»  @ pcE11: Tercek: The Content Is The Container

»  @ pcE11: Lessons Learned From Netflix And Others On New Digital Video World

»  @ pcE11: Where Do You Build Your Brand?

»  @ pcE11: Cutting Clutter To Build Love, Make Money In Web Video

»  @ pcE11: Google TV Is Not A ‘Cord-Cutting’ Product

»  @ pcE11: So You Want To Be A YouTube Star?

»  @ pcE11: Angry Birds ‘The Movie’ Or ‘The App’? It’s Just ‘The Experience’

»  @ pcE11: The Intersection Of Gaming And Gaming

»  @ pcE11: CBS’ Lanzone: If You Want Our Content, You’ll Have To Pay-A Lot

»  @ pcE11: Measuring The Twitter Effect On TV Viewing And Programming Choices

»  @ pcE11: Dawn Ostroff: Streaming Is Better Than DVRs For Advertising

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Tercek began his presentation — slides will be available shortly, along with video — by tapping his inner Marshall McLuhan by telling the audience, “Content is always shaped by the container.” And in the case of the record industry with CDs and cable television with the set-top box, the container is shattering.

He illustrated his point with a description of Charles Dickens revenue model for the novel. The British author, like others of the period, didn’t sell books — he sold serialized chapters. The container of the “serialized pamphlet” influenced Dickens to write chapters with a cliffhanger so readers would be hungry for the next one. Because he was successful, he wrote a great many chapters. Dickens was so good, in fact, interest in his works crossed the Atlantic, where they were packaged as complete books — which publishers in the U.S. produced without paying Dickens royalties for his content. “We complain about China, but once, we were the content pirates.”

Eventually, story structure was determined by TV, which structured scenes around commercial breaks. But as broadcasters create shorter, more frequent commercial pods, they’re ending up losing their audience.

While cord-cutting has been talked about as an emerging threat, if not currently an actual one, to the cable industry, Tercek says that MSOs would do well to prepare for users to turn away from the set-top box.

Even broadcasters (i.e. “content companies”) find themselves in jeopardy, as they face competition from quarters they never had to worry about, such as device makers and telcos and the cable distributors themselves. TV channels like ABC (NYSE: DIS) and NBC (NSDQ: CMCSA) face a future where they are simply apps on a tablet that consumers choose to view.

The move to TV Everywhere, where cable subscribers are given permission to view subscription programming on digital devices, is the way cable believes it can hold on to their value in the eyes of consumers, as device manufacturers, telcos and content providers compete to show programming on their own terms. This will force the unbundling of cable and the MSOs will have to create new services to compete, Tercek said.

Some argue that the telcos will be the winner by “rebundling,” by offering to sell users a basic tier of service and then premium on top of that. “I don’t think the consumer has been asking for that,” Tercek said. “People don’t want a choice between a collection of basic and premium channels. In fact, we’re seeing the end of the channel.”

In the two-way network, channels, are about getting viewers to tune it at a specific time. As time-shifting increases, the value of programming for a specific moment will fall by the wayside. Unbundling will lead to the creation of marketplaces of content. “Every successful business on the web is a marketplace of some sort: Google (NSDQ: GOOG) with search, Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) with retail products and iTunes with music and apps. They are all marketplaces: efficient mechanisms for matching buyers and sellers. These companies don’t need to monetize content the way TV companies do. Facebook monetizes your social graph and market it to the highest bidder. Google does the same; it’s all about selling consumer behaviors, identities and relationships.”

The end of the channel has been happening for a while, Tercek said. “Broadcast news used to be the flagship of the brand. But we’ve hollowed out newsrooms because of the cost. Reality television was thought to be a fad, but it is here to stay. Every TV programmer has some form of reality show. We’ve also started to notice endless repeats of hits in cable, because it’s cheaper to rerun a show than invest in a new one. About 60 percent of cable viewing on a particular channel is three or four shows; the rest is filler.”

