People around the world at 2PM ET today will simultaneously watch a program of 24 short films selected from more than 2,500 entries, the realization of TED Prize winner Jehane Noujaim’s wish to create a day in which “people come together through film.

The four hour program will be shown publicly in a number of Venues. If there’s not an event near you, the program will also be broadcast live on Current_ in the U.S., on TV networks worldwide, and streamed live online and on mobile. The films will be available online here.

My short list: Encounter Point | J’Attendrai Le Suivant (I’ll Wait for the Next One) | Laughter Club | Operation Homecoming: Road Work.

Immersive Media, the company that brought us Google Street View, is now offering 360 degree video recently entered into a partnership with the William Morris Agency Digital Department “to develop, implement and deliver worldwide media and entertainment services.”

The partnership should lead to new uses of Immersive’s video technology in online advertising and entertainment. Check out the demo below:

Above: imShowcase, Click on the video to view move around.

(h/t FlashComGuru)

There continues to be a very bright light at the end of the content tunnel for those of us looking for more than YouTube clips to define the online video industry.

The Hollywood Reporter’s Alex Woodson today writes that Chicago’s Second City comedy troupe will be bringing their skills online in a joint venture with Media Rights Capital. MRC previously announced deals with Raven-Symone and Seth MacFarlane, putting the smart money on people who know how to create good content for any medium.

Second City’s Quarantine will launch with “six or seven” mini-shows and be syndicated across a number of yet unnamed syndication partners. As Second City already has a division dedicated to doing corporate events, MRC digital media president Dan Goodman told the Hollywood Reporter that Quarantine will provide “interesting and innovative” opportunities for marketers, and it plans to “bring brands into the story.”

Congrats the winners - and nominees - of this year’s Webby Awards, which were announced earlier today. Naturally a special nod to those in the online film and video category, as well as those in the interactive advertising category. All categories have a “Webby” Award - the official winner - as well as a “People’s Choice” Award, so go check out some of the best of the web.

In case you didn’t know, The Webby Awards honor excellence on the Internet. The Webbys are presented by The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, a 550-member body of leading Web experts, business figures, luminaries, visionaries and creative celebrities. The actual awards take place June 8-10 in New York.

Sitting in the back of the room has its drawbacks. I would have / should have known that there was an “Official” IAB Live Blog of the event. For another (official) perspective, head over for their recap.

Moderator: Alan Schulman, Senior Vice President, Executive Creative Director, Executive Director of User Experience, imc2
Nick Johnson, VP National Sales, Internet & Broadband, NBC Universal
Rishi Malhotra, Vice President, Multiplatform Program Marketing, HBO
Jon Vlassopulos, Senior Vice President, Digital Media & Branded Entertainment, Endemol USA

Sizzle reels to kick off the “Great Content” panel. Seems like I’m watching a lot of TV. This is more “Big Love” than I’ve ever watched. And I can’t change the channel. But I digress.

New Endemol show, Get Close to the Sugar Babes is the first interactive, mobile only video show. Reminds me of the “30 Rock” clip from about a year ago….

Nick: Post strike, the creative palate is as wide as ever. Marketers and content creators are thinking about how to extend their content digitally from the get go. For Heroes, NBC will be continuing to extend the show, and working on better integration between the show offline and on. The question is how to get wider distribution. Will also be creating additional web only content.

Jon: As a content producer, more and more people coming to them to find out how to get involved. It is an interesting time creatively. We’re not just talking about static advertising, or just about repurposing, but post-strike we’re thinking more about the web as its own vehicle and how to create content for it.

Rishi: The strike created a massive awareness of the other screens on the writing side. Writers wanted to get paid, right? Now, the first thing you hear from writers is, “What else can we do for the other screens?”

Alan: More “Pre-purposing” of assets post-strike. Excellent term.

Alan: HBO doesn’t have brand adjacency, so what do you do to leverage these new screens?

Rishi: Using content to market content. Using the story as an on ramp for the larger story, building a franchise.

Alan: How do advertisers get involved in influencing the storyline?

Nick: The appetite for integration depends a lot on the maturity of the brand. Will Nissan affect the broader storyline? No. But having a good relationship with the show owners is key to finding opportunities that make sense for your brand.

Alan: What about cable? More opps?

Nick: yes. Shows like Top Chef provide a lot more opportunity for brands to integrate and capture frequency. Reality and challenge shows are easier to integrate brands and products.

