By Sebastian Becker, [tbb\*] thebrainbehind

Some experts might have been quite surprised by the spectacular sale of Youtube. 1.65 Billion US-Dollars! A high price if you think about the real assets attached. Something Patrick Walker, Head of Content Partnerships with Google, London seemed to be not worried about at all. Joining me on one of the panels at the MIPCOM in Cannes, he talked about some relevant contracts with major music labels and the introduction of focus groups on Pre- and Postroll Ads. But what Google really bought was neither a well developed technology platform nor a fancy designed service. It was simply a huge number of loyal users.

Customer retention will become probably one of the biggest challenges over the next years in this market - Irrespective of the platform. Doesn't matter if we talk about PayTV, Cable, Telco, IPTV, Mobile or Web 2.0, it all boils down to the number and loyalty of users.

After sorting out all technological issues, main attention need to be paid to the quality of services. To ensure a return on investment for marketing activities and technology there is only one way to succeed - providing best practice to elate an relevant number of active users.

Excellence is what the initiators of such new business models are looking for every day. Finding best practice solutions or at least some very promising start-ups is a good advice. See for example Zeec - this platform is probably more elaborated than its competitor Youtube. In2movies is a very good example for how to run VoD platforms and Brightcove will be more successful in selling independent video content than most of the cable networks and streaming services out there.

So, what about operating excellence? Why does Comcast manages to generate more than 3 billion VoD streams in three years whereas T-Online manages to get 'only' 120.000 a month? Why are interactive TV ads that successful? And what is the secret of PVRs, EPGs and new sophisticated TV channels?

thebrainbehind [tbb\*] and its network of international experts will give everybody interested in this market the chance to find answers on all these questions. On December 1st, our team is going to host the annual B2B conference 'TV Outlook 2007' in Munich. We are please to welcome a high quality line-up of experts from leading media markets around the globe. Please see the programme and further information on this event on www.thebrainbehind.com.

To sum it up, interactive and on-demand revenues might still be a smaller part of the business plans of most channels and platforms, but this segment is definitely a growing one.

So, even though one or two percent of growth in the core business might still be more significant than innovation in the interactive department, but in the future diversification of revenue streams might make the difference between gains and losses. We have to keep in mind that innovation is quite easy for web-based platforms like Google and Youtube compared to changing the soft- or hardware environment of broadcast platforms. That's the reason why it might be a fatal error not to embrace innovation in the TV and broadband markets right now.