The first panel at last year's Futures of Entertainment focused on "Television Futures," featuring a variety of interesting speakers who discussed where the television industry was headed from a variety of perspectives. While there is no video available from the panel, audio can be found here.
The panel was live-blogged on the C3 blog here. We wrote about their discussion on issues such as "What Has Caused This Period of Increased Experimentation?," "The Shifting Relationship of Television in the Media Industry," "Television in a VOD and Netflix World," and "Bypassing the Networks."
Participants in the panel were:
Andy Hunter, who was planning director at GSD&M in Austin, Texas, at the time. GSD&M is one of our corporate partners in the Consortium. Although Andy is no longer with GSD&M, he is going to be an attendee at this year's conference, and we look forward to hearing what he has to say.
Mark Warshaw, the founder of FlatWorld Intertainment who had been working on the CW's Smallville. Mark is now working on NBC's Heroes and will be appearing as part of the MIT Communications Forum on Thursday evening proceeding the conference with Heroes' Jesse Alexander. We are looking forward to having Mark with us again for this year's event.
Josh Bernoff, our neighbor at Forrester Research.
Betsy Morgan, who at the time was Senior Vice President of CBS Digital Media and General Manager of CBSNews.com and who is now with the Huffington Post.
In our live-blogging, we wrote:
Bernoff points out that iTunes has already made deals with record labels and that there is many ways already in place that, even in the new media environment, makes it easier going with a traditional company to get attention online. "When you're an artist, you find it a whole lot easier to delegate the job of distribution and promotion to somoene with a lot of money and a lot of experience. Most producers, even if they start building a direct relationship, still want to connect to a distributor who can get them onto multiple platforms effectively." Hunter concurs that, "if you are an artist, to jump in the deep end and walk away from the investment power of the media companies is harder." They point to Morgan Freeman distributing on the Web and George Lucas moving to short films over the Web.
