“Level Who?” Digital Distribution’s Mysterious Middlemen

The following is a short piece I wrote up about Net Worth: Media Distribution in the Digital Era, a one-day conference sponsored by the Carsey-Wolf Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The event brought together media industry workers and scholars from a variety of disciplines for a series of 90-minute panels on the challenges and opportunities posed by digital distribution. Having attended a number of less than successful industry/academia conferences in the past, I was really impressed by the quality of the discussions that took place at Net Worth. I credit that to the organizers (UCSB’s Joshua Green, Jen Holt, and Michael Curtin), who did a fantastic job of composing the panel topics and lineups.

At Net Worth I participated on a panel titled Technologies of Digital Distribution. I was joined on the stage of the Pollack Theater that day by moderator Anna Everett (UCSB) and panelists Horst Stipp (The Advertising Research Foundation), Kelly Summers (Walt Disney Studios), Randy Shaffer (Microsoft Corp.), Joseph Turow (University of Pennsylvania), and Phillip Napoli (Fordham University). Our panel was very lively, and gave me a lot to think about. This piece represents a preliminary attempt to organize some of those thoughts.