It’s four hours long, though, which is quite a few hours! There’s some good discussion overall, with folks from AOL, College Humor, YouTube, Blip, MySpace and MSN, but here are the Cliff’s Notes — some of the smarter insights and comments from the day’s panels.

• Research matters — apparently, people are pitching content to the CW Digital department without actually knowing what the CW is. Don’t be that person. “Nothing is more frustrating than when someone comes in who haven’t been to our website, don’t know who our audience is, but know they have the perfect show for us. Not gonna happen,” CW Digital EVP of marketing and digital programs Rick Haskins said during the Development: Building a Foundation panel.
• The great content creators, according to everyone on the Development panel, understand more than just making content — specifically, how to market that content on a social media level.
• Celebrities don’t always click on the web, according to Ran Harnevo, AOL Senior Vice President of Video, but casting someone with, say, four million Twitter followers will be significantly more meaningful than a celebrity who has less of a following. And web celebrities like Ian and Anthony of Smosh may have a lot more draw online.
• “A lot of well-known stars want to do it for the money — they don’t give a rat’s ass about digital, and to me that goes nowhere. You want to find people who understand digital and are passionate about it,” Haskins said.
• My Damn Channel CEO Rob Barnett urged people to avoid exclusivity initially, but then focus on finding a company the best deal as your development grows — especially when it comes to promotion, not just money. “You gotta look for promotion — the sea we’re all swimming in gets more and more crowded every day,” he said. “If you’re just upload to one of those huge places, the odds are getting the push that you need are getting scarier by the minute — you’ve got to be as judgmental of a home as we are of your content.”
• Barnett also recommended people check out the YouTube Creator Handbook: “90 percent of it is awesome — 10 percent, I don’t like, but we’re using 90 percent of it and our videos are getting more views.”
• During the Talent Debate panel, Innovative Artists head of digital David Tochterman revealed that breakout web series Lizzie Bennet Diaries has partnered with DECA — big news for the homegrown web series from Hank Green and Bernie Su.
• Also revealed during the Talent Debate panel: Mark Malkoff’s life is now much more difficult since Facebook removed email addresses from user profiles, as he now has to work much harder to book celebrities for his Celebrity Sleepovers series.
• Going back to the web celebs point: Despite Celebrity Sleepovers‘s impressive roster of names (including Camryn Manheim, Steven Weber, Ed Begley Jr. and Rob Corddry), Malkoff said that the iJustine episode was by far the most viewed of the series.
• Blip CEO Kelly Day laid out the company’s shift in approach over the last six months — specifically, a shift from its previous “Blip vs. YouTube” mentality, and a new focus on helping creators distribute their content through a variety of means, including YouTube as well as other partners. “I don’t think it’s a binary conversation. YouTube can be a great way to build your audience, but it’s not the only way to build your audience,” she said.
• Lee urged creators to “play the whole field” when it comes to putting content out there. “Go out and experiment and see what you get out of it.”
• MySpace Entertainment president Roger Mincheff stepped up big time to discuss MySpace’s recent relaunch, and defended keeping the MySpace name despite the brand’s rocky recent years, especially given the comedians and musicians who attribute MySpace to their success — making MySpace the ultimate farm system. MySpace nostalgia? That’s apparently a real thing.

This is just some of the interesting stuff discussed over the course of the day: It’s a fun mix of folks discussing how creators can use the current state of entertainment to thrust their content into the world, and the challenges they might face in the process. Go watch it yourself if you have a minute to spare.

It works like this. The three companies will all host the same toolkit that lets users take short surveys on topics like immigration and health care. Their sites, which will have a countdown to the next debate, will also show how many other Americans are exploring the same issues. Here’s what it looks like:

This isn’t the first time the Commission on Presidential Debates has worked with online media companies to educate voters.  In 2008, the non-partisan CPD partnered with MySpace (described then as “the world’s premier social network”) to stream the Obama-McCain debates and offer political learning tools.

This time around, the process will include data visualization graphics that depict how an individual user’s views on topics like social issues compare to others:

When filling out the surveys, voters will also be able to indicate that a given issue — say jobs or the environment — is important to them. This will produce graphics showing how voters prioritize the different issues.

