@ CES 2006: The Portable Video Evolution

It’s a gorgeous Las Vegas winter day so I’m sitting inside a fairly full meeting room at the Las Vegas Convention Center at a panel: “Mobile Music & Video Make-Over – As Mobile and Entertainment Industry Merge – TV, Music and Movies.” Good group including a few fave usual suspects — David Bluhm, CEO, GoTV Networks; Rob Chandhok, Vice President Engineering, Qualcomm/ MediaFLO; Ted Cohen, VP-D3 – Digital Development & Distribution, EMI Music; Bernard Gershon, SVP & GM, ABCnews.com; Lucy Hood, president, Fox Mobile Entertainment, and SVP-Vice President, Content and Marketing , News Corp. Energtic conversation moderated by Zomba co-founder Ralph Simon.

I missed the top but here are some highlights: Finding content: Bluhm: “One of the big hurdles that hasn’t gone away is discovery. How do you find content? … It’s hardly intuitive. You have to have intestinal fortitude to buy a ringtone and it’s a $4 billion business.”

Gershon: “We like the fact that ABC starts with A — much better than Fox, which starts with F.”

Carriers: When an audience member suggested that some services could cut the carriers out of the loop, Hood replied to the contrary, listing News Corp.’s various carrier deals and saying she thinks those partnerships only will become more important. One thing the carriers contribute is reach. Gershon said he doesn’t see how the carriers can be cut out completely.

Windowing: Windowing used to be sequential. Now, says Hood, “We’re playing 3-D chess here.” The challenge is to get it all out at the same time. Cohen mentioned the premiere of a Robbie Williams video via mobile, a first for a company used to MTV premieres.

More to come.

Comments have been disabled for this post