Attending Video on the Net

Today I’ll be attending Video on the Net, the Jeff Pulver conference happening at the San Jose Convention Center. Here’s the schedule. Looking forward to meeting Chris Brogan of network2.tv and Michael Smolens of dotSUB, among others.

Update: I’m at the first panel, sitting next to two of my heroes, Jeff Jarvis and Steve Garfield. Steve just turned around his laptop and took a snapshot of the first panel with PhotoBooth, and then uploaded it to his blog a moment later. It’s here. Other familiar faces: Rafat Ali, Deeje Cooley, Om Malik, Josh Goldman.

The first panel, Are Viewers Really Watching?, is top notch. Lots of ideas flying around. A few live-blogging snippets:

Dina Kaplan, COO, Blip.tv: "Within a couple of years we’ll lose the distinction between TV and Internet video. … Now we have to say TV shows for the Web. In a couple of years we won’t need to say that. …
Ze Frank and ‘Goodnight Burbank’ are honestly as good as what you’re seeing on television." Blip is all about shows.

Dmitry Shapiro, CEO of Veoh sees a trend toward more professionally produced video, with some longer-form content emerging rather than all the "video snacking" short-form clips. Popular Internet shows like Diggnation are beginning to crop up. "All these shows will come through Tivo or RSS feeds that sit next to your monitor. … Advertising is about to change dramatically. Any small or medium-sized business will be able to target people directly" rather than as an undifferentiated mass.

Robert Petty, CEO of Australia’s ROO Group: "The internet is all on demand. The users decide what they want."

Shapiro: "We’ve created the first ever entertainment content marketplace, based on millions of people deciding with the click of a mouse what’s going to be popular or not. … We compare this to the democratization of print brought on by the World Wide Web. Back in 1997, no one was making money, today you have bloggers and videobloggers starting to make money. Forget about Madison Avenue. Instead of Madison Avenue you’ll have main street in Boise [determining the marketplace]."

I asked the panelists about whether we’ll soon move from watching small grainy clips to watching high-quality larger video shows via streaming on Joost or download on Democracy Player (and FireAnt).

Shapiro: "I’m a huge believer in the idea that this will be the year [the transition to high-quality video over the Net will begin]." Veoh keeps the original file and then hosts and delivers it over the p2p network they’ve developed. "You can get these qualities in their original resolution. I watch those videos on my plasma TV set and it’s a good experience. … Using the internet to deliver content to you of any bitrate is the future."

Where today there are 367 video hosting sites (says Om Malik), Shapiro says, in a few years "it’ll be 3,700 sites and beyond. It’ll be a very fragmented marketplace." I agree. The costs are so low that while we’ll see a lot of these startups go out of business, we’ll see other grassroots efforts come along and take their place — and then some.

The big challenge for the industry now is helping viewers identify the video content of interest to them. Says Shapiro: "I want to track things by my interests and allow the system through intelligent systems and collaborative filtering to identify content that I want." In effect, we’ll see series of playlists with a Jeff Jarvis channel or Steve Garfield channel.

Kaplan: At Blip, "we’re finding ourselves more and more in the role as a an internet talent agency." She pointed out that internet video is becoming mainstream — no longer a nerdy niche thing to create a show or channel. … We’ll soon start to be thought of as entertainment companies as much as technology companies."

Shapiro says Veoh doesn’t push for exclusivity for content distribution. "This medium should be an open medium. Content aggregators shouldn’t be using their power to try to force exclusivity."

Panel 2: How Well Do Sillicon Valley and Hollywood Fit Together?

Daniel Scheinman, GM of Cisco Media Solutions Group: "How do we get content to find you, when the Internet becomes this giant library? Half the time you don’t know what you want. That’s the challenge of Silicon Valley over the next five years — for consumers find content intuitively that are important to them."

Sarah Harden of Fox Cable says that Viacom’s lawsuit against YouTube "sends a signal to Google [from the entertainment companies that] we want our content protected, and we want our content to be monetized."

Scheinman: "This [the lawsuit] may mark a turning point that eventually may result in a more mature relationship between Silicon Valley and Hollywood."

More Scheinman: "Two years ago, the question was: would Hollywood allow its content to go online? That problem is over." Today, the problem is: How to sort through all this flotsam and jetsam (my words). Soon, when we figure this out, "the content is going to find you."

I asked the final question of the panel: Given the fact that grassroots media and traditional media are intersecting, and the panel had spent quite a bit of time talking about the headaches of clearing rights, I pointed out that grassroots media makers aren’t about to do that, and never will. Shouldn’t there be an exception in the copyright law for noncommercial works?

None of the panelists answered my question.

Panel 3: Who’s making money with web-based video?

Josh Goldman, CEO of Akimbo thinks Google will overcome the suit. "They will get the filters right to get rid of the [infringing] copyrighted content."

I did video interviews with Veoh’s Dmitry Shapiro and dotSUB’s Michael Smolens and will post those in a few days. I won’t be able to attend the rest of the conference, Tuesday to Thursday, but lots of interesting sessions on tap.

Meantime, Jeff Jarvis did some live-blogging here.

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.