(Update: The conference ended at noon. The on-demand videos of the event are published above.)
The Beet.TV Online Video Roundtable is taking place at the msnbc.com digital cafe today at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in New York City from 9 a.m. to noon, and we're streaming the event live using Mogulus. For a list of participants, please see our earlier post.
I'll be live blogging from the event; keep reading to see my updates below. And please add your comments!
—Kelsey Blodget, Associate Producer
8:56 a.m. : We're streaming live! And drinking lots of coffee.
9:00 a.m. : The Beet.TV Online Video Roundtable is streaming live on Outside the Lines, the blog of CNET News.com Editor-in-Chief Dan Farber.
9:02: Event host Charlie Tillinghast, President of msnbc.com, is making his opening statements.
9:03: Andy is thanking his co-moderators Dan Farber and Erick Schonfeld.
9:08: The participants are introducing themselves.
9:10: Dan Farber kicks off the first session, which focuses on the use of online video by big and small publishers. The second session, on monetization, will be moderated by TechCrunch Co-Editor Erick Schonfeld, and the final session, on technology, will be moderated by Andy.
9:12: Charlie Tillinghast says that while msnbc.com was doing a good business in online video a year ago, the election has made it even more popular.
9:17: KC Estenson from CNN.com says a lot of Web 2.0 companies let viewers choose what videos they want to watch, while CNN filters them more. He predicts that in the future video publishers will meet somewhere in the middle.
9:19: Fred McIntyre from AOL video says he'll be making an announcement today with Brightcove. We blogged about the news here.
9:25: Adam Berrey from Brightcove says that the shift from linear programming to non-linear, contextual programming will be important as online video moves forward. He mentions The Washington Post and The New York Times as sites that are both doing this well.
9:26: Max Haot from Mogulus says he wants to challenge the notion that on-demand content is revolutionary. One of the next big steps is not just the live streaming, but micro-channels where viewers can discover content they might not have been aware of, he says.
9:32: Laura Lee from YouTube says YouTube gives consumers tremendous choice, and is is delving into full-length videos. YouTube Insight shows the hot spots of a video–which sections are most popular–to provide useful analytics to advertisers.
9:34: Cristian Cussen from MySpace talks about the TheWB.com web show Sorority Forever, which has a greater advertising reach because it is syndicated through multiple sites, including MySpace TV.
9:38: KC Estenson from CNN.com says iReport has been a huge success. The site has 160,000 dedicated iReporters, and their contributions are moderated by the community, he says. He says it can be a challenge because CNN has editorial standards that are different from iReport, but when the fake Steve Jobs heart attack post went up, the iReport community questioned the story and it was taken down almost immediately.
9:43: Chet Rhodes from The Washington Post talks about a reporter writing about gorillas in the Congo who took a 30-second video clip of a gorilla beating its chest. It was a professional reporter shooting an amateur video, and those kind of contributions, from professionals or iReporters, will continue to play a role in journalism in the future.
9:53: Dan Farber asks that if, given the economy, the mainstream media will move faster to identify independents who would be a lot cheaper to hire and start bringing them into the fold.
9:56: Former CBS News President Andrew Heyward says that the value of the 11 o'clock news cast has been taken over by others, as all of the information is available on the Internet. TV broadcasts and newspapers can reassert their value by making the content hyper-local.
9:59: Erick Schonfeld discusses the damage that one false sensational report, like the Steve Jobs hear attack report, can do do a brand.
10:03: Jimmy Pitaro from Yahoo says that a Shakira video mash-up Yahoo created, which included cutaways of fans lip syncing and played the original Shakira soundtrack in the background, became the site's number one video. Yahoo has had a lot of success on the user-generated side, but advertisers do prefer professional content, like live sports games and on-demand highlights. Adding a professional component to user-generated content, like the Shakira video, makes it more marketable, he says.
10:10: Erick Schonfeld begins the second session, which will focus on the monetization of online video.
10:15: David Hallerman from eMarketer says it's very difficult to make money off of video at this point. Video advertising makes up a small pecentage of advertising online, and the TV-Internet combo will be a driving force in video ad spending over the next few years. Video used to be a young male environment, but the audience is broader now and is ready for more advertising.
10:23: Professional video content is up to 80 or 90 percent monetized by advertising tied explicitly to the content, like pre-roll, according to Suranga Chandratillake from video search engine Blinkx.
10:28: It's been proven that the the online audience and broadcast audience are different audiences, according to Charlie Tillinghast. The Internet is a complementary rather than competing experience.
10:31: Gina de Mendonca from neo@Ogilvy says her digital media agency views extensions of television, like complementary online and print experiences, as useful for deeper brand integration.
10:37: Adam Berrey from Brightcove says there's been a myopic focus on the ad within the video in the discussion so far, but that publishers need to realize that they're selling the whole site.
10:40: The CPMs for online are different than for TV, but are appropriate given the audience, KC Estenson from CNN.com says. The biggest gap to fill right now is the unsold inventory.
10:43: Schonfeld asks: Are advertisers more interested in attaching ads to compelling content that could be published anywhere or on sites that they trust?
10:45: NextNewNetworks syndicates on Blip, YouTube and Yahoo. CEO Tim Shey says they've had major advertisers like Microsoft and Starburst, but despite the high interest in the space, standards are a big issue and a tracking system to deliver analytics is a big issue.
10:50: Jimmy Pitaro from Yahoo says he used to fast forward through ads on DVR but now finds himself actually hitting play for entertaining ads, and that the same thing is happening online as quality ads become viral.
11:13: The third session on technology, moderated by Andy, has started after a short break.
11:17: The participants are prompted to discuss the difference between Flash and Microsoft Silverlight.
11:20: Eric Schmidt from Microsoft discusses in-stream delivery from Double Click for Microsoft Silverlight.
11:26: Cristian Cussen from MySpace says that they're still testing the waters for how they want a mobile video offering to emerge.
11:30: Over 200 viewers are watching our live stream from the conference, and a number are having a very insightful chat about it on our Mogulus channel.
11:38: Two thirds of all videos streamed on MySpace are streamed off of user profiles, which creates many points of entry for discoverability, Cristian Cussen says. Media assets are consumed and made social by being on the site; the notion of social referral is essential to discoverability.
11:40: If you don't have strong metadata, nine times out of ten people won't necessarily find the video they're looking for, according to YouTube's Laura Lee.
11:41: Suranga Chandtratillake from Blinkx says metadata has faults, because people often don't enter it in properly. Blinkx uses voice and facial recognition technology to help solve that problem.
11:43: Chrandratillake says he'd like to see video integrated better with the rest of the web. Video spliced with text is a lot more effective.
11:58: Schonfeld asks Tillinghast if a big company would acquire a start-up with an audience but without revenue. Tillinghast says it would have to have a proven revenue model to be attractive.
12:00: KC Estenson from CNN.com says he and Charlie have large enough audiences. What they need are verticals.
12:01: Max Haot and Chet Rhodes have some final comments about live streaming.
12:04: Andy makes his closing statement. Phew. That's a wrap. Expect to see interviews with conference participants and segments from the conference on Beet.TV soon!
