As many of our favorite TV stars manned the picket lines in solidarity with the Writers Guild of America, dozens of TV executives descended upon lower Manhattan yesterday afternoon to chat about whether digital media was killing TV.
Strikes aside, participants at the Future of TV Conference were confident that TV would live to see another day, and promised that Internet video content would enhance and not destroy our precious television.
The trade-off for that, however, is continued "pre-roll" ads that play before online video content. Executives recoiled in horror at the notion of ad-free subscription services.
"Subscription models on the Internet are tough," said Jordan Hoffner, head of premium content partnerships at YouTube. "You either have to be a real avid fan of something ... or [offer] some piece of information you can't get somewhere."
"Online, the key is to make [video] very easy to get to," said Greg Clayman, executive vice president of digital distribution and business development for MTV Networks.
A rep from NBC Universal appeared at an earlier panel to tout Hulu, a possible competitor for YouTube. Jean-Briac (JB) Perrette, president of digital distribution, said that 10 days into its beta, it was "way too early to tell" how well Hulu will perform, but painted it as a "scaling, broad, super store" for online video.
Another panel also touched briefly on Google's Android open-source platform for mobile devices.
Evan Neufeld, vice president and senior analyst at M:Metrics, applauded Google for moving away from a "walled garden concept." The industry, however, is in transition and the next two to three years will be about "trying to figure out how the public will be using phones," he said.
"It's a good thing for someone to put a stake in the ground," Neufeld said. "How it's going to impact any other business--mobile handset business included--I have no idea."
Neufeld said he has an iPhone and loves it, but it still "pisses [him] off" that adding new applications to the device could turn it into a brick, he said.
Shelly Palmer, chairman of the Emmy Awards' advanced media committee, was less enthusiastic. "Everyone assumes that because it's Google, it'll succeed," he said. But Android will have to pry the proprietary information from Verizon and AT
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