Below are a few observations from individual speeches:

Kevin Hanson of Value Vision/Shop NBC challenged the delegates in his opening address by asking, "How are we going to find a business model that's cool with revenue and not just cool?" Most of the speakers responded to the easily-spoken challenge in a serious manner.

Intertainer's Jonathan Taplin expressed a degree of justifiable frustration with the pace of change within the industry. Multiple competing middleware, he lamented, is stifling progress. Looking at Intertainer's business model, one can understand his impatience. Intertainer liscensed an impressive list of content from Disney, MGM, Time Warner, etc, but has only managed to reach 350,000 households while struggling with competing standards. Yet, Taplin points out, Intertainer enjoys a 30% clickthrough rate in it's advertising . This particular data point really impressed listeners. The reason for the advertising success, says Taplin, is obvious: video ads are infinitely more compelling and inviting than two-dimensional banner ads. But what good is it when you can't scale up? Taplin, as always, advocates an IP platform. An outline of his firm's Digital Asset Management system (manages content, adds digital rights management features, distributes and manages subcription features) was also worth the listen.

AT&T Broadband's Richard Fickle gave an eye-opening presentation about how to develop a sustainable business model. Subtitled "How to Partner with Cable Partners", Fickle helped the audience see that the cable industry has a formidable/risky task when making the interactive transition. As always, it's excellent to hear from AT&T directly. Can we hear from them more often? Among the issues he pressed:

• Value proposition to consumers. (Cool doesn't sell).
• What do consumers want from ITV? (Do they know?)
• Revenue enablers (it's more complex than you think; consumer adoption depends on subtle activities, early results are often deceptive, packaging complexity, marketing costs, etc.)
• Costs (Gee, we didn't think of that)
• Economic structure. (A number of outside products need to scale up for the economics to work: VOD, PVR, interactive advertising, t-commerce.)
• Risk assessment. (results from Europe do not necessarily translate to the US.)
• Trap doors (what lurks beyond?).

Robert Pepper, FCC chief of office of policy and planning, delivered an assuring message about the Commission's policies for the future:

• The FCC is drawing upon lessons of "un-regulation" learned from the Internet. They will avoid imposing old rules designed for a previous era.
• They are actively seeking to prevent bottlenecks and anti-competitive behavior from dominant incumbents.
• Promoting, not prohibiting.

Other noteworthy points from Mr. Pepper:

• The industry needs new models for intellectual property rights protection.
• He sees viewers installing $150 digital TV cards in their computer. [itvt] believes this task is a non-starter, but a few companies are doing it.

• Wrestling with multiple platforms (again)
• Lack of ability to gather data about viewer interactive habits.
• Difficulty in aggregating ITV ad media buying opportunities.

Starcom's Tim Hanlon and Mediacom's Russ Booth built upon several points brought up by Mr. Pearson. Booth pointed out, for example, that the ad agencies'role will be to act as a "pivot" between technology providers, content providers, and content distributors. Booth additionally said agencies face a strong challenge as well as an opportunity to help enable the formulation of standards for interpreting viewer data for targeted advertising.

On to content - the Discovery Channel's Abbey Greensfelder and PBS's Deron Triff shared some compelling, cutting-edge, interactive programming with attendees. Their viewer demographics (information-seekers) enable them take some enviable creative risks. It's always great to see what they've got up their sleeve at any event. PBS, for example, showcased their killer app in which they insert relevant, local content into national programming. [itvt] first reported on their experiments during the last election in which the University of Wisconsin PBS affiliate and national worked together to broadcast election returns. We highly recommend seeing their demonstrations.

Further to video-on-demand (VOD) - a panel of executives -Joseph Boyle, vice president of iNDEMAND, Brad Samuels executive vice president of Comedy Central, James de Rin, president of Spec TV-][compared experiences in VOD entertainment. iNDEMAND takes a more traditional approach to VOD by offering recent titles that are still relatively fresh, while Comedy Central seems to be experimenting with ways to squeeze revenue out of its archives such as old "South Park" episodes.. Spec-TV, however, "dredges the ocean floor" for dated, niche, and cult-oriented content. They plan to offer this content to viewers for a small fee. In short, all providers said it was too soon to draw any hard conclusions from their VOD efforts.

Kevin Hanson of ValueVision/ShopNBC made some strong final arguments for the future of t-commerce. He has some terrific financial support (as [itvt] reported a couple of weeks ago when the companies merged) from NBC and quality programming at his disposal. We look forward to hearing about his experiences as the months come and go.

Lisa Fields of Excite@Home suggested that marketers could shorten the learning curve by testing their services and technologies in a broadband environment. Real ITV, she said, isn't WebTV or AOLTV (both require a telephone line and based on HTML). Broadband means cable, two-way high speed, and always on. Her point, though well taken, is still highly controversial as it challenges the right for the ITV industry to develop a single screen approach as opposed to relying on dual screen programming for now. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

One important discussion missing from the conference was a lack of data or even anecdotal observances of viewer interaction with ITV interfaces and apps themselves. Lee Pearson suggested it would be difficult to gather reliable data on this sort of thing until a fully-loaded broadband ITV experience (VOD, enhancedTV, Internet, PVR, etc.) is deployed to a small population here in the U.S. Interesting news, however: PBS has reserved some monies to study the viewer interface in upcoming programming. We look forward to hearing about those results.

A special thanks to our hosts at Worldwide Business Research.

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