The Hilton hotel in mid-town Manhatten is *the* place to be this week if you're in the online ad business, and that's where you'll find myself and the ever-charming Chris Law. Chris and I caught the 6:20am flight from Toronto to NYC this morning, and went straight from La Guardia to the conference. Up since 3:30am and running on little more than a coffee and bagel, we dropped off our bags with the hotelier and proceded to the ad:tech registration booths. All hooked up with the requisite tote-bag (for all the brochures, product-sheets and kotchkas we would be collecting), we headed straight for the 9am keynote.

This morning's keynote topic was online video. The panel was made up of some pretty serious industry heavyweights: Paul Sagan, President and CEO of Akamai; Suzie Reider, CMO of YouTube; Jonathan Klein, President of CNN US; and Sarah Fay, President of Isobar Communications. Some of the key issues that were discussed included Measurement and Reporting, Billing and Rates, Products and Inventory, In-stream vs In-banner, and of course, Content Distribution and Copyright. A couple other topics that were discussed included Consumer Control: how much is too much? is there any way to manage the risks associated with relinquishing control of your Brand? The other thing that came up of interest was the growing need to re-evaluate how networks and sites are built, in order to be able to handle the bandwidth demands of millions of simultaneous video streams. It's a lot like the old days when a site's success could ultimately result in it's downfall: too many simultaneous connections, and the end-user experience suffers. How do we prepare for a future of video-on-demand at a scale that makes today's traffic look like a trickle? We're in for some interesting times ahead, no doubt!

Following the keynote, we decided to cruise the exhibition hall - or should I say halls. This conference is massive, with over 3 floors of exhibitors showing off their stuff, and of course, giving away free stuff. I'll provide a more in-depth post on some of the cool companies and products we checked out, but right now, it's time to head back into the fray. I'm hell-bent on collecting enough free pens and sticky-pads to last me till next year.

Till then...