Summit Notebook

Cisco home TelePresence: online school heaven?

You can just hear the University of Phoenix licking its chops right now.

Cisco expects to have  its home TelePresence system — a living room version of what you have seen in those quirky Ellen Page commercials (see below) — by the holiday season at around $500 (plus some kind of monthly service fee), Cisco Executive Vice President Rob Lloyd said on Thursday at the Reuters Global Technology Summit. He and some other Cisco employees are about to start a round of internal testing.

The system will let two users have a conversation with video. Ok, yes, Skype does that every day over garden variety laptops. But TelePresence, as described by Lloyd, uses your high speed Internet link, and your own flat-screen TV, to deliver crisp video, and overcome that weird latency issue where you and your conversation partner both talk at the same time, and both stop to say “no…you go.”

The key benefit, he says, is that it works over your home TV and brings the myriad tools of the Internet to your conversation. So if you are talking about the family tree, you can bring up photo apps during the chat, or video or other useful information. And for school… its priceless.

When you get the latency too high — I say something, you say something, two seconds later you stop, and I stop and we both stop. We have all been there. You get the latency nailed down, and then you get applications integrated into that — because just talking to someone is interesting, but you probably want to have that integration into a marketplace when you can get service that can take advantage of that. So you want some small business services, some educational capabilities, you want to take some MBA classes from home, connected to a university that is offering some extension services — not on a website, but on a consumer TelePresence – it is going to happen.

So you will get education just transforming itself. A whole bunch of universities are going to love us.

So, would you buy this Web-videochat-on-steroids system?

Is Apple in Intel’s future?

Apple developed the processor for it’s recently launched iPad tablet PC in-house. Intel was left waiting on the sidelines but change may be in store. Future tablets from other device makers, and maybe even Apple, could prove to be a lucrative for the world’s largest chipmaker. And why not, Intel already makes the microprocessors that are used in more than three quarters of the world’s PCs. Tom Kilroy, Intel senior vice president and general manager of sales and marketing, says “wait til Computex” for a big announcement. So, what’s likely to come out of the industry trade show this June in Taipei? Any thoughts? Click below to hear what Kilroy had to say in San Francisco at the 2010 Reuters Global Technology Summit.

Intel on Tablet Opportunities from Reuters TV on Vimeo.

EPIX CEO: Kids are media omnivores, industry must adapt

Remember when the “good” TV in the house only received 7 or 8 channels?

Most young people today cannot, and in many ways they could not care less. Even more, they probably think that it is just as odd that we “old folks” don’t understand their ability juggle multiple devices and inputs. Therein lies a critical challenge for broadcasters using old media models to reach younger audiences, Mark Greenberg, president of cable channel EPIX said speaking at the Reuters Global Media Summit.

Hey, even Anne Sweeney, president of the Disney/ABC Television Group,  had to force her college-bound kid to take an actual TV to school.

Greenberg’s EPIX offers a “screening room” service that allows subscribers to order a movie on EPIX’s web site and share it with friends who are watching at the same time in other locations. In the meantime you can chat with each other about the film — that’s “chat”, like, commenting about the star’s clothing by typing “I want to buy those shoes” into a little box, not “chat” as in “dude, pass the nachos.”

Greenberg explains that that is the world young folks, like his teenage son, live in:

I look at my 17 year old — we tease him and refer to his bedroom as “the hole”, because he has got his big screen TV, it is hooked up to a DVR, he’s got his other TV set set up to his Xbox, his got laptop and his cell phone and he doing his homework. and by the way — he’s a great student, so i can’t complain.

But this generation multitasks in a totally different way and what we have to do as programmers is start thinking about how we are making content available on their terms and not my terms.

That’s the mistake the music industry made. They said you have to listen to a CD and spend $14.99, and you have to go to HMV to buy it. This generation, for better for worse, this group has a different behavior.  If we want to build this, this is where we need to go. This is the way the world is now evolving.

Discovery CEO talks about Oprah, her show, and OWN

Now that Oprah Winfrey has set a date for when the sun will set on her syndicated talk show — Sept 2011 — everybody wants to know if she will recreate the show on OWN. OWN, the Oprah Winfrey Network, is the cable channel set to flicker on in some 80 million homes in January 2011 with Discovery Communications.

