The pre-show keynote panel on Monday was held in a smaller room within the Gaylord Texan and Convention Center, as expected, but it was so crowded that calling it "standing room only" would be a falsity. There wasn't even anywhere to stand.
President and CEO of Federal Hill, Bethany Gorfine moderated the panel, which included Jon Cody, VP of Digital Media at Twentieth Century Fox; Gene Pao, the executive director of business strategy and development at Disney & ESPN media networks; and Doug Hurst, SVP, On Demand and Affiliate Marketing, Scripps Networks. Here's a sampling of the discussion broken down by the key topics:
If you build it, content will come
Pao: We are slaves to the technology, if you build it we will make the content for it…
Why content costs so much
Gorfine: The movie business is considered by many to be a poor investment.
Cody: At the end of the day we have an 80-20 set-up, 80 percent of them are misses and 20 percent are wins (profitable). Borat looks to be the studio's big winner this year.
On place-shifting content
Cody: Right now we do have theoretical problems with technologies like Sling, but we may soon have some legal ones too. Porting our content to markets where it is against regulations to do so, for instance, we don't have the license to broadcast certain sports games in market A because a different network, a local channel, might. That said, at the end of the day, we are all about giving the consumer what he wants, when he wants and where he wants it.
For more sound bites from the keynote:
- check out the full article here [1]
Links:
[1] http://www.fierceiptv.com/story/pre-show-keynote-content-roundtable/2006-11-07