibm vice president of development, rob thomas, thank you for joining us. you'll have to get back to me if you find life on other planets. the season five finale of "game of thrones" leaves fans with the usual handful of unanswered questions, but how about this one -- how does the show create such realistic looking dragons? aren't they amazing? the answers with the help of high-powered computers and chickens.

take a listen. emily: hbo's "game of thrones" is five season steve and the real stars of the show's don't speak a single line. the three dragons are brought to life by the oscar-winning team at the international visual effects team behind hugo, "the hunger games" and "the amazing spiderman." 30 people spend up to 4 months a year living the models. they model the skeletal structure sure and locomotion of pigeons and chickens to scale the creatures from this to this. >> it's like raising babies. the character changes, so we had to build in much more spatial performance over the last season. of course, they glow, so the detail becomes much more complex. emily: 10 times more complex.

the layers of texture in dragons this season, the complexity increased. >> we had to texture it and the flight to the surface, so that the scales are moving when the dragon is turning around. this is what makes the machine slower and we have to increase the complexity of the rate. emily: that is where dell computers comes in -- they provide the workstations. >> rendering takes a lot of horsepower. think of a mcdonald's milkshake. you don't want a skinny straw to drink the milkshake. we offer immense throughput and power. emily: enough power to create a 1000 frame shot that took two whole months to build. and the dragons are still growing, meaning more complex

animation and a need for more computing power, but we will have to wait for season six to see that. if you haven't seen the finale yet, no spoilers here, but fans feel strongly about the ending. 258,000 tweets about it so far and counting. don't forget tomorrow, i will be hosting the bloomberg technology conference right here from san francisco. we will hear from marissa mayer, dick costolo, an actor from hbo other hit show, "silicon valley." that's all day tomorrow here on bloomberg television. up next, "fallout 4" -- we talked to the game's creator. who let that goats out. in this viral video, hundreds of goats are being herded down the hill where the crossing guard

halts traffic. ♪

emily: it is time now for the daily byte -- today's is 85. that's the number of seconds the philae lander made contact after seven months of silence.

it parked at 4 billion miles away from earth. it took 10 years to get there. scientist celebrated the historic landing in november that communications went dark when the solar powered coming occasions fell into a shadow. they were able to reboot it momentarily and sent 300 packets of data across the solar system. scientists are now awaiting its next signal. the e3 gaming conference is officially underway in l.a. it's the against conference for it gaming, but it is bethesda softworks jumpstarting the action for its epic post-apocalyptic game, "fallout 4" and a mobile platform. we got a look at doom. here to tell us more about the lineup for the rest of the year, i'm joined by the vp of marketing for bethesda softworks. pete, it looks like this mobile game has already taken off. in the last 24 hours, it's the number one game in the apple app store. how big is it so far? guest: it's going really fast and really big.

not just the number one game but the number one free app of any kind. within the last few hours, we've shot into the top 10 for highest grossing apps of any kind, so it has been an amazing response. it's fun to see so many people downloading it and it hasn't even been out for a day yet. emily: do you see this mobile game is something that will stand out on its own or do you use it together with "fallout 4?" pete: this was something the team had been talking about for years. they had a lot of different ideas but this is when they kept coming back to -- though idea of being the overseer and you have these characters you place in rooms and sort of manage a little underground community. it was designed and built as a thing that could live on mobile devices on its own, but to announce it and have it out that night we have it be part of a

much larger campaign obviously helps visibility. it is doing very well on the charts. emily: are the mobile gamers different than typical console gamers? is it a new audience are the same audience? pete: it is probably a little early to tell. the folks who first heard about it were the ones to tuned in to hear about our games. we are known for making aaa games for pc and consoles, so that is the audience that tuned in to what we have to say. how far outside we go to mobile only is i guess we need to wait to see. emily: we have to talk about

"doom." it's more violent and visceral than ever, but what is it you think about "doom" that is so enduring? pete: it is a historic game in our industry. it has been included in hall of fame's and it's about the pace of the action. these big crazy guns and over-the-top violence where you are battling demons. it's got a great multiplayer component and snap map which allows users to make their own content and share with other users across any platform. it provides almost endless gameplay of the whole different variety. we are really excited with what we have and it seems like everyone else's excited as well. emily: and you have a female protagonist this time. thank you so much for joining us. thanks for watching this edition of "bloomberg west." tomorrow we're live from the bloomberg tech conference here in san

francisco. ♪

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