What is the Future of Television?
The Future of Television Conference got off to a not so auspicious start from a blogging perspective as there was neither mobile broadband reception nor Wi-Fi. Of course, in fairness to the organizers the conference venue, a museum was not ideally suited for this type of event and lower Manhattan is not only very windy this time of year, it is notoriously poor for wireless broadband reception.
Ned Sherman, whose company Digital Media Wire has seen significant traction in the space set the stage for the two-day event to a full house of television and media specialists. Questions texted from the audience over their mobile handsets were displayed on a projection screen feed from a laptop and served as questions for the panel.
photos © IPTVe
The upstairs hosted a number of companies such as Limelight Networks, KickApps, Level (3), Bluefrog Media, Blinkx and Prospero among others. I spoke with the folks from Prospero, their space for creating widgets and applications for social networking sites, which they would host and usually administer for media clients.
Of special interest to me was their platform was created on .Net and one would certainly expect tight integration with Microsoft Silverlight distributed content in the future as MFST seeks to ramp up interactive rich media experiences.
Of the two panels I sat in on, the first “What’s Next: The Top Give Digital Media Trends to Watch and Why” was the most interesting. Shelly Palmer spoke of a lack of inventory of ads for the on-line space. As he said, “the largest advertiser on television is television”.
Tim Herbert, Sr. Director Market Research, CES spoke of the rise of screens in the home from nine in 1990 to over 25 in 2006 and Evan Neufeld Vice President & Senior Analyst m:metrics mentioned the over abundance of text messaging all struggling to get the attention of readers.
I audio recorded today's conference and will post select comments from the panelist.
