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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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
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.