For CPD, the debate sponsor, the new online partnerships are a way for it to carry out its mandate of educating voters. For the media partners, it is a way to showcase their political coverage.

According to Chris Grosso, SVP of AOL Homepages, the debate channel will let the company “showcase different brands” like AOL, Patch and the Huffington Post. As an example, Grosso said that if a topic like the auto industry bailout comes up, AOL will be able to “surface” relevant content from a Patch live blog.

As of Monday morning, the sites had yet to go live. They will soon be available at yahoo.com/thevoiceof, aol.com/thevoiceof and youtube.com/thevoiceof

The interactive toolkits were produced for the Commission as a pro bono project by New York ad agency BBH.

(Image by James Steidl via Shutterstock)

Miller, a former CEO of AOL, joined News Corp in 2009. He was tasked with developing a digital strategy for a diverse set of properties that included everything from MySpace to Photobucket at the time. He was also asked to make digital a priority across the company’s many news and entertainment divisions.

Miller’s parting was amiable, according to All Things Digital, which first reported the story. That sentiment was echoed in a News Corp announcement in which the company said he would stay on as an adviser and CEO Rupert Murdoch praised him as “a visionary in the digital media industry.”

The departure appears to be related to News Corp’s impending split. Lucrative entertainment assets like Fox and BSkyB will be spun off into one company and the publishing properties into another.

While presiding over News Corp’s far-flung digital assets, Miller made sensible moves such as offloading MySpace, which the company had acquired for $580 million in 2005. The divesture was consistent with a statement in News Corp’s 2012 annual report that its digital strategy is no longer acquisition-based.

Miller’s other activities included supervising News Corp’s $45 million investment in streaming device maker Roku and working with Hulu, where he was a bord member.

Miller is also an active angel investor with deep contacts in the media space. He joined us at the paidContent 2012 conference, and you can hear his thoughts on digital media here:

We do — that was that state of digital media when paidContent launched in 2002. Other weird things were happening back then too: People still got much of their news from television and newspapers, and they learned about major events after they had already happened.

There have been some huge shifts since 2002: Tablets and smartphones are now ubiquitous, lots of people read on their digital devices, and just about everyone is part of a social network or three. This summer is the tenth anniversary of our launch. In an effort to gain some perspective on the past decade in digital media, I’ve been reading back through paidContent’s archives — a collection of over 80,000 posts.

Since I was only a freshman in college when paidContent came to life, I often didn’t know, as I read through the stories from the early days, how things had begun or how they turned out. As I watched them unfold, I wanted to grab our readers’ arms and give them advice (“Don’t buy that Zune!” “Invest in Facebook!” “Go for the good Twitter handle now!”). But I also realized how difficult it is to predict success.

Some takeaways from my trip through the archives:  Some companies — AOL and Yahoo come to mind — have been consistently bad at predicting what consumers want. And a couple of companies, namely Apple and Amazon, have been very good at it. Also, being a native digital company helps, but it’s no guarantee of success (what up, MySpace?). And after all these years, it’s still not clear what content customers will pay for, or how much they’ll pay.

Streaming and Moviebeaming

What do analysts, CEOs and bloggers have in common? None of us can predict the future. Roger Ebert joked in 2002 that “on-demand streaming movies on the Web, like HDTV, are five years in the future — and will be for at least another 10 years.”

If Disney’s Moviebeam had been the only game in town, Ebert probably would have been right. When it launched in three cities in 2003, customers paid $6.99 a month to use a device that could hold 100 movies and plugged into the back of a TV set. They also had to pay for each movie they watched– billing was done via the phone line. The company went through various unsuccessful iterations before India’s Valuable Group bought it in 2008. It was never heard from again.

Netflix almost went down the same road. It had a plan to release a Moviebeam-like “proprietary set-top box with an Internet connection that could download movies overnight.” But instead, it decided to forge ahead with streaming — starting with a complicated “quota hours” system in 2007 and moving to unlimited streaming in 2008. By 2010, the majority of subscribers were streaming something, and the company began offering streaming-only subscriptions, though CEO Reed Hastings said that same year that the company would keep shipping DVDs until 2030. (We’ll see about that.)

