Internet and old media confab seeks peace not war

By Kenneth Li

SUN VALLEY, Idaho (Reuters) - Cooperation, not mutual destruction, is a major theme at this year's summer gathering of the media and technology elite in Sun Valley.

And the Scandinavian founders of new online video service Joost -- Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom -- perhaps embody this new spirit best.

Friis and Zennstrom, who once terrified the media industry with file-sharing technology company KaZaa, and then the telecommunications industry with Skype, are first-time guests at Allen & Co's 25th annual media conference in Idaho.

But Joost has distinguished itself by seeking partnerships with content owners before making any of their shows available. The company landed its first big distribution deal with Viacom Inc just days before Viacom sued Google Inc. and its video-sharing site YouTube for copyright infringement.

Joost does not let its users upload videos, unlike last year's media darling, YouTube, to the relief of media industry executives assembled here.

"The time in the market is good for traditional media and digital to come together," Mike Volpi, Joost's newly appointed chief executive, told Reuters. "Technology has matured to a point where rights can be protected properly."

The former senior Cisco Systems Inc executive added: "That gives a lot of comfort to media executives worried about their content."

Volpi said he wanted to find new partners at the conference and connect with prospective advertisers.

The Joost trio replaces last year's big attraction, YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley, whose wild popularity both terrified and attracted big media.

Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt and co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who are on the guest list, had not arrived by Wednesday afternoon.

The conference, conceived in the early 1980s by banker Herbert Allen as a week-long mingling of Hollywood's top power brokers, kicked off with a morning session led by Time Warner Inc. Chief Executive Richard Parsons.

It was followed by a session on private equity financing.

"I understood about half of it," Blake Krikorian, Sling Media's chief executive, joked about the private equity panel.

He returns this year to mingle with media and tech moguls and to show off a near-final version of a new technology that lets viewers save and send clips of television shows.

"It's amazing how quickly the industry has started to see the power of what these things can do," he told Reuters.