Zoom-in Online

I just got back to the office after bumming around this year's New York Media Summit, the "international conference on media, advertising, television, cable & satellite, broadband, mobile, publishing & radio, magazines, news media, motion pictures and marketing."

Quite a mouthful. Super-duper tagline aside, this is definitely a power player event. Keynote addresses from top-mouse Robert Iger and CBS head Leslie Moonves are being supplemented with panel sessions, workshops and various schmooze fests. After grabbing my press pass I headed to an afternoon session entitled "Television without Boundaries: Cable, Telco, Satellite, Broadband and Mobile Define the Future of Entertainment and Communications."

The stellar panel was populated by Sam Howe (CMO, Time Warner), Sean Carey (SEVP, Sony Pictures Television), Sandy Wax (President, PBS Kids Sprout), Patricia Gottesman (EVP Digital Marketing & Commerce, Cablevision), Herb Scannell (CEO, Next New Networks) and moderated by Shahid Khan (Partner, Interactive Broadband Consulting). What struck me most about the discussion was the specificity; for the most part everybody stayed away from general platitudes or talking points, and spoke candidly about everything from the bottom line to bandwidth. A few takeaways I found interesting:

- Fairly large digital production budgets are typically in the '100s of dollars a minute' range

- Destination sites will not work; you must bring content to audiences, not audiences to content

- Cable companies are realizing the value and necessity of consumer choice. The general consensus was that this means more VOD

- MySpace = content vehicle, Facebook = communications vehicle

- Television metrics must evolve to match the more robust nature of web analytics

A few of us from ZIO will be posting on various tidbits from the summit over the next few days, so stay tuned!