ABC was the first network to sell episodes of its shows on iTunes, back in 2006, and to stream shows free with ads on ABC.com — and later on AOL. But by the time premium subscription service Hulu Plus launched in 2010, the platforms getting the attention were devices with built-in access, like Internet-enabled TVs, Blu-ray players, and tablets.

Return of the living dead

Speaking of AOL: It’s something of a miracle that the company still exists. In 2000, when it merged with Time Warner, it was valued at $350 billion, and the next year, more than 24 million people in the U.S. were paying for its Internet access service. By the end of last year, that number had dwindled to just 3.3 million subscribers. Here’s a quick recap of some of AOL’s miscues over the years:

• AOL Voicemail ($5.95 per month)
• A teen service called Red (featuring “a talking head—using the image of an actual employee—that uses software to answer users’ questions”)
• A digital music partnership with Burger King
• A reality show called “Gold Rush”
• Social networking site AIM Pages
• Going free
• The hyperlocal Patch blogs

Though AOL was once a high flier, no other company ever liked it quite enough to buy it. Google bought a five-percent, $1 billion stake in AOL in 2005, leading analysts to wonder if Microsoft missed out. That resulted in a $726 million writedown in 2009. Time Warner bought back Google’s stake and finally spun off “the albatross” in December 2009.  AOL is still promising a bounceback. “The executive team expects a profitable content business by next year,” CEO Tim Armstrong said in May 2011.

Yahoo hasn’t fared much better. The company launched Yahoo Platinum in 2003; for $9.95 a month, subscribers got access to audio and videos.  The program was dead by October of that same year. It later tried a Twitter-wannabe microblogging service (“Meme…where you share everything that you find that’s interesting,”). Perhaps the smartest move Yahoo ever made was not buying AOL.

Where did these companies go wrong? In 2010, former Time Warner CEO Gerald Levin pondered that question in an interview with the New York Times . The AOL-Time Warner deal was “undone by the Internet itself,” he said. “I think it’s something that no one could have foreseen, and to this day, whether Apple is going to dominate entertainment or whether Amazon is going to dominate publishing, all the old business plans are out the window. How do you get paid for content?”

Know what’s cool? A billion dollars

In 2006, an RBC Capital analyst estimated that a certain social networking company would be worth $15 billion in a few years, based on “raw, unprecedented user/usage growth.”

Six years later, Facebook went public with a valuation of $104 billion. Too bad the analyst wasn’t talking about Facebook but about MySpace. The social networking company that Rupert Murdoch acquired for $580 million in 2005 sold for just $35 million in 2011.

Why did Facebook soar while MySpace — and other social networking services like Friendster — sank? It allowed people to build real connections using their actual personal information, and rolled out a product that was ready to scale and had good technology. Other companies realized sharing was important too — in 2005, Yahoo SVP Jeff Weiner called sharing “the next chapter of the World Wide Web” — but Facebook was able to implement it in a way that kept users coming back. The site surpassed Yahoo and AOL for “stickiness” in 2009, when Nielsen found users spending an average of four hours and thirty-nine minutes a month on Facebook.

Social has already disrupted some industries — witness the rise of Twitter and the way it has changed the way news is reported, with stories like Osama Bin Laden’s assassination breaking there first. In a sign of the importance of these emerging platforms, newspapers like the Wall Street Journal and New York Times are launching “Everywhere” initiatives to deliver news to readers where they are already hanging out.

Fast food and music don’t mix

Hard to believe it now, but there was real skepticism that iTunes’ 99-cent songs would be able to compete with peer-to-peer file-sharing services. “According to academics who’ve studied the economics of digital music distribution,” we wrote in 2003, the year iTunes launched, “the cost still seems too high to attract users of peer-to-peer file trading services.” The piece cited an economist who believed “the appropriate price of a downloaded song is 18 cents.” In fact, Real Networks dropped its song prices to $0.49 in an attempt to compete against Apple.

