While the crowd at MacWorld was waiting for the gospel by Steve, I was backstage during the Michael Dell keynote chatting with another man wearing a black turtleneck: Leslie Moonves, casually clad as he prepared for his own hour in the CES spotlight. Last year, CBS was part of Google’s CES cavalcade—in Las Vegas as one of the launch partners of t the Google Video marketplace. This time, Moonves and company are the show and YouTube, barely a blip back then and now the high-priced star of Google’s video dreams, is part of its lineup. (The CBS crew isn’t pitching it that way but it’s hard to avoid the comparison.) When I pointed out how different his keynote would be from that of Disney CEO Bob Iger the day before, Moonves replied that the companies are different with different goals: “He gets half of his revenue from theme parks; I have 140 radio stations.” Too much noise backstage to post the recording but here are some excerpts from the interview, which covered a lot of ground in a short time:

On experimenting: “At this stage, these are all experiments because we don’t know where the world will lead. So far the experiment with YouTube has been phenomenally successful. When you see that there are millions and millions of hits and it’s turning into a great promotional vehicle for us and we haven’t even begun to monetize it, which will be the next step, we’re very pleased with what has happened with that in the early stages.

On YouTube and copyright: Some content providers are expressing concern that YouTube is running behind with its promised tool to allow policing and removal of infringing content. Not Moonves. “It’s in the very elementary stages. What is appreciated by me is the fact that they’re aware of it and they want to do it properly., When I first talked to Chad (Hurley) last summer, I literally said, ‘What am I to do about you stealing my content?” He laughed and said, ‘Well, you can take it down.’” Moonves said he mentioned the CBS News piece about the autistic basketball player that made such a stir, telling Hurley that it was playing all over the world because of YouTube—as well it should—but “it’s my content. I pay people a lot of money to put on that content. … Number one, he said, I’ll take anything down you want me to. Number two, let’s figure out how you get paid for it in a fair way. Once again, attitudinally it was I don’t want to take anything away from you that is yours. I want to work with you to figure that out—and I appreciate that. … This is not a guy that’s saying, ‘Sorry, guys, it’s not my fault someone is putting your intellectual property on YouTube. It’s your content; let’s figure out how do we protect you.”

On Clip+Sling: Why trial it? “Once again, Sling is a very interesting group of people. It is a technology that is here. Am I scared by it? Sure. Do I have questions about it? Sure. Once again, it’s a little experiment to see how we can work together .. Can this work in a positive way for CBS? The answer may be no .. But it is a technology that is here to stay and if you put your head in the sand, you’re going to lose. … By and large, most of the experiments we have seen have been additive to our general programming. If a viewer watches CSI online or sees clips of the show or exchanges file with his best friend … it has, in fact, made the experience better for them and it’s proven they will be loyal fans. Is this another one of these things? We hope so.”

Impact on programming: CSI creator Anthony Zuiker talks about the impact his online fans has on his shows. Moonves: “Having this fan base and having this community around each one of our shows is terrific .. We can learn more, we can make better shows.” He knows it won’t all be positive. “Not everything we do is going to work. Not all of these experiments are going to work. We are aware of that. We go into every one of them with our eyes open—and ours closed—there’s good in them and some of it’s bad, We have safeguards, we have exits from these things if it’s not working comfortably for us.”

On hiring Quincy Smith and M&A: “We have already stated that we’re not opposed to investing. We are not looking for a large investment but we are looking for smaller investments in internet companies across the board. We brought Quincy here for a number of reasons: number one, he’s a brilliant strategist. Number two, he knows every company that’s out there even if it’s two guys in a garage in Palo Alto, he’s heard of them.” Moonves likes what it says about symbolically that Smith opted for the media company when he could have written his own ticket on the internet of M&A side. “It says a lot about us.”

CES a year later: “When you consider where we have come in 12 months—it seems like five years—it’s only been 12 months, when you see the number of deals we’ve made, I think the perception of CBS as a company amongst this crowd at CES is very different than it was a year ago. I don’t think you hear us referred to as an old media company very often.”

What’s next? Right now, we’re looking at everything. There isn’t a day that goes by we’re not looking at some deal. There’s an enormous amount of time and energy expended—bringing in Quincy, Quincy’s staff … There is rarely a week that goes by that we are not pitched by 10 different companies to invest, to acquire.