Hollywood Reporter
What started as a panel discussion about how media companies make money off the Internet evolved into a discussion of how entertainment companies — even such recent entrants as Google, Hulu and YouTube — remain relevant as the pace of change accelerates. Moderator and Disney president Robert Iger framed the first part of the debate by questioning how to get enough money out of new media to keep paying the costs of producing and distributing television shows, movies, games and other content if consumers think they are going to always get everything for free online. “Will we ever be able to monetize our content on new platforms as we did on traditional platforms?” he asked his four panelists, all of whom were from the cyber side of the equation. Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired magazine, said the question implies that everything will always be free, but that isn’t the case. “Free and pay are going to co-exist and compete,” he said. Anderson used the example of music. There is lots of it available free on the Web today, but many people still pay to download from iTunes and other sources. He said that is because iTunes is not just selling music, “It’s selling convenience.” Iger asked Chad Hurley, CEO and co-founder of YouTube, how Google was going to get back the money it paid to buy his company. He said that it is adding new formats beyond just showing videos to find the answer. Hurley said YouTube also has added more new applications and formats — including transactional sales — in the first half of 2009 than it did in all of 2008 and that it fine-tunes its model daily, sometimes hourly.