In the end, consumers choose selection and convenience over P2P networks. We called iTunes “a kickstart for the micropayments industry.” Was it? While Steve Jobs said in 2004 that Apple wouldn’t hit its one-year, 100 million songs downloaded goal, global digital music sales crossed $1.1 billion in 2006. In April 2008, Apple surpassed Walmart  as the largest music seller in the United States.

The company that arguably started the digital music revolution — Napster — didn’t survive. Once it no longer offered “free,” it was done, though it tried to reincarnate itself: launching a mobile music service, “Napster To Go,” with AT&T in 2004 (the one smartphone that supported it could hold up to 6 songs), partnering with Circuit City on a digital music store, getting itself acquired by Best Buy in 2008 ,and then being bought back by Rhapsody in 2011. Unfortunately, Rhapsody was already losing out to newer (and free) streaming services like Pandora and Spotify.

The partnerships with Circuit City and Best Buy, though, were probably the kiss of death. One of the big trends of the past 10 years has been brick-and-mortar retail stores’ consistent failure to compete effectively against digital-native companies. Best Buy wasn’t the only retailer to try to crack the digital-content business — and fail: Target and Sears both took a shot. And McDonald’s sold digital content over its WiFi network and even tried DVD rentals in its restaurants.

Do you like the feel of paper?

Just as digital music didn’t really take off until Apple introduced the iPod, the ebook revolution didn’t take place until the arrival of the Kindle. In paidContent’s early years, ebooks were written off as a failure in part because publishers couldn’t figure out what to do with DRM. (In 2003, “temporary electronic ink” that would disappear after a few months was floated as a possible solution.) Barnes & Noble decided to stop selling ebooks in 2003, and Yahoo stopped selling them in 2004.

Meanwhile, Amazon and Google were pushing forward. Google launched Google Print – now called Google Book Search, and still besieged by lawsuits seven years later. Amazon tested two now-defunct programs: Amazon Pages, which allowed customers to buy access to digital copies of select pages from books, and Amazon Upgrade, which bundled print books with online access to the complete work.

Customers weren’t biting. Then Amazon came out with the Kindle in 2007 for $399. Less than two years later, Amazon was selling more Kindle books than print books, and ebooks now make up over 20 percent of some big-six publishers’ sales. Barnes & Noble has had some success with its Nook e-reader and digital bookstore, but bankrupt Borders shuttered all its stores in 2011. Meanwhile, the Department of Justice suit against Apple and five big publishers for allegedly colluding to set e-book prices drags on.

Good thing Steve Jobs looked beyond ringtones

A Forbes survey back in 2002 found that “business professionals” would be willing to pay for “news content to be delivered to their cellular devices,” and some media companies tried early mobile experiments. Verizon offered a cell phone version of the Yellow Pages — which, at $19.95 per year, gained 15,000 subscribers in three months. But starting in 2004, everyone decided the future was in ringtones. A $4 billion global business by the end of the year, one company projected.

So, so many ringtones. You could buy them from Rolling Stone or from an ATM-like device called E2Go. A fall 2004 marketing campaign let you mix your own ringtones on Levi’s website. Billboard launched a top ringtones chart.

Could ringtones “prove to be a passing fad”? we wondered late in 2004. Luckily, yes — a new technology came along to shake up the mobile market. No, it wasn’t the $500 ESPN phone, but the iPhone, which came out in 2007. And by opening its platform up to third-party app developers, Apple got users ready for its next ecosystem-changing device, the iPad, in 2010.

Monetizing mobile

Advertising has always been a fuzzy business — how exactly do you measure engagement and success? Well, that’s still the big debate about advertising in the digital era.  ”If here’s anything that’s really holding back ad spending on the web, it’s the lack of good measurements,” Tim Armstrong, then Google’s VP of national sales, said in 2007.

Mobile advertising has also faced obstacles. In 2006, mobile carriers began allowing advertising despite fears of annoying customers. Customers were indeed annoyed – 79 percent of them found mobile advertising annoying, according to a 2007 Forrester study — but they could “see the potential benefits of mobile advertising and marketing to themselves,” particularly if they could get a useful special offer or coupon.

Further complicating matters for advertisers: The smartphone market is fragmented among different brands — marketers don’t want to spend the money to create different ads for Android and iOS — and there are two mobile ad universes: mobile browser and apps.

