Trust ContentNext to accomplish the impossible. We got a major network exec, the head of an indie digital studio and the SVP of digital at one of the largest talent agencies in the business to agree on something: that though 2009 will be tough, the best thing for companies in the digital content space to do is stay the course.  But that was only a small part of the Year-End Digital Media Review moderated by our founder and publisher Rafat Ali, who pushed them on questions like why all the networks can’t play nice with Hulu, YouTube’s image problem, and whether independent content development studios will be able to scale next year:

SEE ALSO: Year-End Digital Media Review: Kutcher, Huffington Talk SAG, Online Video And Saving Journalism

—Why isn’t ABC’s content on Hulu?: Albert Cheng, EVP, digital media at Disney-ABC TV group, said it’s because Hulu is a distribution-and-reach play—and ABC has no problem getting views on its own. “We’re one of the top 10 video sites in terms of unique viewers—we have more uniques than Hulu. They may have more streams, but that’s because they have more than one network’s worth of content. We’re drawing in a multitude more viewers, and the key for us is to make sure that users know the content they’re seeing comes from ABC. So you can get our player from anywhere: from AOL (NYSE: TWX), on Facebook, and even Hulu on video search, but we need to be the ones that are driving the monetization.”

—Networks don’t need YouTube, either: “They have a challenge,” Cheng said, when asked whether YouTube would be able to broker deals with networks for full clips of TV shows, a la Hulu. “Clearly they’ve been built up as a destination for short form. But to the credit of the [networks], as soon as video picked up, we figured out that we needed to build something online. And we did. So when you ask consumers where they get full episodes of their favorite shows, they say they go to the networks’ sites. The question then becomes what do we get out of YouTube? More after the jump.