The Cannes takeaway

In 1900 dreamers imagined something very much like television, predicting quite accurately that this kind of theater would be an everyday phenomenon in the year 2000. The illustrator was quite a visionary; the lady in red seems to be getting only an audio feed! Cross-platform, already!

And so to Cannes, to the MipTV market which I have been attending regularly for about 15 years.



So, business as usual. People from all four corners of the globe buying and selling the programs destined to fill the schedules of countless cable, satellite and terrestrial television broadcasters.

No, not really.

Many of those attending still chose to ignore the 500 pound gorilla lurking on the Croisette; the internet.



Babelgum, which few of us had even heard of before this January (when I posted this), had their poster on the facade of the Palais des Festivals, an internet usurper occupying space which , surely, should have promoted NBC Universal, Sony Entertainment, Disney, HBO or any other of the established forces in television.

Joost had a market stand of their own, Brightcove , Joost , MSN Video and a number of other Television 2.0 concerns fielded eloquent panelists (Tony Dunaif, Fredrik de Wahl, Rob Bennet) in the conference sessions. Rick Sands, COO of Metro Goldwyn Mayer got all the laughs at the Superpanel: Broadband Video Explosion, but they came from the stuck-in-the-past majority of those in the Salle Esterel who didn't 'get it'.

[Sandlander's regular readers may appreciate a recent article about Joost I found here.]

In another superpanel Jason Hirschman, of SlingBox fame, warned of technologies enabling "people to watch their home television on their laptops from anywhere in the world" - not exactly music to the ears of those who for decades have thought in terms of release windows and territorial licensing.

"Don't just defend the old business," suggested Christiane zu Salm, founder and CEO of the investment fund AboutChange, "Develop it. Experiment. Learn from the mistakes. If you concentrate on defending old models, the only people who are going to get rich are the lawyers."

[Not only is she right, not only does her thinking reflect everything you have read in the past six months on this blog but Christiane was also the first distinguished panelist at a MipTV conference with whom I exchanged bisous - we were work colleagues back in the mid-nineties!]

Ken Rutowski moderated in a very free-wheeling manner a session with the daunting title How to build, market and syndicate television and long-tail content over the internet. This was an session which made me wonder if I was failing in my ambition to track, evaluate and even beta-test all interesting TV 2.0 developments. I had never heard of Jalipo!

I was reassured when I learned that Alex Taylor's new 'pay-as-you-go' video system was brand new and only launched at Cannes. Jalipo should be on everyone's watch list.

And I am not going to blog about it!

To be honest, the proliferation of platforms and tools is so rapid (Microsofts Silverlight, the new Adobe Media Player, Motionbox bringing HD to AppleTV, Vimeo creeping into YouTube territory) that I am from today going to concentrate on the content creation arena.

So this will be my last allusion to the tech toys. That's Michael Rosenblum's watch on the left, which he took off to give an idea of the scale of that amazingly tiny HD camcorder he found at the NAB!

And in Steve Safran's post from the RTNDA Attacking and defending the VJ model you can read of a clash of cultures among the makers of television equally as important as the battle being fought about the ways of delivering content.