At the Reuters Media Summit in New York, Reuters Paul Thomasch put the question directly to David Zaslav, the chief executive of Discovery Communications:

REUTERS: Do you expected Oprah will dedicate a lot of time to the OWN network? DISCOVERY: When we announced OWN, Oprah talked about it as being ‘her’ media company. Its a 50-50 venture. We think it’s going to be very significant asset. But Oprah is the chairman, she’s the chief creative officer. Shes spends a lot of time on it with me and the staff, she’s involved in all the creative decisions she has a ton of energy and great creativity. We always expected that she was going to be spending a lot of time in front of the screen and behind the screen.  Its a big win for us and the cable industry that (she) will be available primarily on OWN. OWN will really feel the strength and creativity of her presence.

REUTERS: Have you talked to her about bringing her current show, or something resembling her show, to OWN? DISCOVERY: We have talked about a lot of creative ways that Oprah can have a presence on OWN (such as Master Class). Oprah has a ton of great ideas. But ultimately, what Oprah does on OWN is Oprah’s decision.

REUTERS: But could we see her show show up on OWN? DISCOVERY: “The Oprah Winfrey Show” will probably go down as the greatest show on television in terms of inspiring people, connecting with people and the overall success of it for everyone involved. But (that) chapter will be ending. You will see her, she will be on in a meaningful way. But it will be different from her show and it will be what she wants to do.

Redbox: Paving the way for “G.I. Joe” rentals

You thought that maybe that giant Redbox machine in your local food mart, offering $1 DVDs, was simply a low-cost way to share a movie night with the family.

Its REALLY a (nearly) free pass for guys to grab testosterone-rich, leave-your-brain-at-the-door, man-cinema, where stuff blows up reaaal gooood.

You know: “Predator” or “Conan the Destroyer.” Or something else starring Govenor Arnold. Redbox President Mitch Lowe said the low price allows people to explore their taste universe…

“What is misunderstood is that that dollar price point gets you to watch movies and rent movies that you never would have thought of renting before.”

… and reap the fringe benefit…

“I’ve seen examples of wives approving renting, I think, “G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra” just because it’s just a buck, where as if it was Blockbuster, they would say “you are not going to spend three dollars on that movie I’m never going to watch.”

The flip side: Don’t be surprised, guys, if you develop an (ahem) “urge” to sample Jane Austen’s ” “Sense and Sensibility” or the “Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants.”

Zynga CEO: Half of social web users will be social gamers

Don’t ask Zynga’s Mark Pincus how much money his company is making.

The founder of the hot social gaming company, which is operating at a more than $200 million yearly run rate according to sources familiar with the matter, said sharing such information would contribute to the kind of hype that would be bad for the nascent industry.

“I just hope that we can all partner to try to get the story out in a balanced way, so that the media doesn’t necessarily have to go back and forth, ‘This is the next great coming,’ and hyping it, and then two or three months later, ‘Oh they didn’t deliver on these very high expectations that we’ve all put out there,’” Pincus said in a conversation with reporters at the Reuters Media Summit.

He noted that Zynga, whose games include FarmVille and Mafia Wars, has been profitable for eight quarters and sees no reason to raise capital in a public stock offering anytime soon.

Pincus did sketch a rosy picture for the broader social games and virtual goods business.

“I believe the addressable market for social gaming will be the whole web and the mobile web.”

“I think that eventually more than half of the population of people who are socially connected with participate in social games.”

Daily Beast staff ‘happy as clams,’ says Barry Diller

The journalists and staff who work at The Daily Beast don’t look at life like you other sad-sack scribes out there who are watching your job market wash out to sea with the ebb tide. In fact, they are happy in a particularly mollusk-like way.

“They’re as happy as clams,” said Barry Diller, chief executive of IAC/InterActiveCorp, which is financing the online news outlet with its editor, Tina Brown. “They wake up every morning filled with possibility.”

That’s because they are not working at sinking-ship news outlets like most of the rest of their colleagues in mainstream U.S. journalism.

Hear Diller on this, speaking at the Reuters Global Media Summit:

“Look at what’s going on in publishing. The talk about the destruction that’s taking place there. It’s the perfect time to start something that’s an original product. The Daily Beast is a daily newspaper or magazine. It’s primarily original and is there every day. It’s got real staff, making real money, paying a lot of them — journalists — to make things for us, make stories… They’re covering books, art, the daily features and national and international stories. And it’s incredibly ambitious. It’s gotten a real audience. It is absolutely an original product.”