While Tercek expressed a great deal of pessimism for the current state of cable TV, he is particularly excited about the kinds of businesses that will emerge. “What might the service of the future look like? A company called Frequency — I wish I could talk about what they’re releasing next week. I was at a presentation of their’s earlier and it rocked my world.”

But be careful, warned Mark Suster, partner at GRP Partners: “being too early is the same as being wrong.” Digital video technologies that aren’t quite ready for prime time can hurt a company’s brand and make it even easier for upstarts to find disgruntled customers.

Enter Exhibit A for how to rankle your customers: Netflix (NSDQ: NFLX). The panelists, who included Suster, Jason Deal of Initiative, William Quigley of Clearstone Venture Partners, filmmaker Jamie Patricof and Rick Allen of Snag Films (which announced two content deals earlier in the day at the conference) shook their collective heads at how Netflix bungled the goodwill they had earned over the years among both consumers and the entertainment industry in just a few short months.

Because of the disruption in costs and the need for big brands to have quality content associated with their brands, in a way, content is once again expensive, Quigley said. Netflix didn’t realize exactly how dissatisfied customers were with its streaming-only offerings and overjudged how quickly people would be willing to give up DVD service without the same quality available from the streaming side.

And to top it all off, filmmakers like Patricof weren’t making all that much money from Netflix in the first place, he said.

Facebook as the platform for consumer relationships: No one denied the value of establishing a Facebook fan base. But Dan Pelson, EVP, global “direct to consumer” operations, Sony (NYSE: SNE) Music Entertainment and Jay Samit, CEO, SocialVibe clashed with regards to how valuable it ultimately is. Samit said, “Once you have a fan page, you have the ability to reach out forever unless they un-like you. It becomes stale over time but the likelihood anyone will leave Facebook soon is slim.” But Pelson says, “At the end of the day, it’s Facebook who owns that customer.”

The importance of being honest: Courtney Holt, COO, Maker Studios says the more consumer data you have, the better. But it needs to be a direct relationship with your consumers — the more intermediaries you have, the less authentic your relationship becomes. As a result, anything based on social distribution needs to be authentic. Bryan Perez, president, digital and ticketing, Media, AEG adds that it ultimately boils down to trust; it’s not about the phone, e-mail, Twitter, etc.”

Referring to social media, Pelson said having a team of community managers works, but for brands. It’s more difficult to tweet on behalf of another human being, which is why it’s so rarely done, if ever. “A lot of the younger artists who are becoming very famous do it themselves because they don’t want anyone else touching it.”

How do you establish the relationship? Samit raved about the value of reaching your exact audience, citing a study Disney (NYSE: DIS) recently did on its ticket sales as they were advertised across various platforms. It found 64 percent of people who saw the particular ad bought tickets. Thus, he said, “You don’t have to own the specific vehicles as long as you know which ones they are.” When asked how to latch onto those specific vehicles, which ones are key, Pelson said, “In terms of being able to monetize a tweet, it’s lower on the food chain than Facebook.” Holt says connecting those dots are difficult because people can be lazy. A challenge is finding the passionate fans, the ones so gung-ho about a product, they record themselves un-boxing it.

Why the concert ticket business still sucks: “The whole ticket thing is so screwed up,” Perez put it bluntly. “It’s 2011 and it’s essentially the same buying process as in the 1970s. You line up at the record store — but at least back then it was like a party. Now, everyone shows up at the store at 10 a.m. on a Saturday; there’s no party. We need to change that. The second we announce the show, people already know whether they’re interested. Why not package this in a better way?”

Perez also proposed an interesting idea: the digital shoebox. “No one’s cracked the code on the post-event experience. Where is the digital shoebox that has ticket stubs, photos, and connects you with the people you were with?”

Possible lessons from the upcoming election: Samit says the upcoming presidential campaign will prove an interesting lesson for social media and marketing. “I think we’re going to learn a lot about what brands should be doing. They won’t have 10 years to make it as a rockstar, or 100 years to make it as a cola. You have 11 months or you don’t get the job.”

