Industry players remain at odds with each other over the commercial potential of digital media, as was apparent at the Playback Innovations Forum on Tuesday.

‘It’s in the ether, but people don’t really care about it. The broadcasters don’t want to hear about it,’ said Chris Coelen, CEO of prodco RDF USA, in an onstage interview at the Toronto industry event, organized by Playback.

‘Give me an example of one show that benefited in the ratings from its online component. If there was some way to make money out of it, that would be different,’ continued Coelen, whose company’s credits include reality shows Don’t Forget the Lyrics, Wife Swap and The Two Coreys.

This stood in contrast to the outlook in the day’s final session on the digital marketplace. Kate Hanley, president of consultancy Digital Theory, spoke of the potential of do-it-yourself online syndication, especially for lifestyle content.

She gave the example of Studio One Networks’ multimedia pet site The Dog Daily, sponsored by Iams pet food. New York-based Studio One gives the Dog Daily content to the websites of U.S. network affiliates for free, provided its sponsor gets good placement. The prodco says it now has 500 partner websites.

Meanwhile, Steve Billinger, CBC’s executive director, digital programming and business development, pointed to the Ceeb’s extensive online video ventures on cbc.ca and its own YouTube channel, and how the content gets picked up by other YouTube channels and is ultimately seen by hundreds of thousands of viewers.

A recent example is the gory Evil-Dead-meets-West-Side-Story short satire Macs vs PCs, produced by The Accident Factory, which has been picked up by the Goodie Bag channel, where it has logged more than 200,000 views in just over one week.

‘There’s no chance in hell that would end up on the network at any time of the day,’ Billinger said, although he emphasized that online is a great place for edgy content and emerging talent. He pointed out that last year CBC had $100,000 in development money for digital programming, yielding 20 to 25 such projects.

The rest of the half-day event was spent hearing from those who create content for broadcast, starting with James Manos, Jr., who created the acclaimed Showtime serial-killer drama Dexter. He ran the show during its inaugural season before leaving over creative differences with what he characterized as newbie broadcast executives.

Asked what he would do differently in the future, Manos responded, ‘I will never again work with people who have not already been in showbiz.’

The picture was far rosier from Robin Veith, writer on Mad Men, who participated with fellow scribes Tassie Cameron and Tom Chehak in a panel on writing. Veith said that her show had only received three or four of those infamous ‘notes’ from its broadcaster, AMC.

Cameron, showrunner on the CTV/CBS hit cop drama Flashpoint, added that her experience had also been positive.

‘The networks were in sync [with one another] — almost in sync,’ she said. ‘We spent a couple of months making sure everyone was on board. The notes were very good and very helpful.’

While the Canadian team has delivered an extremely rare ratings hit south of the border, the makers of Mad Men, which airs here on A, could at least console themselves in the show’s lavish critical kudos and half a dozen Emmy Awards.

‘Our ratings are very small,’ Veith conceded. ‘We just tell the stories we want to tell.’

The veteran Chehak, whose credits extend back to WKRP in Cincinnati and who now works on The Listener, said that buzz and acclaim should also be considered when qualifying a show as a ‘hit.’ He acknowledged, however, that when your show airs on primetime network TV, as Shaftesbury Films’ The Listener will on NBC and CTV, other considerations come into play.

‘I’m a writer-for-hire,’ he said. ‘I work for networks that have a demographic. You don’t want that to override your creativity. We want to tell a good story. But you have to be aware of it.’