Recap from NewTeeVee and Dinner with a Ninja
On Wednesday I was at the NewTeeVee event in San Francisco. I have to say it was one of the better digital media conferences of the year. I can't really pinpoint why (it still seemed to focus on the same subjects we've heard at conferences throughout the year: a) "advertising will be big," b) "social networking is really important for video," c) "consumers want HD, and d) "let's hear from YouTube or MySpace..."), but quite a few people I talked to thought it was a great event.
For two anecdotes from the event, click to the rest of the post.
I had a lot of fun on Wednesday night at a dinner hosted by Om Malik and Accenture. I randomly sat next to Mark Trout of Accenture (Mark runs the West Coast Tech practice) and Kent Nichols of AskANinja.com. You couldn't get two more opposite ends of the spectrum - Accenture is a $20B global corporation, while AskANinja is "two guys and a ninja."
I do think what the Ninja guys are doing is pretty interesting, though, as we look forward for the future of digital media. Kent and his partner created and run the site on a shoestring, but get more than 700,000 monthly visitors and are making real money (sounded like it was in the hundreds of thousands of $) through advertising. There are weak shows on broadcast tv that don't reach those numbers. I'm not the first to ponder this, but with the writers' strike, don't you think more of the creative types in LA will look to the Internet as a low-cost way to distribute their ideas - and get paid directly, without studios and others taking a giant cut? If nothing else, go to Kent's site and watch a few videos - they're hilarious.
One of the more poignant insights at the conference was made by Quincy Smith of CBS, who said "Old media executives have made more of an effort to learn new media than new media has bothered to learn old media." There's some strong advice in there for technology vendors...