Nevertheless, mobile advertising has gained ground, crossing  $1 billion in the U.S. for the first time in 2011, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau, totaling $1.6 billion for the year.

The next opportunity is social media advertising. And once again, it will be a challenge to figure out some standardized metrics. What’s a retweet worth, anyways?

Back to where we all began

Though micropayments worked well for music when Apple launched iTunes, the path to payments for written content has been rockier. In 2004, we wrote that “micropayments today are still characterized by a large number of competing transaction types” – including direct-to-bill, merchant aggregation, prepaid accounts and direct transfer – and “each of these face the current incumbent in digital content distribution: the flat-fee subscription model.”

Eight years later, it appears that the subscription model has won out. The iPad opened the door for magazine and newspaper publishers to create new revenue selling content on that platform, but the results have been mixed. When Rupert Murdoch’s “The Daily” iPad newspaper launched in early 2011, the company called it “the model for how stories are told and consumed.” We wrote, “The bet here is that while consumers are less and less likely to reach into their pocket for a few quarters to buy a newspaper, they might not care about the 14 cents on their credit card for a copy of an e-newspaper.” A year and a half later, The Daily has over 100,000 paying subscribers — but it’s living on borrowed time and may not get through the five years its publisher has said it needs to break even.

Writing for the web, of course, has been around for awhile. At the beginning of the decade, blogging was called “nanopublishing,” and the question was how blogs could support themselves doing it. All sorts of models have arisen. For example, Gawker tried a licensing deal with Yahoo, but that relationship ended a year later. The deal “garnered way more attention than we expected, but less traffic,” Gawker CEO Nick Denton said in 2006.

Some bloggers have stayed independent and make a living from advertising (or from their day job); others write their blogs under a newspaper, website or larger magazine’s umbrella — see the Dish’s Andrew Sullivan, FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver, WaPo’s Ezra Klein. Or, they go to work for the Huffington Post!

Magazine companies have grappled with whether to bundle digital editions with print subscriptions or charge for them separately. Time Inc. — which first put digital editions of its magazines behind AOL’s paywall in 2003 — started out charging separately, but today Time Inc. and Condé Nast print subscribers get the digital edition free. Hearst, meanwhile, is charging separately, and it said its digital business in the U.S. became “solidly profitable” for the first time in 2011.

Could there ever be a Netflix for magazines? Time tried it for print versions with its 2008 Maghound service. It failed, due to a lack of marketing and reader interest. Magazine publishers are trying again with joint venture Next Issue Media.

Many newspaper publishers, most notably the New York Times, tried paywalls at the start of the decade and then abandoned them – only to return to the model in the past couple years.  In its most recent earnings report, the NYT said it has 454,000 digital subscribers. Is that enough to sustain the newspaper in its 21st-century transition?  Probably the best answer to that came from  Vivian Schiller. But it was in response not to the NYT’s recent digital subscriber numbers, but to the NYT’s decision in 2004 to close the paper’s first paywall, known as TimesSelect. Schiller, then the SVP and general manager of NYTimes.com, was asked whether TimesSelect had worked.  “It did work,” she said. “It’s just a matter of as compared to what.”

Birthday cake photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [Robyn Mackenzie].

TV photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [Somchai Buddha].

Zombie hand photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [lineartestpilot].

Piggybank photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [cardiae]

Fast food photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [Sergio Martinez].

Book photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [TrotzOlga].

Ringtones and apps photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [violetkaipa].

Cash register photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [titelio].

Magazines photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [bernashafo].

Twitter sent some shock waves through the technology community with a blog post on Friday that talked about its plans for the future, and suggested that those plans don’t necessarily involve third-party services and apps. Although the company phrased its statement as a move designed to standardize the experience for Twitter users, developers and others in the broader Twitter ecosystem clearly took the post as a warning shot across the bow — especially since the company simultaneously shut down a cross-posting partnership it had with LinkedIn . It seems clear that Twitter wants to control the network as tightly as possible so that it can monetize it more easily, but doing so also comes with substantial risks.

