Posts Tagged ‘Albert Cheng’

The Alphabet Network has a new digital chief, as Disney/ABC Television Group announced the addition of former Comcast Interactive Media senior vice president, online media Karin Gilford as senior VP, digital media, ABC Television Network.

Gilford will be tasked with overseeing ABC’s digital-media, mobile, and interactive-television initiatives.

At CIM, she was responsible for the growth and management of portal site Comcast.net and entertainment destination Fancast. Prior to Comcast, she spent eight years at Yahoo!.

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Nielsen is best-known for its TV ratings, but the information and measurement company showed its versatility by teaming up with Disney/ABC Television Group on ABC’s My Generation Sync iPad App, which adds synchronized interactive content and social-media functionality to the experience of watching My Generation on ABC. The primetime drama series debuts Sept. 23.

ABC’s My Generation Sync iPad App is built on Nielsen’s Media-Sync Platform, which allows mobile apps to automatically detect and synchronize with TV programming using audio watermarks, letting users unlock synchronized content and features, as well as interact via social networks.

My Generation follows the personal stories of nine friends through the camera of a documentary film crew, and it stars Michael Stahl David, Jaime King, Kelli Garner, Keir O’Donnell, Mehcad Brooks, Julian Morris, Daniella Alonso, Anne Son, Sebastian Sozzi, and Elizabeth Keener.

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ABC News Digital is reorganizing its senior leadership, according to an email from senior VP of digital Paul Slavin.

Slavin announced that Jon Dube, VP of ABCNews.com, decided to take one of the buyouts that ABC News offered employees earlier in the year, and will be leaving ABC in July.

As a result, the company has changed its senior leadership to reflect the new structure.

Andrew Morse has been named executive producer of integration and innovation, where he will be charged with working with broadcast producers to develop integration ideas across the television and digital products. Morse was most recently executive prodcuer of “Good Morning America Weekend,” a position which was eliminated when ABC News restructured in April.

Ed O’Keefe has been promtoed to executive producer of ABCNews.com, and will report to Morse. O’Keefe joined the company last August as senior producer for innovation and special projects.

Elizabeth Barrett has been named VP of mobile, broadband and operations for ABC News Digital, reporting to Slavin. She had been an executive director.

Slavin also noted two promotions in the Disney/ABC Digital Media group, led by Albert Cheng. Those promotions are in the email Slavin sent to staffers earlier today, which is after the jump.
ABC News Digital is reorganizing its senior leadership, according to an email from senior VP of digital Paul Slavin.

Slavin announced that Jon Dube, VP of ABCNews.com, decided to take one of the buyouts that ABC News offered employees earlier in the year, and will be leaving ABC in July.

As a result, the company has changed its senior leadership to reflect the new structure.

Andrew Morse has been named executive producer of integration and innovation, where he will be charged with working with broadcast producers to develop integration ideas across the television and digital products. Morse was most recently executive prodcuer of “Good Morning America Weekend,” a position which was eliminated when ABC News restructured in April.

Ed O’Keefe has been promtoed to executive producer of ABCNews.com, and will report to Morse. O’Keefe joined the company last August as senior producer for innovation and special projects.

Elizabeth Barrett has been named VP of mobile, broadband and operations for ABC News Digital, reporting to Slavin. She had been an executive director.

Slavin also noted two promotions in the Disney/ABC Digital Media group, led by Albert Cheng. Those promotions are in the email Slavin sent to staffers earlier today, which is after the jump.

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If there is one takeaway from this year’s Cable Show, it is this: television and media execs cannot get enough Apple.

Of course, the iPhone is so 2008, this year it is all about the iPad.

The Hollywood Reporter‘s Paul Bond has a good roundup of media execs salivating over the thin, sexy Apple device, including bigwigs like News Corp. COO Chase Carey and Disney-ABC digital chief Albert Cheng. We already saw what Comcast CEO Brian Roberts did when he got his hands on one of those glass and aluminum tablets.

The iPad, answered Carey, the News Corp. COO and deputy chairman, “actually has a chance to be a transforming event.” And his unprompted praise for Apple’s tablet computer was just getting started.

“That device really gives you a richer media experience,” he said. “You can start to envision how you create a really appealing experience for a consumer in a mobile environment.”

Totally Chase, totally. The next step: teach your boss Rupert Murdoch how to use one of these suckers. And send us the video.

Last night we attended the Broadband Video Leadership Evening at the Hudson Theater in Times Square. VideoNuze editor and publisher Will Richmond moderated the panel of Web video executives including Albert Cheng, EVP for Digital Media at Disney/ABC Television Group, Greg Clayman, EVP of Digital Distribution & Business Development at MTV Networks, Karin Gilford, SVP, of Online Entertainment for Comcast and Daina Middleton, SVP of Moxie Interactive.

The takeaway:
• Only the strongest video sites will survive.
• Not everyone can be a good video producer, try as they might.
• It’s not enough to simply be an aggregator of video content.
• These execs say they are learning from the newspaper industry that entirely free content is not the way to go.

Before the panel discussion, Lori Harfenist of TheResident.net interviews MTV Networks’ Greg Clayman.

We Tweeted most of the event…

# Middleton of Moxie: you can niche yourself to death today. People are saying ‘I can only ingest so much.’

# Important thing about video: YouTube is the second most popular search engine after Google.

# Moderator: For a lot of people YouTube is their channel – beginning to end. YouTube has time to figure this out because of who bought them.

# Cheng: TV industry saw what was happening with pirated video. Newspapers didn’t see it. 5 years ago people started getting news from Yahoo

# What did newspapers do wrong that you guys are not going to do? Cheng: newspapers were being myopic about what their readers wanted.

# ABC’s Cheng: for now we’re ad supported, but we are branching out to alternative rev streams, including paid downloads.

# ABC’s Cheng: if anyone thinks they can just go out and be a good producer, they’re wrong. Just look at some of the content out there.

# Karin Gilford/Comcast: about how cable model paved way for online vid: “put a lot of content out there and let it make a life of its own.”

# Moderator: Newspapers would call the changes in media consumption a zero-sum game. These online video leaders can’t be bothered with that

# Greg Clayman of MTV: our mobile is growing. Despite downturn, many companies keeping online video experimentation in their budgets

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> Update: TheResident.net’s Lori Harfenist wraps the event: