It’s Day 3 at the AlwaysOn conference at Stanford, where hundreds of CEOs, venture capitalists and marketing professionals come together each year for a networking love fest.
Photos:
Ronnie Lott, former San Francisco 49er and now a partner (with Joe Montana and Harris Barton) at HJR Capital (top).
Rob Glaser, CEO of RealNetworks.
Moments after the top photo was taken, incidentally, Ronnie batted a football helmet that smacked into my knees as I was kneeling in the center aisle. (It was, I think, to demonstrate a point, not because he suspected I was a NY Giants fan.)
This morning’s opening session, “Radical New Business Models in Media,” featured Kevin Conroy, EVP and COO, AOL for Broadband; Rob Glaser, CEO of RealNetworks; Michael Weiss, CEO of StreamCast Networks; and David Siminoff, CEO of Siminoff Capital. Highlights:
Conroy: The decision to have broadband is a lifestyle decision. You’re going from the task-oriented goals of dial-up to a lifestyle and entertainment environment.
Siminoff: What could AOL have been if it had made the decision to be massively open and distributed rather than closed and proprietary? It would have been the social operating system of the Internet. (Applause)
Glaser: There’s no such thing as open source DRM. Not really. The requirements of open source inspection would literally be a cookbook on how to defeat the DRM. (He added: Because media companies insist on content protection, we’ve taken the approach of layering on protective technologies in the application layer on top of an open source platform.) Having an open approach to content “is not something the major media companies are embracing.” So Real is leveraging an open source infrastructure and putting DRM layered on top to get the rights holder comfortable.
The moderator asked about new business models.On the AlwaysOn Live Chat, Socialtest CEO Ross Mayfield wrote: “New media winners: BitTorrent for distribution, RSS for pings, Technorati for indexes, Six Apart and Flickr for user-generated content. Also, Feedster, Newsgator, Tribe.”
Glaser: If I were starting from scratch and didn’t have any distribution, I’d focus on games. Silicon Valley innovation is much more geared toward innovation in areas like digital knowledge, while it hasn’t changed the product form of music or movies.
Conroy: I’d look to start a company to enable the real digital lifestyle at scale. There are tens of millions of consumers who want to be customers, who find this really really hard, beyond the 1-2% of the population who are early adopters and have the time to figure this out. That needs to be solved, and there are lots of opportunities there. Once you unlock the power of the medium to enjoy the power of digital media inside and outside the home, you’ll be able to serve consumers more broadly. It’s a service model.
Siminoff: TiVo and TiVo-like devices are bad for old media on a whole number of levels. I have a 4 1/2 year old daughter who gets angry when she sees commercials. … The cable and satellite industries say tat by the end of this year there will be 15 million TiVo-like boxes in the home, which means really 10 million. That’s a huge dimunition of the value of advertising time. In the process of going from a free medium to a paid medium, there will be huge dislocations everywhere.
Conroy: I think the solution to that is IP video on demand. That will be in more homes faster than TiVo-like functionality will be. It’s being created in such a way that advertising is being complemented in an on-demand environment. The IP infrastructure is already in place today as it relates to the PC and in a year or two you’ll be able to consume that experience on other devices in the home.
Glaser: Today’s kids will grow up in a world where all these things are merged. … I recently came back from a trip to China and Korea and ran into Jerry Yang on the way back. What struck Jerry was kids sitting around cafés and watching their cell phones. The multiplayer game market in China is big and growing rapidly. Some of the most compelling investment opportunities are around multiplayer games and digital entertainment.
Marc Canter, whom I’m teaming with in a new project called Open Media, spoke from the audience, asking Glaser to support open standards so that amateur media can be supported on any platform. Glaser essentially agreed that it was a worthy goal.
Later: Met a lot of great people the past two days. The final panel of the day — “Bloggers vs. Big Media” — went fairly well. Panelists were Dan Gillmor, Tony Perkins, Blaise Zerega (managing editor, Wired), Chris Nolan,
David Sifry (CEO, Technorati.com) and yours truly.
We decided before the session not to bring our laptops on stage, so I didn’t take notes, but Denise Howell did an excellent wrapup here. Denise also had a good summary yesterday of the session with Joe Trippi and Dan Gillmor.
JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.
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