“You have unbelievably scaled b2c platforms like Facebook, Google etc. And unless you want them to tell you exactly what your business is worth, you have to have your own direct connection with consumers.”

Miller talked about Hulu, the company’s digital tabloid The Daily, News Corp. in China and more during a Q&A with paidContent Editor Staci D. Kramer at our recent paidContent 2012 conference.

Miller, former CEO of AOL, also had some thoughts about the future of his friend and former business partner Ross Levinsohn as interim CEO of Yahoo — and what it will take for the companies to survive. Full video
embedded below:

But while paidContent 2012: At the Crossroads is over as a live event, the conversation is just beginning. And, of course, coverage and analysis of the digital content business across platforms is a 365-days-a-year job at paidContent — not a one-off event.

Join us in our comments, on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+. Keep sharing ideas with us, and with each other.

Thank you to our great cast of speakers and moderators for giving us a lot to think about, to everyone who asked a question or shared an idea, to our new combined team for making it all happen, and to our sponsors for their support.

We’ve archived all the videos from the day, but if you want a taste of what the day was like, watch this video of Union Square Venture’s Fred Wilson in conversation with our own Mathew Ingram — in which Wilson said media companies wouldn’t be threatened by technology if they opened up more.

Live-blogged stories from the event:

• Content, not hardware, have made tablets the current king
• The new digital newsstand: Enabling “pass-along” — and saying no sometimes
• Digital story-telling and the rise of the new publishers
• Fred Wilson: Content owners, don’t fear the future
• New ‘radically simplified’ WordPress is on the way
• HTML5 is a newspaper’s best friend – even if it has a mobile app
• Conde Nast’s Sauerberg: Get busy innovating, or get busy dying
• Don’t think of it as content, think of it as information
• For discoverability, traditional tools still dominate
• Does social beat search, or does “peacocking” get in the way?
• Financial Times exec: iOS apps don’t work for publishers
• Jon Miller: Hulu still essential to broadcasters
• Social media doesn’t speed up the news cycle — it kills it
• Richard Russo: Amazon puts great young writers in “particular peril”
• Is a vast video library worth the time and money?
• Harry Potter’s publishing wand can tame Amazon, pirates

“If content is going to remain king, we have got to innovate,” Sauerberg said Wednesday at paidContent 2012, urging attendees to spend more time trying to come up with the next big thing rather than trying to keep older floundering business models on life support. Sauerberg’s conversation with paidContent’s Staci Kramer follows below in its entirety.

Check out the rest of our coverage of paidContent 2012. Full archived video on livestream (registration required).

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.

Lanzone arrived at CBS Interactive in March, when the network acquired his startup Clicker, which defined itself as a “TV Guide” for online video.

Clicker is at its heart a search engine, and with most people satisfied with what Google offers, why did Lanzone see a need for such a site?

“TV was moving online, and there was tremendous growth in the number of original online videos being created and distributed,” Lanzone said. “But unlike TV, online video wasn’t about when they were on, but where. My sense was that the remote control of the future was a search engine, and it needed to be a highly structured one around video choices.”

Lanzone ended up selling it to CBS 14 months after creating it. In terms of moving himself and Clicker to CBS, he said, “I’m a product guy and I love the opportunity to run websites.”

CBS already had its own site for discovering videos, TV.com. Lanzone talked about greater integration between Clicker and TV.com. “TV.com, when it was created in 2008, historically was the leading community site to talk about TV information,” Lanzone said. “Then it became a place to watch video, but it wasn’t clearly defined. That’s changing.”

While TV.com brings outside shows and clips under the CBS Audience Network umbrella, CBS.com is the main hub for the broadcaster’s programming. And Lanzone said that the network still doesn’t see a need to see that mimic anywhere else. “We do not believe in competing against ourselves,” he said. “But we’re not closed off either. Not only do we post videos on CBS.com, it’s the modern equivalent of Channel 2 on the web. We do a lot of syndication through the CBS Audience Network. But we’re not going to be acquiring other people’s shows.”

In terms of Hulu, online video viewers in Tokyo can watch older CBS shows thanks to a deal that was struck two months ago. Lanzone gave no indication that a similar deal for the U.S. was in the works. “Our strategy is to own, operate and monetize ourselves,” he said, “and I think (CBS Corp. CEO) Les Moonves has been very smart about that.”

Ostroff left The CW network after five years. That network recently made a series of major streaming deals with Netflix (NSDQ: NFLX) and Hulu. As Kramer noted, the Netflix deal could be worth $1 billion to The CW and its shows producers. “It’s really a new business model in the making and those deals were going on before I left,” Ostroff said. “We were criticized for not jumping on Hulu when it started. Our target audience is 18-24 years old and we kept our streaming content exclusive on our site. We came up with a concept to put full commercial loads in our streams. Instead of just having two little spots at the beginning and end of stream. That gave us the same CPM online as on air. By doing that, we were paid a substantial amount of money and it made a lot of sense.”

Satisfied with having established the TV-like model for The CW site in the minds of viewers and marketers, the broadcaster decided it was ready to explore outside streaming deals. The appeal of the Netflix placement, is that the network can try to attract new and irregular viewers who would like to catch up on an entire season in weekend. And with Hulu’s paid subscription format, The CW felt it was still able to protect its own site’s model, which is solely ad-supported.

As viewers get more used to time-shifting both online and through DVRs, is there a difference between the value of viewers on one platform versus the other, when it comes to advertising? “The CW felt it was better off if viewers stream rather than DVR-ing,” she said. “You’re getting the same CPM as you get on air. Because we didn’t allow our content anywhere else, we were in a unique position. For advertisers, the goal is still the same: it’s all about where your content is, who your viewer is.”

» Watch the video of Everson’s Q&A with paidContent Editor Staci D. Kramer, embedded below. Full coverage of the conference is available in our archives.

On mobile, where Facebook runs no advertising today: “We are holding ourselves to as high a standard as possible on mobile,” she said. “I don’t rule mobile out, but we are working hard to figure out what the right model is. We haven’t figured that out yet.”

Facebook takes advertising strategy cues from Mark Zuckerberg: “He wants ads to be as useful as the content consumed in your news feed.”

On growing partnerships with studios for premium video content (particularly relevant considering the content push announced at f8): “We can move the box office needle. We feel confident about what we can do on the studio side.”

Learn more from his Q&A with paidContent Editor Staci D. Kramer in the video, embedded below. Full coverage of the conference is available in our archives.

It’s all in the video embedded below. Is Mohan right? Let us know what you think in the comments. Full coverage of the conference is available in our archives.