Posts Tagged ‘Peter Chernin’

The Web 2.0 Summit, taking place at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco Monday-Wednesday, will offer live coverage for streaming and embedding free-of-charge, the conference’s organizers, O’Reilly Media and UBM TechWeb, announced Monday.

Speakers at the three-day event will include Google CEO Eric Schmidt, The Chernin Group founder Peter Chernin, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz, William Morris Endeavor Entertainment co-CEO Ariel Emanuel, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, Gilt Groupe chairman Susan Lyne, Digital Sky Technologies CEO Yuri Milner, and Qatalyst Partners founder and head of merchant banking Frank Quattrone.

The Diamond Sponsor of the Web 2.0 Summit is Comcast. Platinum Sponsors are Bing, BlackBerry, Dell, and Yahoo!. Silver Sponsors of the event are Canaan Partners, iStockphoto, Ixaris, Meebo, Quova, TokBox, Unity Medical, and Visa. And Supporting Sponsors are Aperture, Ask.com, Omidyar Network, SendGrid, TriNet HR, and Wyse Technology.

Former News Corp. President and COO Peter Chernin has been busy since he left the company last June. As Michael Cieply in The New York Times reports, Chernin founded a production company, Chernin Entertainment which will produce traditional films and television series.

But the Times also says that the exec, who was one of the early supporters of Hulu, has some new media plans up his sleeve:

Rather than joining another big media company, Mr. Chernin is in the early stages of assembling his own enterprise, a company of considerable ambition that will meld original content, like feature films and television series, with cutting-edge technologies that use the Web and other digital ways of delivering entertainment.

Last month Bloomberg reported that Chernin was in talks with Microsoft about creating a television channel that would be available through the software giant’s Xbox 360 platform. While such a channel would likely be tiny compared to traditional television networks, in would give ammo to consumers that are looking for ways to cut the cord without sacrificing too much high quality content.

As the Times notes:

Mr. Chernin’s plans could test whether a large-scale business of the kind engineered by moguls like Barry Diller and David Geffen in the 1990s can be built today in the emerging media world, where Xboxes and cellphones can be as important as multiplexes and coaxial cables.

It looks like online video ads will soon get premium pricing. In an interview with Fortune at Brainstorm Tech on Tuesday, News Corp President Peter Chernin said advertisers still haven’t completely embraced the online opportunity, and that they continue to have a television mindset.

He said in the report that an advertiser recently told a MySpace sales rep to come back when the social network has a ‘SuperBowl-level’ event. “What the advertiser failed to recognize,” Chernin said, “is that the MySpace homepage has as many viewers every day as the SuperBowl has once a year.”

He also discussed how MySpace is having trouble securing decent ad rates for News Corp—and that the answer is probably not banner ads or text ads. “What drives ad prices is scarcity,” he said. “The place that is most promising is probably in video. By definition there’s more scarcity in video, and there’s even more scarcity in premium video.”

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