It's been a bustling, buzzy MIPTV this year, and this is the last session: the digital wrap-up. Its aim is to bring together the various strands of online, mobile and social media ideas and innovation that have been discussed this week, and get to the bottom of how (and how soon) they'll make a wider impact on the TV industry. Watch out for 'Twitter', 'Engagement' and 'Transmedia' among other buzzwords. Oh, and 'iPad' obviously - with bonus points if we actually see one.

Gavin McGarry from Jumpwire Media mentions iPad within 20 seconds of starting his presentation - they can be disruptive at dinner apparently - but then moves onto the trends to watch at MIPTV. He's chosen 11, in order of importance: Data mining, micropayments, single sign-on, HTML5, Location/Foursquare, Android, Twitter, Semantic Web, Open source video, Chatroulette, and Creative Commons.

Phew. These are essentially the things McGarry thinks MIPTV attendees should be making it their business to keep tabs on, even if you don't use them yourself. His advice on Chatroulette is good value though: "Go on for 30 seconds, click next, next, next, and NEVER go back!"

Another quick tip: go to YouTube and watch a video called Did You Know 4.0 - the idea is to help grown-ups keep up with what The Kids are doing. In fact, you don't need to go there, here it is:



"I think it really resets your brain when you see that," says McGarry, before moving on. "The one thing we haven't talked about enough at this conference is word of mouth," he says. "It's something that's being neglected a little bit."

So, McGarry's observations on the conference. Curiosity over command. He says the big broadcast people presenting - Sky's Jeremy Darroch and Electus' Ben Silverman for example - were very much about saying what they are and aren't going to do. But that when he talked to Twitter's Chloe Sladden, she was full of questions and curiosity. "That's the difference between old and new media."

He also says that women in the digital space are important for pushing innovation, and he also talks about the theme of 'global over territory'. "We are now moving into a global business... and really need to understand the global market."

McGarry also says that social media is currently part of TV firms' marketing departments - it's not a PR thing, but about marketing and getting your message out there. Another theme of MIPTV is innovation outside America - he says there's a lot of it happening now, even if it doesn't always get the credit in the States. Another observation: YouTube is the global leader in web video. And another one: "How do you influence the conversation, not how do you stop it?"

McGarry also gives some of the key facts he's learned this week:

1. A lot of Facebook and YouTube's traffic comes from outside North America.
2. IPAL in Poland has a client that builds in instant messaging, Facebook and YouTube, and it recouped its investment in two years.
3. Niche markets and ethnic communities are key. He points to Poland, which has 40 million people and another 20 million outside. For Russia, it's 130 million to 140 million outside.
4. The Pirate Bay's code was put on BitTorrent and downloaded more than 1,000 times within a week. "The Pirate Bay that everyone decided to shut down became a thousand Pirate Bays within a week," he says. The implication: trying to shut down BitTorrent won't work. "You've got to work with it."


He then cites some stats from the USC Center for the Digital Future. The average household spends $260 on entertainment and communications that they didn't a generation ago - and even the poorest people in America spend $180 a month. "If you've got a unique experience, people will pay you for it," he says.

McGarry also talks about successful examples of digital and social media. Starz made a game for The Crazies which cost $15,000 to produce, but was downloaded more than 250,000 times. Bad Girls Club, another show, saw a 60% jump in ratings when it worked with Twitter to get people interacting live.

He talks about mobile, and warns that Steve Jobs may be on the wrong track with the iTunes "walled garden", saying that it might be mirroring the mistakes made by the broadcast industry. He's moving towards the more open model of Android, which McGarry says is a wrench, because he loves Apple's hardware. Yes, he does have an iPad - he invites the room to come up to touch it after the session. "Just don't steal it!"

He says he was extremely sceptical about Yahoo's Connected TV technology. "If my wife can't use it, it does not get my seal of approval," he says by way of explanation. But he says that when he used Yahoo's service today on the stand today, he was impressed by its ease of use. "But it'll be a year," he says, because the first batch of connected TVs don't have fast enough processors inside.

Now he moves on to trends from New York. He talks about nyvideo.org, which he says is the biggest video meetup group in the world, which has a monthly meeting with four demos of new online video technology. And apparently Foursquare is "off the charts" in New York now. He says that it will really deliver on its potential once "everybody has this on their phones". The service has 750,000 users, and has added 100,000 in the last ten days alone (that's globally, not just in New York).

A big stat now: video is expected to be nearly 50% of internet traffic by 2012. "That means there's money to be made," says McGarry. And video is expected to be 64% of global mobile data traffic by 2013. "We're in a good position!" he says of the TV industry.

And he moves on to 'profiting in the digital landscape' - how to make money? Web video, mobile, social media, casual games, advertising and then digital publishing. In that order. And picking out casual gaming, he says MIPCOM will have a lot more gaming companies, as it's an important sector.

His big advice: for the next 18 months, TV firms should focus on getting data. "Write it into all of your contracts... and ask for it in real-time, so you can go and access it."

He talks about BitTorrent now, and downloads of US TV show The Pacific, claiming that big downloads in the UK and Canada show that windowing isn't working because people have a demand for shows that aren't being aired in their countries yet. "We need to understand how we can deliver it to them and monetise it."

"Most people are good. If they just can't find it or get it where they want it, then they go and look for other alternatives," he continues. The challenge is to find a way to solve this problem. "The digital world tells us you have to give the user what they want, because otherwise they'll just go and do it themselves."

McGarry moves on to web video, breaking down estimated YouTube revenues of $1 billion for 2010. He talks about the prices paid for pre-rolls, overlays, homepage CPMs, and homepage banners. And then refers to figures from comScore from June 2009. If YouTube is monetising 35% of its 1.2 billion daily streams at an average CPM of $7, its annual revenue is around $1 billion.

"It's a business, it's growing very fast, and we need to be there," he says. He moves on to Facebook, since he believes the social network is number two in the world behind YouTube in terms of views. "You need to be in two places: YouTube and Facebook," he tells the audience.

Another trend: algorithmic content models. He talks about Demand Media, which uses an algorithm to identify topics with high advertising potential - trending adwords on Google - and then they get low-paid freelancers to write text (blog posts) or make videos based on those keywords.

The company has 7,000 contributors, and it generates thousands of YouTube uploads every week. Demand Media made $200 million last year, and has a valuation of between $1 and $2 billion. If it's not on your radar, it should be, in other words.

One last point: McGarry thinks YouTube's content identification system is revolutionary: TV firms should be uploading their shows to YouTube "behind the wall" - not for watching on the site, but purely so YouTube's technology can identify fan-uploaded clips - and then you can monetise those by putting ads on them.
Plenty, then, to look into and report back on at MIPCOM 2010!

by Stuart Dredge