I had hoped to live-blog the Television 2.0 panel, but unfortunately was running late getting in (I took a stroll through one of the exhibit halls first, more on that later). By the time I got set up, I was mostly committing notes from the earlier segment and trying to keep track of the rest. So I’ll give you a recap.

The panelists included Luke Bradley-Jones (BBC Worldwide America), Steven Canepa (IBM), Doug Lee (MGM), Terry Mackin (Hearst-Argyle Television), Rishi Malhotra (HBO On Demand and Multi-Platform Marketing), Ryan O’Hara (TV Guide Network), and Jeff Weber (AT&T). The discussion focused on the changing ways consumers engage in entertainment and the changing television platform in a panel moderated by Shahid Khan (Interactive Broadband Consulting, LLC).

Bradley-Jones, recalling his trip to Vegas said he watched someone next to him viewing Pirates of the Caribbean on his Nano. He suggested that that would be the exception rather than the rule and he did not believe that consumers would consume long-form video in that way. He suggests that is an oddity likely limited to people attending CES.

This became a recurring theme of the panel. Lee agreeing with Bradley-Jones, suggested that long-form via personal devices is not appealing, but suggests that people may want to watch portions of long-form in that way. His example of The Good, The Bad & The Ugly as a movie too long for consumption that way, but he thinks people may want to watch pieces of it.

I’m not sure if that’s really true and would like to see some stats (if the companies have them) on research that indicates people won’t watch long-form content that way. It may be a chicken/egg discussion that people aren’t doing it now simply because it’s a new technology. Only the early adopters are really consuming mobile video. With advances in devices, and a marketing focus, would that change?

The discussion moved to gaming and gaming consoles. Khan asked what the role of game consoles will be in the delivery of content? Canepa responded that “the most powerful processor in the household is often in that gaming console.” Canepa discussing gaming on large screen video (100 inch via projector) and interacting with people around the world on massively multiplayer games represents a significant shift in people’s entertainment.

Bradley-Jones doubts game consoles will be big players in the streaming model as providers will look to their own delivery methods rather than feed competitors. That begs the question of whether that ignores the fact that game consoles are high demand items with a high price tag and if asked to choose between content via that channel and buying another device to access similar content, will consumers choose the platform they already have for games over a different device?

The conversation then turned to social media and user-generated content with a discussion of the Facebook platform, YouTube, and other growing content avenues.

Bradley-Jones theorizes that Facebook viewer traffic will drop off, but admits he thought MySpace user levels would drop after the News Corp. purchase. His comments indicate he believes social media is more of a fad, while Malhotra suggests it’s not the delivery, but the content that’s king. Content that people want is always going to be key, and will always be the driver. Using multi-platform distribution like YouTube together with HBO’s channel lineup to deliver that content is secondary to the platform itself.

An audience member steps up to ask if the reason Facebook, YouTube produce “hot” content is the “indie” spirit that may be required to produce content. He suggests big corporations, by nature of their size, are less likely to produce something that gets the same attention.

The question drew a lot of discussion mainly along the theme that the questions may be a faulty assumption. Weber believes that the two are not comparable. They produce content in different ways. HBO has looked at having their production teams go back and produce short-form, web exclusive content that drives the content on the typical TV platform. O’Hara discusses the monetization of people who create indie content, get noticed, get an agent, and begin producing content for corporate interests for money.

Lee commented on the ease of people producing and distributing content and argues that is creating a talent pool for large corporate producers to draw from.

It’s an interesting discussion that posits the user-generated content model is essentially an audition process to see who can be creative and get noticed and thus picked up by large companies to do interesting stuff with a larger budget. Similar to the argument of whether studio pictures or indie films are better, this could have been a panel on its own.

One interesting comment that came up during the panel was O’Hara discussing the limitations of a standardized middleware for creating applications across cable platforms. For an update on the Tru2Way application platform developed by CableLabs to address exactly that issue, stay tuned to our coverage this week.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 7th, 2008 at 2:50 pm and is filed under Tech Discussions, Technology Showcase. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.