Being a web-based video site is like being a single product in a giant supermarket — or rather four giant supermarkets if you believe Jim Louderback, CEO of guy’s site Revision3. Louderback predicts that video sites will have to be ready to compete across platforms on four different operating systems. The first three are no surprise: Apple (NSDQ: AAPL), Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) and Google’s Android devices. The fourth is a new-comer that appears poised to make a noisy arrival:

“I’ll make a prediction… The Kindle Fire is going to be the biggest consumer electronic device this fall. It’s a place where you want to win the shelf space battle,” said Louderback.

That’s good news for Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) but the outlook looks ever bleaker for also-rans Nokia (NYSE: NOK) and BlackBerry — “those stores are going out of business.”

Louderback’s remarks set the stage for a closer look at how successful web videos companies are standing out on the web. According to Funny or Die CEO Dick Glover, the secret is all about using branding to break through the clutter. His site’s short comedy clips have created a power brand led by the likes of Will Ferrell and other A-list comedians which in turn have brought audiences to him. To Glover, it’s all about having scarce high quality programming. “There’s nothing worse than good distribution for a bad product.”

The CEO of another upstart, Buzzmedia, is another apostle of quality. Tyler Goldman, who presides over forty celebrity-related sites, says there is “a finite amount of premium inventory” and that companies have to set out to win the categories they choose to play in. Goldman added that search and serendipity is a “poor man’s tool” to attract audience and that over 70 percent of this traffic arrives directly. It helps that he hosts the official site for Kim Kardashian.

As for Louderback, a true Northern California, he says the secret to success is love and technology — “if your people are in love with something, you can monetize them” — in practical terms, this means a beloved video site is a perfect host to introduce fans to new brands.

And, finally, it wouldn’t be a panel discussion without essential take-away principles. Mitch Berman, a former veteran of HBO and Zillion TV, had seven: mobile, social, influence, sharing, curation and ease of entertaining. To these, others on the panel added “be early.”

Some content–like Hulu–is blocked on Google TV, but Queiroz said that shouldn’t be a problem for users: “We assume you have access to all of that content live or through your DVR.” And, he said, focus on blocked content “misses the point [because] there’s a lot of content you can access–more than 80,000 film titles and TV episodes in addition to live TV.” The bigger problem and Google’s main focus, he said, is users’ ability to discover content.

Discoverability is a lesson learned between the first iteration of Google TV, released last year–a product many users found disappointing–and the new update released on October 31, said Queiroz. “Search is interesting for the viewer but often people don’t know what they want to watch. We have a new TV and movies app that helps users find content across the Web.”

Other lessons learned since last year: Google aimed to make the user experience in the living room easier. The company noticed that many people were using YouTube on their TVs, so it beefed up Google TV’s YouTube app in recognition of that. And Google opened up an Android app market on Google TV, seeded it with about 50 apps to start and hopes to provide a “door into the living room for content owners and for developers large and small to bring their content to television.”

Queiroz sidestepped Kramer’s question about how Google plans to make money from Google TV. The company is focusing on user experience first, he said, as it did in the development of its mobile platform–and monetization can come later.

For artists like Hayden Black (producer and star of Goodnight Burbank) and Lisa Donovan (LisaNova on YouTube), the Internet is an important vehicle for artists who want to reach audiences without having to go through the traditional talent-development process. Unlocking the opportunities that success can present, however, requires a combination of a do-it-yourself strategy when it comes to marketing and promotion and help from professionals when the water gets too deep.

Online audiences demand engagement, Donovan said. That engagement can be the content itself, given the personal nature of many *YouTube* videos, but it’s still something that creative types have to manage much more than in the past.

“What it took to be OK Go is very different than what it took to be The Rolling Stones,” said Jesse Dylan, founder and CEO of Wondros, a media production company.

