Pearls of wisdom on digital content's future

Here's the deal of the day.

The same nuggets of wisdom that executives paid $4,000 to get last week from a Wall Street Journal tech conference in Carlsbad, Calif., are yours for just 50 cents here in print, or free online. Let's hope The Journal won't sue me for piracy, but I'm not too worried after hearing conference organizer Walt Mossberg rail against the inequity of copyright law.

A highlight of D: All Things Digital was Bill Gates' reunion with Steve Jobs, but the event's recurring focus seemed to be the next phase of digital media.

Hot spaces of 2005 to 2007 — search, ad engines, social networking, broadband, copy protection and new presentation tools — are maturing into a foundation. Now that the foundation is largely in place, big media are building their homes on the Web.

Now for the nuggets, from conversations on- and offstage:

"We have more structured data than anyone else on the Internet," said Peter Chernin, president of News Corp., the media conglomerate planning to aim more ads at users of its MySpace service. "It's not guesswork, to guess their behavior — we know exactly what they think about, what they care about."

Another media titan, Viacom, is also building out its online presence. People may not find its content at Google sites — Viacom is suing the company for copyright violations — but Viacom Chief Executive Philippe Dauman isn't scared.

"We have plenty of places to go — consumers will gravitate to high-quality content," he said.

A lot of people will also gravitate to low-quality content, according to legendary filmmaker George Lucas.

"There's two forms of entertainment — circus and art," he said, when asked what he thinks of the Internet video phenomenon. "Circus is random and voyeuristic. That's what you find on YouTube, porn and 'American Idol.' "

Art contrives a situation, tells a story "and hopefully reveals a truth," he said.

Don't write off print media, Time Inc. CEO Ann Moore said. Time's magazine business remains strong.

Time's online push was complicated by its merger with AOL and uncertainty about the online medium, but not anymore.

"We were waiting for the business formula to show up. That happened last year," Moore said.

Her factoids: People spend about 3,500 hours consuming media — about five months — per year.

"Despite all that, reading is still alive and well," she said, noting that 84 percent of adults subscribe to magazines and reading is "the No. 1 way women de-stress in America."

As I finished dinner that night, Intuit founder Scott Cook and venture capitalist (and Sun Microsystems founder) Vinod Khosla sat at the table. Khosla suggested that in five years, the majority of personal computing will be done on devices other than traditional PCs.

That thought came to mind the next morning, when YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley described how the company wants its content played on everything from mobile devices to living-room TVs.

"We want to bring video to every screen that we can," he said. "With the technology that we're developing, we have a great chance to accomplish that."

Steve Jobs is going there, too: "Our model for AppleTV is like a DVD player for the Internet."

Perhaps we need Ann Moore's Law: The amount of online content is doubling every two years, but we can only take so much.

Brier Dudley's column appears Mondays. Reach him at 206-515-5687 or bdudley@seattletimes.com.