New York -- Despite it being what she called one of the darkest periods for media in recent history, Bank of America Merrill Lynch senior media and entertainment analyst Jessica Reif said there is still plenty of room for growth for cable operators at the NextTV Summit here.

While the video segment has been pressured by intense competition from over-the-top and subscription video and demand players -- cable video penetration is around 30% of homes passed, she said -- there is still ample room to grow the broadband segment.

There is no doubt that the video landscape has changed dramatically -- Reif said we are in probably the “bleakest period for media we’ve ever seen.” But broadband penetration is still under 50% and there are opportunities in wireless and commercial services.

Scale, however, remains critical, as is evident by recent mega deals in the programming space -- AT&T’s purchase of Time Warner and The Walt Disney Co.’s buy of 21st Century Fox assets.

Reif said the latter deal -- Disney Fox -- shook the industry in that it showed that one of the industry’s founders -- Fox executive chairman Rupert Murdoch -- saw the need for a dramatic transformation of his business from linear entertainment to live sports and news.

“He saw the handwriting on the wall. That’s why everyone went into internal introspection -- do we buy or do we sell?” Reif said.

Scale doesn’t just mean increasing your domestic bulk. Reif added that today’s media giant needs to be global, adding that she believes Comcast would have been “marginalized” had it not won the auction for British satellite giant Sky.

“You need to be able to deliver content in many, many ways,” Reif said.

While Netflix appears to be the model every programmer is chasing, Disney’s 2019 direct-to-consumer offering -- chock full of Disney, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars and Fox content -- and other DTC offerings to come could chip away at that dominance if that content were to be removed from the SVOD pioneer, Reif said.

New York – Short-form video clips can still drive viewership on OTT platforms, according to a panel session Wednesday (Oct. 18) at the Multichannel News/B&C NextTV Summit. part of NYC Television Week. And though there is no magic number as to how long an audience will pay attention to the videos, 15 minutes seems to be the limit.

Read More: Complete Coverage of #NYCTVWK

Comcast Watchable VP of programming Craig Parks said that while he has always chafed at the term – "short-form" implies “less than” to him – he added that it is increasingly valuable. But the length of the clips, he said, depends on what the content is being used for.

“If you’re cooking a pizza, it doesn’t need to be any longer than it is,” Parks said at the panel session entitled “The Transformation of Storytelling in the OTT/ On-Demand Era. “There is no magic number, no magic length.”

But he said that after producing 18 short-form series, he believes anything past 15 minutes might be pushing the envelope.

Read More: Complete Coverage of the Next TV Summit

While short-form shows may get short shrift compared with traditional 30-minute and 60-mnute series, panel members said the two can work together. At A+E Networks, Paul Cabana, executive vice president and head of History & Biography digital, said the network is bringing back the Biography channel brand, but only through one-to-two minute clips. At that length, he said, they can relaunch the Biography brand on any one of A+E Networks’s channels.

Gunpowder and Sky founder and CEO Van Toffler, a veteran of linear TV (he spent more than a generation at Viacom) said short-form video can lead to longer form projects, but that is a rarity. Short-form also has value in determining if a longer form show will resonate with the audience.

Toffler said his company is currently shooting a 7-minute pilot for a proposed 30-minute show. Once that pilot is finished, Gunpowder and Sky can put it online to determine how a young audience will react to it.

“I love the idea of down and dirty, fast and cheap pilots you put up on your own sites and learn from your experiments,” Toffler said.

The panelists saw mobile video as being the biggest disruptor to their businesses, but that too can be a perfect vehicle for short-form content.

“Let’s do more for mobile," said Revry CEO and co-founder Damian Pelliccione. “I don’t have any competitors in this space because we get to set the bar.”

Los Angeles -- Thanks to a move away from monolithic, “big iron” infrastructure to much more agile, “virtualized” systems, programmers such as Disney/ABC Television Group will soon be in position to spin up new types of channels that could be made available for a few hours, a few days, a few weeks, or perhaps just around specific events.

That was one of the potential use-case examples cited here Thursday at the Multichannel News/B&C NextTV Summit during a case study about “Project Columbus,” an initiative that Disney/ABC and Imagine Communications kicked off in 2011 to virtualize the programmer’s workflow, master control and playback operations, positioning the broadcaster to support a new IP-based world that now includes streaming players, gaming consoles, tablets and smartphones and is, more generally, altering the way viewers are consuming video. 

The initiative, which is global in scope, aimed to “virtualize and get away from big iron broadcast centers that don’t have the ability to scale,” Vince Roberts (pictured above, at right), Disney/ABC Television Group’s EVP, global operations and chief technology officer, said. 

Project Columbus, which automates workflows and builds virtualized environments that live in private, hosted clouds “gives us scale, and the ability to move our markets,” he said.

The approach, which allows programmers to run and manage key functions in software on commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) equipment, is gaining momentum among several broadcasters, noted Imagine CTO Steve Reynolds (pictured above, center), as they look for ways to launch more channels at a more rapid clip, and to enter new markets and geographies. It will also put them in a better position to introduce new encoding platforms that will be used for 4K/Ultra HD.

The move to virtualized systems, he told session moderator, Broadcasting & Cable contributing editor George Winslow (pictured, far left), will enable programmers to stand up new channels on an “an ad hoc, on-demand basis.”

“We have to be in a virtual environment to take advantage of an industry on the consumer side that is changing so rapidly,” Roberts said. “I can spin up a workflow in minutes, not months.”

“This is not a science experiment,” he added, noting that the project is being rolled out to support Disney Channel and an initial eight ABC feeds later this year.

As for why the timing is right to move away from hardware-based functions, Reynolds said Moore’s Law has finally caught up with what will be demanded of these new virtualized systems. “We’re now at a place that this is finally feasible,” he said.

Roberts acknowledged that the shift also required a cultural shift and much discussion to get everyone on board with the program.

Whether you’re converting to the cloud or changing your business structure, “Everybody needs to buy in,” Roberts said, noting that it also requires “champions deep in the organization” – people he referred to as “change agents.”

“It’s not an insignificant effort,” he said.