LIVE Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes At Goldman (TWX)

By Peter Kafka

Jeff is the lunchtime interivewee at day 1 of Goldman’s annual media marathon. He tends to be good at not answering questions, but we’re hoping for the best.

Softball question: Tell us the most important things about your business…

Attractive trends in media business, advantageous for us. If you think of change in the world going to digital, all the excitement about that, long tail, etc. Attention of users, people and of money is going to the big, branded, popular stuff. The old 80/20 rule is going to the 90/10. Giant brands and hits are more important than ever. What’s suffering or flattening out are the things in the middle. You can personalize stuff to your tastes, or you can see the big mass-market hits. The things you used to watch because it was there, because it was something to see, are not doing as well. Money moving to big hits on TV, cable, and even in magazines.

Economics of transition to digital are supposed to be bad for big media, though, right? No. It’s an

Advertising is a different story: Trading tight, control, limited inventory vs. the Web? Ad market getting more efficient, and that can’t be bad. The old joke, I waste 50% of my ad budget… that could not continue and that’s a good thing for advertisers and that’s good for us.

What about piracy, though? That can’t be good. Piracy is flattening out. File-sharing is flattening out. But this piracy question has been around for quite a while. And it’s different for film and TV than it for music. Napster started killing music right away. But there’s been P2P movies for a long time, and market still doing well. Real piracy problems are bootleggers selling discs, specifically in Asia. But even that’s flattening out. Countries across the world want protected IP, so they can particpate in sale of that IP. And people want good versions of TV shows and movies, not lousy camcorder versions.

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