The main topic of the opening panel - "How the Rules Changed. One Year Later" - was more than apt with its IPTV and entertainment star-studded roster of YouTube CEO Chad Hurley, Sling Media CEO Blake Krikorian, Demand Media CEO Rich Rosenblatt, MP3tunes chief Michael Robertson and Carson Daly, who moderated.
And while the good news was much has changed and shifted forward in the last six months or so since Google announced it was acquiring YouTube, many panelists also said they expect the transition to take years. "I think you're gong to see this go on for decades," Rosenblatt predicted.
Earlier, the former MySpace chairman had launched with Daly his company's new forray into online video meets social networking meets domain registration meets $220 million of financing. Demand Media's new enterprise, dubbed "me.tv" or "dot.tv" provides a host of rich media tools to help users register a domain, create their own pages and generate traffic to their site. One click helps demonstrate the power of the revenue model - those $24.95 web domains aren't the cheapest you can find, but they do offer customers a way of getting up and running swiftly.
YouTube is concentrating on the tiny screen - i.e. mobile video - befitting the short-form format it has always promoted, Hurley shared. Details? Stay tuned.
Krikorian describe a 'reverse slingbox' now in development, which would involved a 'catcher' version which could sling items from the Internet or your phone or personal computer to a television. Down the road, he also sees the possibility of creating affiliate groups - such as a UCLA Bruins fan club for himself and other fans of the university's sports teams.
One impediment to growth is the complexity of different offerings on internet-related advertising, rather than the one-stop bucket available on television advertisements, for example. And another is the bicameral nature of many traditional media and agencies where 'traditional' journalists, editors, filmmakers, etc., are seen as different from their peers on the web, including the broad number of amateur participants. Yet panelists expect the experiment of amateurs using increasingly powerful production tools will likely produce top quality work that will challenge professionals and push the envelope.
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