So, Banff. Seemed to me the festival this year was hijacked by the new media types.

Oh, excuse me, apparently we’re not allowed to call it that anymore. ‘New media is dead. New media has become media,’ said Mark Greenspan, director of digital media for Achilles, the folks who organize both the Banff World Television Festival and nextMEDIA, the digital media confab that immediately preceded it. ‘It’s all one and the same.’

Just as we’re getting our heads around it (never mind trying to break even at it), these young upstarts are informing us that they’re mainstream. And they are – if you’re under, say, 20.

This may seem obvious, but it was interesting to observe a very clear correlation between the age of the speaker at the fest and his or her astuteness or fogey-ness regarding digital media.

Joost’s Stacey Seltzer probably gets carded all the time. At the other end, when asked what he thought of handheld technology, George Russell, the very much of-age deputy chairman of ITV, said, ‘I have trouble turning it on.’ The audience chuckled. Commiserating or marvelling, it was hard to tell. My guess would be the older ones were laughing with him, the younger ones at him.

There seems to be a Betamax/VHS-style battle going on with regards to digital media, winner take all.

‘Now’s the time to put your stake in the ground and say, ‘This is going to be the strategy I’m going to follow,’ and to experiment and move with that strategy,’ said Greenspan.

As the CBC’s Dan Hill laid out so eloquently at nextMEDIA, the trajectory goes from the ad-supported user-generated fare of YouTube and MySpace through to SPUG (semi-professional user-generated) content like lonelygirl15, to the professional, also ad-supported Joost and Heavy.com.

Then we move into the realm in which the user pays – via rental, subscription or purchase through sites such as Movielink and Azureus (Vuze.com), HBO On Demand and iTunes.

That is one fast-moving train to hop onto, and while broadcasters may be many things, fast, typically, isn’t one of them. (New NBC co-chair Ben Silverman said it’s like turning a tanker around. It takes miles.)

A green paper commissioned by the Banff fest, Canadian Heritage and the Canadian Television Fund on the state of the industry indicated, among other things, that traditional broadcasters are dragging their feet when it comes to streaming their fare online.

Unfair, says Alliance Atlantis SVP Claude Galipeau. ‘Judging Canadian broadcasters only on the basis of their ability to clear U.S. shows for distribution online in Canada displays a typical Canadian colonial attitude with regards to its own media space,’ he said. ‘It’s unfortunate and also inaccurate in regards to where broadcasters are moving.’

Clearly, everyone has been thinking hard about the issue, and they’re working on it, collaborating on it like the pack of roving alley cats that they are.

The CBC and Alliance Atlantis have garnered the most respect from digital media delegates for being ‘with it,’ (if not necessarily ‘on it.’) CTV is making an earnest effort – while you won’t find them streaming Desperate Housewives, they have interesting Corner Gas and Degrassi sites. And dragging up the rear, in part due to its online division being packaged with its income trust, was CanWest Global.

I say ‘was’ because that’s about to change. The income trust is history, and with their recent CH-rebranding deal with E! network, Global brass now have all of the expertise of U.S. cable powerhouse Comcast at their fingertips. Comcast’s E! networks have been online since 1997, have a web editorial department of 80 staffers, survived the dot-com debacles of the late 1990s, and have remained advertiser-supported – making money – the whole time.

In September, E! will leapfrog into Canada on five platforms – TV, VOD, online, mobile, and satellite radio. Sure, the Canadians have to maintain editorial control for regulatory reasons, but you can bet the experts at E! are on their speed dial. Add to that the fact that provided the CRTC gives its thumbs-up, Alliance Atlantis will be joining the fold as well, and CanWest will suddenly become a force to contend with.

And then there’s Rogers, recently tapped as our newest conventional broadcaster with its purchase of the five Citytv channels that the CRTC wouldn’t let CTV have. Rogers is an interesting one. It’s not going to just make use of multiple platforms – it actually owns them. Rogers has been particularly aggressive in the VOD market, especially last year in inking a groundbreaking deal with CBS to offer episodes of Survivor, thereby sidestepping CanWest entirely in the transaction.

For those of us who do the festival and market circuit, these conversations may sound drearily similar from year to year, but the fact is that they do evolve. And as they do, it is clear that while digital media is something of a rookie in the TV lexicon, to ignore it is to hasten your obsolescence. And at Banff, most everyone seemed to get that.

‘We’re in a much better, smarter place to be able to deal with [digital media],’ says Greenspan. ‘We’ve learned lessons by watching the music industry, and by watching the last dot-com bubble. People on the whole are more savvy and experienced, and the risks they’re taking are calculated risks.’

I will rely on hindsight to let us know if that really was the case.