In his blog post, consumer product manager Michael Sippey talked a lot about the introduction of features such as “expanded tweets,” which show more information from providers like GigaOM and the New York Times when a link is included in a tweet. He said the company wants to broaden that program to more publishers, as well as giving them tools to display expanded tweets and other features on their sites — but he also made it obvious that developers who stray outside of the lines are taking a big risk:

[W]e’ve already begun to more thoroughly enforce our Developer Rules of the Road with partners, for example with branding, and in the coming weeks, we will be introducing stricter guidelines around how the Twitter API is used.

Twitter has burned the ecosystem before

These comments set off warning bells for a number of developers, who said they were concerned that Twitter was going to crack down on any third-party app or service. One developer on Hacker News said that in his view, Twitter was trying to shut down third-party services so that they could “inflict a homogenized, boring, monoculture on their user base [that] they can monetize, which will make the experience progressively worse.” Said Turntable.fm developer Jonathan Kupferman:

Twitter seems to be mercilessly killing all developer apps of any interest businessinsider.com/twitter-linked… Light the match, hello #burningplatform

—
Jonathan Kupferman (@jkupferman) June 29, 2012

This isn’t the first time that Twitter has upset the developer community by throwing its weight around. In 2011, there was widespread criticism of the service for the way it issued new rules around use of the Twitter API — and also the way it behaved towards those who crossed the line by shutting off their access without even a warning, as it did in the case of entrepreneur Bill Gross and his Ubermedia network. At the time, one critic accused the company of “nuking” the Twitter ecosystem.

The company also came under fire in 2010 for the way it handled relations with third-party developers after it bought an app called Tweetie. Hunch founder Chris Dixon said Twitter was “acting like a drunk guy with an Uzi” by telling developers not to bother developing Twitter apps, and a number of companies and investors that had been putting money and time into the Twitter ecosystem stopped doing so. So some of the negative reaction to Sippey’s post stems from being burned twice already.

Some observers have argued that Twitter is just doing what it has to do in order to control its network and build a sustainable business, and that third-party developers don’t have any right to expect favorable treatment, since they are piggybacking on its API and resources. Longtime Twitter users, however, say the service’s behavior is a betrayal of all of the other services and apps that helped generate most of the goodwill it is now busy monetizing. As John Abell of Reuters pointed out on Friday, much of the value that users find in Twitter comes from the way it connects to other services.

Twitter's value is its integration with other networks. Cutting them off is like being on the wrong side of history. allthingsd.com/20120629/twitt…

—
John C Abell (@johncabell) June 30, 2012

Anti-user moves torpedoed both MySpace and Digg

And there is a very real risk to this kind of aggressive focus on control and monetization, as a commenter on Hacker News pointed out: restricting the ways that users can access and display their tweets, whether through strict API rules or moves like the LinkedIn shutdown, could irritate the user base that Twitter is relying on to click ads and do all the other things it is planning around monetization. Ultimately, the company could ruin the experience that made Twitter so compelling in the first place, in the same way that MySpace and Digg did.

There are plenty of reasons why MySpace failed, including the conflicting desires of a giant corporate owner like News Corp., but it also started to hemorrhage users because it focused more on monetization through ads and other elements than it did on maintaining a good experience for users. Digg did something similar — in an attempt to build a bigger company and leverage its user base for profit, it added a whole range of “services” and features that were designed mainly to appeal to corporate customers and advertisers. The end result was a wholesale desertion of Digg for other communities like Reddit.

Twitter has a tiger by the tail — it has an active user base in the hundreds of millions, it has become an almost indispensable tool for both news junkies and the media (although this carries risks as well) and it is starting to see some favorable responses to its ad model. But it is also a community, where the users provide the vast majority of the content that is being monetized, and while screwing around with that relationship may appear to make short-term financial sense, it could end in disaster.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Rosaura Ochoa and See-ming Lee

A new survey reports that social media played a significant role in nearly 700 cases in the past two years alone and that most of these involved either MySpace or Facebook. LinkedIn and Twitter were the next most common social media sites to produce evidence for the justice system. Only one case mentioned FourSquare. The report doesn’t mention Google+ at all.

