The TV of Tomorrow

I was asked to be on the panel of Tracy Swedlow's TV of Tomorrow Conference in San Francisco. It was a lot of fun but I realized that I had a tough time connecting with some of the other attendees. Turns out that they are all traditional TV / Cable folks that actually know what EBIF and tru2way mean, while I'm just an Internet guy with an idea and a passion. What was really cool was that Tracy was able to get all of the interactive internet video providers into one room onto one stage. (This is her passion as well, and kudos to Tracy for pulling this thing off).

On my panel were Brian Rogers from EvenHere, Nick Alt from ConciseClick, Baba from VideoClix, Shana Steele from Tremor Media, Michael Fink from YouTube Annotations, myself, Abe from Clikthrough, Scott Bloomfield from Veeple and Rob from content creator Rob Chad and Matt. It was pretty interesting to see everyone's demo and to hear everyone's thoughts. I've always wanted to drive interactive video because I believe that we are not working against each other but actually should be working together. The great thing is that each company had a slightly different spin with a slightly different target audience. Here's the rundown:

Evenhere - They drop items into a timeline that appear in a video. When you are watching you have the option to purchase these items. They charge on a CPM / CPA basis. Target audience appears to be professional content - currently implemented on BFF.tv

Conciseclick - They are clickable video with popups that show up when you roll over something. Came from an agency and I think they are still targeting those clients. Not sure how they charge, but nice implementations with Hotwheels and Mattel.

VideoClix - They've been around for 11 years now and have a nice interface for professional content creators that track objects within their video. Then the creators go in and create content for each tag. They had a nice sizzle reel.

TremorMedia - Aren't they an ad network? Not just. They also have an Acuedeo tool that furthers interactivity for their brand partners. Pretty cool. They provide buttons and overlays that easily plug in.

Clikthrough - They target the music industry and have a really comprehensive system that gives the viewer anything from ratings to ecommerce to social media. Pretty nice interface.

YouTube - Small company attached to a small search company. Even Michael said that annotations was pretty low-tech but what's interesting is the adoption of annotations. (They've also released what Michael describes as wiki annotations). One out of every six has some type of annotations. He's no longer working on the product anymore.

Veeple - They are targeting the pro-sumer and corporate users including GoDaddy. Pretty interesting how they've allowed users to put PDF, Word, PPT files into a video.

Rob - Funny guy who is part of a trio of comedians from LA. They do a lot of cool things with interactive video including choose your own adventure.

And then there was me. I told my favorite story about our favorite movie (Miss Pettigrew) and the audience got that. I was also able to fit in a story about In The Heights and how its a different game than Miss P and why it worked better. And then time was over. Wow that was fast. We even had to postpone the click awards. So apply for them, and email me if you'd like to apply. On my way now to go meet up with old friends from Google....