Nick: If you want to be more efficient in a broadband environment, there are plenty of them. But not very many opportunities to justify the high CPMs that high quality content offers.

Alan: with all the “pre-purposing” of assets, who is paying for the creation of that content?

Rishi: When people ask late in the game, it adds production days and costs. The earlier you can build a “surround story” and bake it into the natural show production, the better.

Moderator: Patrick Keane, EVP / CMO, CBS Interactive
Steve Robinson, President & Founder, Panache
Ian Schafer, CEO, Deep Focus

Patrick: Upfront is this week. How is money positioned in terms of an upfront, and will we see “meaningful” budgets move over?

Steve: We see multiple approaches. Seeing early adopters consuming all their video online, but you need to have the ability to scale the buy. Need to know that ad formats will work across all of these platforms.

Ian: Upfronts are like DoubleClick parties in 1999. You knew that something needed to change. Upfronts are evolving. Right now they serve as a platform for education to media buyers.

Patrick: Lets look at creative in respect to video. Is it pre? Overlays?

Ian: Many different formats, and the IAB is removing the friction. But I have my own biases…pre-roll for example. There have got to be better ways to capture people’s attention. On TV, the commercials break up the content. But you start with an interruptive experience. Need to use video to create a deeper experience. Needs to scale “deep” rather than just “wide.”

Steve: Engagement is the key. The more engaging the ad, the more compelling the experiences bring the user back to the content. Video overlay ads are great opportunities. Create engagement, plus you can constantly pull up new video and create a telescoping experience and offer an extended and different experience for the user.

Ian: The experience has got to be the first thing we look at.

Patrick:: Obvious elephant in the room is measurement. We have an inability to measure what is supposedly the most measureable media in the world. How do we provide measurement and accountability to advertisers that are meaningful?

Ian: Working with Bacardi for Dewer’s, we’re able to measure ROI because we gave it enough time to have an impact. We gave it time to grow. And we targeted content that reached a very specific audience – hipsters. We were able to move the needle in regional markets, but it took time. Three months before we saw anything, and six months before it was significant. But it worked – it just takes time.

Steve: We’re monitoring how people are engaging with overlay ad formats, when people interact, how long they interact for, and trying to figure out how to measure the engagement and accountability and tie it back to ROI and brand lift.

Patrick: What verticals need to put their toes in the water now?

Ian: Niche content is going to open the door to more advertisers. There will be lots of ways for packaged goods companies to take advantage of what is going on, but they will have to get into the creation of content, in the same way they did 50 years ago. We’ll start seeing longer form content that people will want to consume. Not the “Tide Presents Crescent Heights” stuff, but real content that people want. But not sure the Internet can sustain the size of the budgets that have the potential for shifting online.

Steve: Lions Gate did a very successful campaign. The Internet will be able to deliver and help figure out “which 50% of their advertising works.”

Ian: Not only a question of inventory being available, but are the agencies able to buy it? A second year media planner can buy online advertising easily. But to buy at scale that lifts the CPMs of the industry, buying the scale is challenging.

Steve: Not a technology challenge. We need to advocate standards for ad delivery as well as ad formats.

Patrick: At CBS, we don’t believe that the web is just another vehicle for watching video, but need to think about community as well.

Ian: We think about community all the time. We don’t generally do one without the other. In order to fulfill on the promise of the Web, we need to tie the community to the back end as well.

Steve: Doesn’t believe that people gather around the video screen to have a shared experience when watching shows online.

Audience Q&A:
Cable providers varying their pricing based on bandwidth consumption?
Ian: Its like global warming and steroids in baseball. It’s a bad idea and consumers will revolt. Joost was more interesting as a technology than a content platform. Don’t be surprised if there is actually a bandwidth surplus.

Patrick: Have to take a consumer driven approach. There are real costs, and those costs need to be paid for.

Peter Naylor, NBC: What are thoughts on ABC’s two-ad pods?
Patrick: we are in a mode of experience. Everyone right now wants to beat up pre-roll, but they are working for advertisers right now. A :30 in front of a clip is a crappy user experience. We are experimenting with overlays, pre-, mid- and post-roll, full ad experiences.

Jeff Coco, Atlas: What about costs? Advertisers feel like prices are inflated and waiting for costs to come down? Will CPMs stay in the high $20s?
Steve: too early to say right now. As we get more information, we’ll have more insight as to what audiences are worth in terms of scale and reach. Right now, though, media is just starting to understand technology. When that happens, these things will take care of themselves.