The trend does not appear to be abating. Here is this week’s genius who posted a Facebook snap that shows him stealing gasoline from a police car.

The findings were based on a study of legal databases  and were published by X1 Discovery, a company that helps lawyers and law enforcement mine social media.

The most curious element of the findings may be the ongoing prevalence of MySpace in the criminal justice system years after most consumers have abandoned the service.

An unscientific explanation for MySpace’s ongoing presence is that most of the cases in the survey are criminal ones, and that crimes typically involve people from lower socio-economic classes. Such people are more likely to be MySpace users than the rest of the population.

Social media has provided not only new evidence for courts but also a challenge for judges who are struggling to decide what to do with jurors who tweet or discuss cases on Facebook.

More highlights from the report can be found on the Forensic Focus blog. A spreadsheet of the findings can be found here.

“I actually think we’re entering the age of video now…some people think we’re already there but I think we’re just getting started,” he told an audience at the DLD digital media conference in Munich, Germany.

He predicted that digital video consumption will “rise for the next many years” as bandwidth to the home continues to grow, and new devices make it easier to consume more content than ever before.

News Corp. like many other TV producers, has long been preparing itself for a time when that TV content is watched on anything but a TV, with the launch of online video and apps for new screens like those of tablets and smartphones. “TV is no longer a device,” he said. “It is a concept, and people go where the best screen is.”

And rather than simply ramping up the amount of content that News Corp.’s video properties produce — they include broadcasters like Fox as well as the film studio 20th Century Fox — Miller says that it is turning to News Corp. businesses that are traditionally more tied with written content, in what sounds like a very decentralized, try-everything-and-see-what-works approach to the space.

“We’re producing everything across the board now,” said Miller. “[Because] we’re focused on video…we’re trying to move our print publications into video, too.” That includes training Wall Street Journal reporters to “take videos on their iPhones,” as well as write.

And gaming site IGN, which originally started life as a collection of titles reviewing games, is running a dedicated channel on Microsoft’s Xbox, as well as the YouTube (NSDQ: GOOG) channel dedicated to gaming. “We won the bakeoff for the YouTube channel last year,” said Miller, referring to YouTube’s strategy to launch 100 new premium content channels covering a variety of interests.

He also noted that through IGN News Corp is once again looking at how it might develop its own gaming content — this is something that it had tried to do through its old subsidiary Fox Mobile, although that content division, including the production studios, was sold off last year to Jesta Digital. The company seems to be taking a more cautious approach than in the past: “We are putting our toe into the water with casual games,” said Miller. “Playing games is a bedrock so we want to learn and earn our way into that.”

Miller was interviewed on stage by DLD’s chairman, Yossi Vardi, who noted that he once worked with Miller for four years, and also that DLD had been trying to get Miller to speak at the event for the past three years.

These two hooks might be part of the reason why Miller was thrown quite a few softballs in the interview. In other words, no questions about how News Corp. can avoid another MySpace or Fox Mobile investment (both written off and sold off) in its search for the next big revenue stream.

Nor were there any questions at all about the best business models for delivering that new material: News Corp has been strong on paywalls for its written content so far — with paid subscriptions required for much of the Wall Street Journal and The Times in London — would Miller and News Corp consider extending that to more of its video content?

One area where Vardi did press Miller a bit was on the Megaupload closure and how content companies are going after the “little guy” in their pursuit of copyright protection. Aren’t you ashamed your industry is chasing small kids who want to have some fun, asked Vardi.

“I think you’re confusing us with the music industry. We don’t do that,” answered Miller. “What you’re getting at is what is the proper way to protect copyright….There has to be a way for freedoms to be respected and for copyright to be respected.”

That is an issue that has yet to find a definitive solution from many of Miller’s peers, and perhaps Miller himself. “The industry takes a while to embrace new technologies,” he said. “We’re doing it as an industry but it’s a different world.”

That world, in Miller’s view, has discounted content to almost nothing, in order to shift value to other parts of the ecosystem — a complaint often heard from those in the content industry in the face of juggernaut’s like Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) and Google, which respectively are more interested in pushing hardware sales and advertising for their own business models, offering easy and cheap access to content as part of the deal for consumers.