Who wouldn’t like that? Even better, Diller seems OK with the whole “it doesn’t make money” aspect of the Beast. He declined to say what the targets are, like, when he expects it to make a profit, when he expects it to make some revenue and how it will do those things. “We’re going to know at a rational point,” he said.

The best part is, I don’t even end this blog with: “And then I woke up.” Now the question is whether we can find some more sugar-moguls to sweeten our journalistic career paths.

THQ CEO: No need to buy social gaming share

Internet social networks like Facebook are the new frontier for video game makers.

But not all companies see a need to buy their way in, as Electronic Arts did with its $275 million purchase of Playfish last month (the deal could be worth as much as $400 million if the company meets certain future financial milestones).

Brian Farrell, the CEO of game maker THQ, believes the barriers to entry to social gaming are low enough that his company doesn’t need to buy a company to get a foothold in the market.

“In our view what they [EA] got was they got a user base, and then we can debate for the next several hours about is that worth $275, $400 million,” he said at the Reuters Media Summit.

“Obviously we think there’s a path to build that in a much more effective return on investment,” he added, when asked whether the EA purchase was worth the money.

THQ currently has three games for Facebook in development, said Farrell, who noted that many of the “mechanics” of social games draw on similar expertise that THQ has developed in the traditional, console-based gaming business.

Farrell would not provide details on the kinds of Facebook games that THQ has in the works, but hinted that some of its existing franchises could make their way to the social sphere.

NHL commish: Bigger not always better

If you want a new National Hockey League team, you’ll definitely need a spanking new arena, or at least one that’s been gussied up in a significant way. But that doesn’t mean it need be a super-sized arena,  Commissioner Gary Bettman said at the Reuters Global Media Summit.

“While we play to 93 to 94 percent capacity, we’d like to play to 100 percent capacity,” Bettman said. “A 15,000-16,000 seat arena might work better in some markets than a 19,000 seat arena.”

That’s promising news for Quebec City  and Winnipeg, who were  once homes to the NHL’s Nordiques and Jets respectively, and are said to be on the league’s potential expansion shortlist. Bettman told Reuters that both cities, and “even Southern Ontario” would be given a serious look if the league were to expand.

Smaller venues are becoming common in pro sports: Major League Baseball’s New York Mets and New York Yankees moved into smaller stadiums this year, and the Canadian Football League’s Montreal Alouettes have thrived since moving in 1998 to a stadium a third the size of its original home.

But though smaller, cosier arenas would be appropriate for cities of Quebec and Winnipeg’s size  (both cities have metro-area populations of about 700,000) any new NHL venue would need to seat at the very least 15,000 fans, if not more, Bettman said.

That tidbit will surely help guide the mayor of Quebec, as he looks into building a new arena to draw an NHL franchise. But Winnipeg’s MTS Center, home of the American Hockey League’s Manitoba Moose, fits 15,015 and may be cutting it close for the NHL’s tastes unless it gets an upgrade.

ESPN: We all live in sports towns (And tell great jokes)

ESPN President George Bodenheimer has been at the business of TV sports, one way or another, for nearly three decades, starting in the mailroom and working his way up.

It’s the classic media story — and this one even involved a stint driving through nearly every little town in Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Louisiana and Mississippi to sell this odd new 24-hour sports network to cable distributors.

Here’s one thing he’s learned: Every town thinks it’s a sports town. Sort of like everybody thinks they have a good sense of humor.

As he said at the Global Media Summit:

Every town I pulled into, I was calling cable operators. They’d say ‘Hey George, your idea is a little crazy. And we’re glad you’re here — but this is a sports town.’ I’m telling you from experience every town in the United States, and maybe the world, I don’t think that’s an overstatement, considers itself a sports town. People always said we’re in a niche business. If we’re in a niche, we’re in a mighty big niche.”

And that hasn’t changed. Indeed, given the downturn in the economy, people may be more sports-crazed than ever, he said.

I think sports is a little bit of comfort food to people in the United States and indeed around the world. It’s why there’s a lot of fans. It takes you to a different place.  There’s a beginning, a middle and an end. You see an outcome. The value is only going to grow in the DVR world and the ‘I gotta have everything in two minutes world.’ I just think live sports are going to continue to be a bit of an oasis in be a good driver for the media business.