(Boston, MA) Jeff Pulver’s Voice-on-the-Net conference expanded its scope this year to video-on-the-net. This new focus of the show got off to a bang this morning with two back-to-back panels. The basic message of both sets of speakers: video from everybody is available everywhere and we’d all better get used to it.
With no exception, the speakers across the first two panels hit home again and again that the video world is exploding, with an enormous number of video producers putting their wares on just about every conceivable platform.
“The idea is to turn every person..into their own personal broadcaster,” Pixpo President Ron Stevens said of his video self-publishing start-up. “You can take it anywhere in the world and hook it up to the Internet, hook it up to a television set and your service will be available,” said Chris Wagner, EVP of Sales and Marketing for place-shifting start-up NeuLion.
Rocketboom’s Andrew Baron put it the most succinctly: “There is nobody controlling anything any more.”
When asked how a traditional video distributor handles this massive supply of new competitors, Warren Schlichting, Vice President of New Business Strategies at Comcast said “Never, ever sleep.” Paraphrasing somebody else, Schlichting offered another option for how traditional video providers can cope with the crazy rise of net video. “I’m going to put my head down on the table and I want all of this and all of you to be gone.”
More seriously, Schlichting demonstrated a sense of healthy realism when he added “We need to get used to the media being available everywhere.”
In terms of what lies ahead, Thom Kozik, Director of Business Development at Yahoo!, said don’t even try to make any predictions given this volatile and rapidly growing trend. “The way video on the net is proliferating now I think we’d be foolish to try to predict where things will be five years from now.”
Cynthia Brumfield at 4:10 PM|Comments(0)
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