Ian: The reason people pay $1.50 per click from Google because there are results that show that it is worth it. If the results work, you can justify the costs. We need to deliver on the promise of metrics to justify the higher CPMs .The problem right now is that we are charging the high CPMs without the justification.

Patrick: The web is a great place to reach niche audiences. And if you can reach a high value audience, then advertisers should pay a premium for them.

What are the qualities of the perfect media planner?
Ian: Need someone who understands how TV is purchased. Need to be able to talk the talk and then walk it. Most people don’t have the expertise from TV, but you can give them a crash course. Media planners need to look at consumer behavior patterns and their media consumption patters. They need to be able to be flexible and nimble and take advantage of a medium first, before other people get there.

Steve: Going to see a more quantitative look from the agencies. They need to be able to justify the CPMs for what they are buying.

Patrick: The internet is just another media now. The web isn’t just people with pierced noses in the basement playing foosball. Interactive people need to understand TV.

Ian: Media buying is going to have to be platform agnostic.

Moderator: Dina Kaplan, COO, BlipTV
Deva Bronson, Digital Media Manager, KFC
Ari Paparo, Group Product Manager, Google
Adam Shlachter, Senior Partner, Group Director, Mediaedge:cia
Cheryl Kellond, Vice President, Advertising Marketplaces, Yahoo! Inc.

Dina: Will ad budgets come from TV or digital?
Adam: Its all the same money in the end. Because of the rapid change in what we can buy and where we can place ads,
it is tough to say if there’ any one thing that hsould be on a plan, and where those
budgets should come from. But so much of online video is on demand, it is hard to quantify how many people you’ll get, when, where, etc.

Adam: Macy’s has a very holistic point of view of marketing. They have online as a much bigger part of their overall media budget. Digital shouldn’t take anything away from it. It should supplement.

Dina: Three types of video content
True pro
True consumer
And now emerging category, or pro-sumer. Independent production companies.
Will they be monetized differently?

Ari: there is going to be segmentation. Huge attraction to professional, and advertisers are staying away from UGC. There will be a mixture of approaches to find and organize the safe content.

Deva, KFC: UGC can be exactly where you need to be in order to reach your audience. It can be scary, but you have to be where you can reach 14-18 year old guys.

Cheryl: Need to give a “well lit” marketplace for advertisers to choose from.

Adam S: Plenty of ways for content to be distributed. Up t oadvertisers to decide if they want to be there. Need to figure out the right way to deliver your message. Theres a time and place to deliver your messages, but we need to figure that out so we aren’t bombarding people with ads in the wrong places. You can’t hit people with ads every time they want to see an ad in order to watch a :30 clip.

Dina: What is the ideal format right now? What is working the best?
Deva- “Preroll. Super short pre-roll is definitely still the favorite.”
Best length? Deva- differs by advertiser and product. Sometimes you need a :30 if you have a really intricate message.

Dina: Can a really interesting 1:30 clip support a :30 pre-roll? Deva – yes, if it is compelling enough.

Cheryl: we need to learn what works best and optimize the user experience. There are enough different formats right now to find the optimal mix for advertisers.

Dina: What content worked well?
Cheryl: Kohler remodeling was very good. Overlay that lasted 10 seconds. When you clicked, it unlocked a full interactive experience. It used the medium really well.

Ari: Isn’t one format. Varies by site and objectives. Pre-roll with an overlay. Overlay doesn’t give enough branding on its own.

Adam: important to create an experience with value. The KFC campaign during march madness was excellent. Banners were video teasers that drive people to the KFC site with even more content. Saw lots of interaction and saw lots of people coming to the site. A nice holistic experience. Hopefully it will result in people going to the stores.

Adam: pre-roll is “scale worthy.” All depends on the client, their objectives, and who they are trying to reach.

Cheryl: Important to fund the development of the middle tier content. Help create the web as a video worthy destination.

Ari: So early in the experience. Lots of people have cancelled their land line phone service. How many people have cancelled cable?

Adam: More people will consume TV worthy content online, either to catch up or watch again. Content is becoming more portable, and as bandwidth catches up, mobile devices.

Ari: Tremor makes a bid for yahoo.

Deva would like to see holistic upfront video buy.

