March 21, 2007 | Filed under: Internet TV

I had a great time last night participating in a panel discussion organised by AIMIA on creating your own TV network. Thanks to everyone that came down to the Shelbourne Hotel. We discussed how the internet is making new things possible and focussed on the opportunity to set up new video content businesses.

It was a pleasure to catch up with Mark Pesce again after more than ten years. We last saw each other in Madrid in 1996 at the Cyberconf. He's a passionate and clever bloke and always good to hear in a debate.  Last night he advocated the ability of individuals to get there stuff out there and build an audience using Ze Frank as his case study. What is the 'value' of Ze Frank after a year of vlogging now he's as big as Jon Stewart? Mark also questioned the internet's ability to handle the load of a video dominated web - especially once Joost goes viral as many expect it will. 

I enjoyed meeting Tom Kendall from Of The World for the first time. He's not just talking about it, he's actually building an internet TV network and there's some good stuff there at oftheworld.tv. I love that the channels are presented full screen in the browser instead of the little screen that are so common. [Tom, I don't know if any of my shelved chatabox.tv thinking is of use to you?]

Ian Gardiner from VioCorp was an important component of the group because he represented the enterprise market. Unlike most of the internet video market that has to give stuff away, Ian is building a business around charging business customers for video products. He was also the most knowledgeable on the subject of large scale webcasting and talked about his experience webcasting the Mardi Gras this year as a pay-to-view offering. [Ian, this is the powerful streaming technology I refered to last night.]

As ever, Marty Wells was the voice of reason. There's a lot of hype about forming a startup and most of it is crap. He has a talent for clearly explaining why. He spoke alot about Purepwnage.com as an example of starting small with a strong idea, and then slowly scaling the business from there. With the videos served on Brightcove there is no serving cost to worry about and its monetised with advertising and merchandise. 

My big points where:

• Forget the technology, focus on the idea instead of getting lost in the options in Adobe Premiere. You can make something great for free and become famous, at no cost. i.e. you don't even need a video camera.
• The problem with podcasts, video blogs, etc is that they are not searchable, so the content can be invisible to the normal channels of discovery. Is that where Adam Curry went as all the discussion went to audio??
• Don't try to control your content by keeping it on your own site. Accept that the internet's nature is copying, sharing, transfering and let it go. Let the users promote your stuff for you. Find a way of deploying the monetisation with the media so this doesn't matter.

Apparently there were quite a few tough questions via SMS that we will be answering today for publishing on the web later.  Watch this space.

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