Ben Grossman, Editor in Chief, for Broadcasting & Cable led this panel discussion.

Danny Kastner is founder of Fan Rocket. Fan Rocket provides services to media companies that help promote media via viral videos.

Stephen Andrade is General Manager of NBC.com with a mission to promote TV shows, provide online advertising opportunities and create content for NBC.com. He shows a clip of what he calls creative social media that shows how The Office’s Dunder Mifflin Infinity website provides tools for fans to build content. The goal was to create a really deep community for fans of the show. The site presents creative tasks to “branches”( user groups) each week.

David Glover is CEO of Or Die Networks. The company is a online creative company that partners with celebrities to build new shows, such as Funny Or Die, and combines that with user generated content and social network tools to build community. He views it as a pyramid of content with the celebrity partner at the top, advanced users producing high quality content and then the mass user generated content.

EriK Flannigan, EVP of Digital Media at MTV Networks, runs Comedy Central and a few other sites. He says that consumers will form groups with or without you, so you need to decide if you want to participate. MTV is trying to embrace the social web using things like the Facebook activity feed.

How does an aspiring producer play in this? Stephen says that it’s important to understand the economics first. He says there are no barriers to entry so it doesn’t make a great area for investment. It doesn’t work to make things with TV type budgets. TV is a hit business where 1 hit can pay for 10 failures. On the web, there is a much lower cost of failure and therefore many more people trying.

Erik says that the industry has come a long way in the past few years understanding how users want to and will mash up content. The biggest stumbling block is letting go and letting users make their own choices. You don’t really have much choice because you can’t control what happens. He says you occasionally get into trouble with copyright issues, but you keep on going.

Dick says he met last week with one of the premier writer producers in comedy television. They were working on a concept and the writer said it would only work if there were no comments allowed. Dick says they walked away. You can’t fight reality.

Dick says they have less issue with copyright problems because their content is short and some what self contained.

Danny says this is really an area of opportunity as TV shows start hiring people dedicated to making extra content and making it viral. Stephen calls it a writer producer in training role, where when they go on to write/produce TV shows they will get the online side of this. Erik and Dick concur saying that new jobs are being created to re-purpose existing content for the digital space and new marketing jobs are requiring digital experience.

Does every new show need a social component as well as a digital component? Stephen says he’s not sure what “digital” means. He says it probably means both, but it really depends on the content.

Erik says that the social component depends upon the show. He describes the difference between The Daily Show and The Colbert Show. One is about presenting content, the other is really social.

The panel had some interesting advice to people in the audience who are interested in the space. In short, think beyond video. Erik pointed to an example on the Huffington Post that was an interactive view of how a conservative views the NY Times. Stephen concurred saying they want interactive ideas beyond video because they can really drive page views. Dick closes by saying think about what the technology can do, and video is just one of the things the technology can do.

Moderator: Wayne Karfalt – Editor, Cynopsis: Digital

Panelists:
Eyal Hertzog Founder and Chief Creative Officer for Metacafe
Melanie Hall – COO Quarterlife
Kevin Chou – CEO Watercooler
Justin Cooper – Chief Innovation officer for Passenger

Crowdsourcing has it origins in things like WikiPedia where people can collaborate and develop content together.  How can crowdsourcing sourcing techniques be applied to entertainment?

Melanie discussed the social networking site for creative people and online show.  She says they have many opportunities for crowdsourcing at Quarterlife.  They use the audience to discuss characters and story lines.  The principles of the show were used to build out a social network so that the show and the site can play off each other.  They launched the show on Myspace, Youtube, Bebo and other sites which then referred people to the site resulting in a fast growing online community.

Eyal described how Metacafe now serves up over 300 million videos each month to over 35 million people.  He says the internet is introducing a new low cost of failure which means many more experiments and allowed many more people to participate in the creative process.  They have recently allowed people to edit the metadata about the videos. The members can edit the tags, titles, descriptions etc connected with the videos.

Kevin introduced Watercooler, a company that makes widgets for social networking sites.  Watercooler’s mission is to bring fans together online.  People have allows gone online to discuss entertainment.  They started online forums to discuss TV shows.  They launched in 2007, growing to 25 million registered users in 12 months.

Kevin says that their users are using the site to find out what others are thinking about when they watch a show. The communities can be very different.  Lost, for example has a community of 600,000 with very different involvement, while the online community for Jericho is 10,000, but very passionate about the show.

Justin described Passenger, a company that provides a crowdsourcing application for large corporations and media companies.  Major networks like ABC and Fox use the application for collaborate with their most passionate users.  These super fans can drive storylines and changes in shows using Passenger.  These audiences are built from either web sign ups or email lists that the clients have built up over the years.  Filtering tools are really important to allow people find the content they want and for the clients to sift through all the information provided by the users.  Justin says that Lost has been an active user of crowdsourcing to steer the show and for what content should be submitted for Emmys consideration.

The panel discussed the future of pilots.  Eyal says that the whole model for pilots is changing.  It used to be that because of distribution constraints there was a filter, then publish model for testing new content. The change of the distribution method has changed the model. We are moving from filter, then publish model to a publish, then filter model.

Eyal says that about 50% of videos are found via search for the first video you watch.  The second video is more likely to be the exploration of the related video.

In another example of crowdsourcing, Wayne described how Digg is building a recommendation engine based up your Diggs.  This will makes for more active recommendations based upon the collective input from the crowd.

A question from the audience – how to use input from the community when it conflicts with the creative direction of the show?  Melanie says that in any successful relationship there is compromise.  Justin describes how the creative commons process where other can build upon existing content and generate fresh content.