Gary Arlen, a moderator at last week’s Digital Media Conference, provides his take-aways on the event, including Net Neutrality. Here is a choice extract: “While the policy sessions generated passionate arguments, the conference’s content and business panels underscored the revitalization of the interactive business itself.”

[Notes from the 2006 Digital Media Conference]  

Paul Towler: Mobile is an incredibly flexible distribution mechanism, but one of the key challenges that all the MVNOs have is that they don’t own their own infrastructure, so they’re forced to live at the whim of the mother network. To that degree on the data side, they’re not in full control. The key attributes of a successful MVNO? (Virgin Mobile comes to mind) is that they capitalize on their marketing ability instead of their segmentation capabilities. Being consumer-oriented can also carry over to this space…

[Notes from the 2006 Digital Media Conference]   

The market has enjoyed 3 plus years of quarter over quarter growth in online advertising, which is big and it's getting even bigger... and becoming a huge part of our business at AOL.  Keeping up with the demand is a challenge. The 4 big players (Google, Yahoo, AOL and MSN) control 50% of the advertising dollars. Each of these players enjoy over a 100M visitors a month. The spending gap between the 4 major portals and the non-portals is huge (i.e. a billion compared to 400k)

[Notes from the 2006 Digital Media Conference]

Aydin Caginalp: The Industry Perspective - The sale of music downloads (online/mobile) has doubled in the last year and has helped to offset the 7% drop in physical CD sales. Most iPods contain files which are 66% ripped from CD’s and most are only half-filled. The empowerment of the internet is the empowerment of the artist.

Ok, I missed the first part of this panel saying “HI” to a few people on the break, but here’s what I heard during the second half…In general, the consumer now has complete control over their television viewing habits and the advertisers need to respect that. The 1980-2000 generation is not really watching tv screens and is much more interested in dealing with content that they’ve generated and in sharing it thereby building community.

[Notes from the 2006 Digital Media Conference]

DNI programs content for 704 million subscribers outside of the U.S. and it operates the largest international footprint in the industry.  (i.e., consists of 17 brands, multiple continents, 100 unique feeds, 35 languages, 1000 employees in 24 offices throughout the world.)

Hi everyone,

A few conference updates:
Hilary Rosen (former CEO of the RIAA) joins the Music Matters panel setting up a lively discussion on the future of digital music.  Since May 2005 she's been a consultant to companies in the media industry such as XM Radio, Viacom and Snocap.  She is also a contributing blogger to the Huffington Post.  For her recent blogs, go to: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/hilary-rosen/for-the-record-for-what-_b_22177.html

We are pleased to announce the addition of a new panel:
"Net Neutrality and Net Competition: The Battle for the Internet Pipes"

Speakers include:
Scott Cleland, Founder & President, Precursor, LLC (Chairman, NetCompetition.org)
Christopher Wolf, Partner, Proskauer Rose LLP (Co-Chair "Hands off the Internet")
Earl Comstock, President & CEO, COMPTEL
Christopher Putala, EVP, Public Policy, Earthlink
Sarah Lai Stirland, Senior Writer, National Journal's Technology Daily (Moderator)

There are currently 425 attendees registered for the event - looks like this will be a "sold out" event.  Final headcount will be announced at tomorrow's event. 

We'll keep you posted on updates throughout the day.

Sincerely,
The Co-Chairs