Balance between standardization and customization?
Ari: hard to customize things with video, so its easier to push back. But the point of standards isn’t to lock people in, it is to ease the friction in day to day operations. Plenty of opportunities on both sides.

Cheryl: Most customization comes from full sponsorship opps.
Deva: Will be a catch 22. Always going to be difficult. Of course we want rules and guidelines, but then we are going to go and ask for smething custom anyway.

What is the shift in content going on in the space? Will there be two different standards for short form, YouTube content, mid-length like news clips, and then long form?
Cheryl: consumers are consuming what is available to them. We will see consumption patterns change as there is a wider array of content available. The ad experience will tie back to who is best equipped to sell that content. TV content will have TV-like ads. Natively digital content will have something more custom.

Ari: nobody has cracked the code for moving content to your plasma.

Pricing? What are buyers looking for?
Cheryl: Yahoo sells sponsorships, so a lot of money comes from that. CPMs in regular in stream content will be based on the audience and what you can show the value of an audience to be.

If you are doing something outside of a straight media buy, do you need guaranteed impressions?
Deva: case by case basis.

Where are the dollars going to come from? How to the publishers and agencies evolve?
Ari: There’s always the problem of buying what is easy to buy, and shunning what is difficult. There isn’t one answer, and the shift will be slower. Agencies need to advise their clients on the “lean back vs lean forward” experience. During this ‘gap’ period, explore other ways to spend the money.

Cheryl: Burden is on the industry to talk to people in terms that they are comfortable. How do you explain it so it doesn’t appear to be an “either or” proposition, but rather something that works together.

CBS Interactive President Quincy Smith just wrapped up the morning keynote at the IAB Digital Video Leadership Forum, key notes:

Some CBS Stats:
#1 in engagement
#1 download on iTunes (Dexter)
#1 Facebook app (March Madness)
#1 TV channel on YouTube
Avg median age of CBS viewer on TV is 53, avg median age online is 37.

Web as a complementary platform:
- Re-broadcast
- Cross-platform / brand extension “holy grail of media”
- Original content “we’re doing it probably half as well as other companies out there…it’s small peanuts, also it’s good margins.”

Web is not cannibalistic to our audience, but from an engagement perspective it very much is.

[Regardless of location] fact is that’s our content, we have to make our content more compelling, that’s not a broadcast mentality, that’s I think our greatest challenge going forward.

Catch up vs. Cannibalization:
- Big Brother 9 - 40% of streams were not the most recent episode. We see very little cannibalization.
- 92% of MMOD viewers stramed at work. Total complementary audiences. Online mirrors TV during Championship game. Less half-time dropoff online.
- The Grammys: 15.9 million households on TV. 50 of top 100 Google trends that night were related to the Grammy’s…how do you get a chance to monetize more and more of that show going forward….take a 1 day event and turn it into a 365 day event.

On Users as Curators: YouTube user MangoFace94 put up a Letterman clip, often more views when not on the CBS YouTube channel. “When content on YouTube is successful, claim it…need to be more comfortable with users as editors”

On Original Content: When television came around it was originally staffed by people on radio putting programs on television…took a long time to see that creativity, I think we’re beginning to see that here.

On Mobile: “Mobile’s funny, it’s always two years away” Need to fix mobile in the U.S., Big change here is they’re looking for more and more content… carriers are seeing original mobile content that is really original.

Labs: Video player: “Everybody’s got an HD player, it’s interesting…this player was built by our team in about 6 and a half hours…the team, engineers, that’s why we have a Menlo Park office, it’s key.”

Where can we go with it? We can go with community, recommendations, making it more interesting, even if they’re watching two minutes of things, they’re interested, and then sharing.

Monetizing Social Networks: I think there’s got to be an effort across this industry to monetize those networks. It seems to me that putting an ad on your own profile page is the equivalent of someone walking across your room and putting a poster on your wall…teenagers won’t react well…this is one of the things we thing about all day long…

The answer has got to be thinking about it all day long…the pre-rolls and post rolls aren’t that bad but “how do we think about adding more value to the advertiser…ad is content.” There are certain areas like widgets where we don’t monetize them yet…monetization and promotion at the same time.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau today announced a set of format guidelines for in-stream ads. Drawn up by the IAB’s Digital Video Committee, the guidelines are aimed to simplify and standardize in-video ads.

While 145 industry members took part in developing the guidelines, 44 are currently in compliance with them.

Download the full guidelines here.