Industry players remain at odds with each other over the commercial potential of digital media, as was apparent at the Playback Innovations Forum on Oct. 28.

‘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 is also available on the Goodie Bag channel, where it had logged more than 200,000 views in just over one week.

‘There’s no way that would be on main network programming,’ Billinger said after the event, refering to the piece’s gruesomeness, format and length (six and a half minutes). But he emphasized that online is a great place for edgy content and emerging talent, and said that last year CBC had $100,000 in development money for such webisodes.