“Distributors have different businesses now,” he explained. “It’s not just to make money on the content as before.” “[Those who make hardware, or sell advertising] would like to keep the value of content low.” He said that this will eventually need to get “rebalanced” in the future. Whether that means more moves to paid content, or more advertising initiatives — or even partnerships on devices — remains to be seen.

»  Panasonic flirts with irrelevance with MySpace TV partnership: How about that, Myspace! You guys remember them, right? (CNET)

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»  Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime running Android 4.0 (hands-on video): Nvidia showed off this interesting tablet from Asus, one of the first tablets to run Android 4.0. (The Verge)

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»  @ CES: *Nokia* determined to battle in America with Lumia 900: It has been a long exile from what is now the world’s most important mobile market for Nokia (NYSE: NOK), and it’s pinning its comeback hopes on a new Windows Phone device on AT&T’s network. (paidContent)

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»  Why 3D TV went from CES darling to consumer reject: Revisiting the CES darling of the last two years, the 3D television. (Wired)

More in our CES archives.

Other investors in Science Inc. include Rustic Canyon, White Star Capital, The Social+Capital Partnership, Jean-Marie Messier, Philippe Camus and Dennis Phelps.

Jones’ goals in terms of the kinds of companies he wants to invest in and build are pretty simple: geographically, he primarily wants to begin Science Inc.’s focus around Los Angeles, as he sees the city’s tech company’s largely ignored by the VC crowd compared to places like Silicon Valley or New York. Secondly, the company will provide emerging startups with operational advice and capital, and third, transform later-stage internet businesses with new talent and ideas.

In essence, it sounds like the kind of relationship Myspace might have liked to have had with News Corp., which sold the entertainment-based social network to online ad tech firm Specific Media for roughly $40 million in June. As News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch confessed to shareholders at the company’s annual meeting, after paying $850 million for Myspace in 2005, “We then proceeded to mismanage it in every possible way.”

While Jones has already given his post-mortem on Myspace’s experience under News Corp., saying it was a “mistake” to keep the MySpace brand after it was repositioned as a social entertainment hub in October last year, he is quick to note that his creation of Science Inc. has other influences beyond the things he learned at his last job.

“Coming out of Myspace, I could have stepped into an established tech company or another distressed asset, but I decided what I really wanted was to work early stage investing,” Jones told paidContent. “It takes a long time to raise money and figuring out the basics when you’re a startup. And if you’re somewhat established, but having difficulty moving forward, it can be a significant distraction. At News Corp., I was really struck with how the film division was set up. There’s an infrastructure that takes care of financing, distribution, the marketing and the ways of tracking audiences. The film studio takes care of all the basics and allows the creative arm to focus on the product. That’s the model that tech companies need.”

In terms of the kinds of businesses Science Inc. is planning to back, Jones said not to read too much into the company’s name. “Science” talks to the process, rather than the type of company Jones wants to work with. For example, there’s the the science of leveraging the social graph, he said, which will underlie the approach the company will take toward investing and advising companies within its fold.

In terms of the sectors Science Inc. is looking towards, Jones and his four-person staff are looking toward the same areas that pretty much all VCs are interested in these days: the e-commerce and daily deals space, as well as anything involving mobile. Science Inc. is already working with a few companies, Jones said, but he declined to discuss what sort of businesses they are or reveal the names of the brands.

But Jones is clear in how Science Inc. is different from VC or PE firms. “Science is unlike a venture group, because we’re going to be very hands on with the companies we take a stake in, we’ll be part of the day-to-day business,” Jones said. “And it’s different from operating in the way a consultancy does, because we’re not taking fees. We’re going to be both a backer and a partner at a much deeper level than those other two models allow.”

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»  Clean Slate: How the online mag’s tech director Dan Check fine-tuned a 15-year-old machine (Nieman Lab)

»  Extra! Bizarre Sales Spike for 2 Papers (NYT)

»  :-O Washington Post (NYSE: WPO), New York Times (NYSE: NYT) think alike on Twitter headlines (Poynter)

»  You Know What’s Cool? Not Myspace (Techcrunch)