Yet the traditional talent-development process can help artists make the leap from YouTube curiosity to sensation. “They need a place that does the parts that they don’t do,” Dylan said, citing an example where his company produced a video for The Black Keys for very little up-front investment that did a million views on YouTube (NSDQ: GOOG). (Updated 4:11 p.m. PT to correct the number of views actually received by the video.)

Donavan has since branched out into the talent development process herself, with help from Dana Settle of Greylock Partners.

“One of the reasons we got exciting about maker was YouTube as a platform,” Settle said. “There’s a huge opportunity for creative people to have a lot more control over the product and the monetization on this platform.”

Professionals can also help artists understand where their promotional activities are best directed. Robert DeSantis, president of transactional media for Maddocks and Company, related the story of Red Bull founder Dietrich Mateschitz and his promotional strategy for a drink that failed miserably in taste tests prior to launch.

“What a lot of us do is try to market to everyone. They were smart enough to say ‘I’m going after the #1 beverage in the demographic I want,” DeSantis said, which in that case was teenagers. Years later, everyone from kids to clubgoers to 65-year-old accountants are drinking Red Bull.

Krazit identified some of the challenges facing Maisel, who is a special advisor to Angry Birds’ creator, Rovio and is the former chairman of Marvel Studios. For one thing, the characters — a few different colored birds and green pigs, don’t have much personality apart from their individual abilities and sounds. In a sense, that’s a problem Maisel believes the movie can easily solve. But the biggest thing is not losing momentum or spreading the brand too thin.

“Will [the Angry Birds films] have broad appeal? When I think about Angry Birds the film, it’s got four things I’ve never seen,” Maisel said. “First, there’s the amount of people aware of the game. It’s been downloaded 500 million times to date. So try to imagine what that number will be in three years, when the movie comes out. Then, there’s the demographics — from parents, to grandparents to kids, are involved. Third, it’s global — no one thinks of it as a ‘Finnish game,’ they embrace it as if it were a part of their own local culture. Lastly, people playing Angry Birds are engaged all the time. All of those reasons adds up to a potential for a huge audience. The thing now is to make a great movie, not just a great ‘Angry Birds movie.’”

In terms of moving from Iron Man to Angry Birds, Maisel said that he first discovered the game after his mom started playing it. “After seeing my mom playing this game, I called up Rovio,” he said. “Good thing I got her an iPad, otherwise, I wouldn’t have been making this movie.”

Video games are a $50 billion-a-year industry, said entrepreneur Brock Pierce, a pioneer in marketing virtual goods in online games. Meanwhile, the traditional gaming industry–gambling–brings in $700 billion per year. “In a casino today, you see slot machines that look a lot like video games,” Pierce said. And that overlap will continue as cash-strapped federal and state governments liberalize U.S. gaming laws in search of tax revenues.

Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari, agreed: “‘Gaming gaming’ is an ascendant market of massive proportions. Once you give people the ability to play a slot machine a few times before they go to bed, on their credit card, they will do it.”

When moderator Tom Krazit, paidContent’s mobile editor, asked panelists about other big trends, all of them mentioned user-generated content in gaming. One interesting development, said Peter Salinas, a gaming analyst at Nerd Kingdom, is the ability to let average gamers act as game developers. “The reason social apps blow up is that they’re relatively easy for game developers to make,” he said. (According to a stat cited by Pierece, 60 to 70 percent of applications downloaded to smartphones today are games.) Nerd Kingdom is looking for ways to develop technology so that thousands of gamers can develop games with each other.

That approach can be very successful in part because gaming has become so social. “The compelling factor is the other player,” said Dmitri Williams, founder and president of Ninja Metrics and an associate professor at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication. “You can have a lousy game and people will stay because their friends are there. It’s key to bring social network analysis into computer science.” Ninja Metrics uses algorithms to determine which people are influential and how much they will spend. It’s “thinking about customers and users as key nodes to be looking at [rather than the game's content as the key metric]. They’re the seeds.”