Network Owner’s Forum (London)

Adrian J Cotterill, Editor-in-Chief

September Networking

Earlier this year, The Screen established the Network Owners’ Forum – an exclusive but informal group if you like for those people who owned / operated “screen networks”. It was a clever way of keeping suppliers, vendors, consultants out of the room and allowing an important sector of the community to discuss issues and focus on different areas of the business one topic at a time.

The first event in June was sponsored by Cisco, the latest event (yesterday, Fri 14th September) was sponsored by EnQii (you will be hearing a lot about EnQii this year and next and there are big announcements coming on Monday and this week).

This latest event covered content and there were great presentations from Grand Visual, Dagobert, Amigo Digital, IMG and Realisation.

The first NOF attracted about 20 networks, this time around there was literally standing room only in a much bigger venue (than last time) – almost 60 folks representing 30+ UK networks. It was nice to see representation also from outside the UK – Asia Media, Neo Advertising and of course Dagobert (Paris) all came along.

Of course with 60+ attendees, The Screen is close to the 80 limit it sets for its Annual Conference (usually held at the BT tower and limit is set by the venue) and I understand that this year it is considering ramping up the NOFs and maybe not having a conference (I don’t think that is a bad thing but happy to hear your comments on this).

Both events have been held at The Hospital in Covent Garden. A great venue for these forums.

see http://www.thehospital.dreamhost.com/

Anyway, these (informal) events really do seem to have struck a chord with the industry – the next event is already being planned for the end of November and the featured topic is likely to be sound / audio / music etc.

That means that they should be able to invite speakers like Julian Treasure (the ‘sound’ expert in Europe) and add into the mix debates about canned vs live music and discuss / demonstrate technology such as whispering windows or Panphonics etc etc.


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