Ralph de la Vega, group president of AT&T, keynoted NewTeeVee Live and told us he sees a big opportunity in AT&T partnering with “entrepreneurial production of content.” To that extent, the company recently signed a deal with ON Networks to show the startup’s content on its U-verse IPTV and HomeZone satellite services. De la Vega said AT&T is looking to make more deals:

“We’re not interested in just licensing established content. Where I think the business is going is with those content providers that I would call non-traditional talent… There is a huge pool of talent that is waiting to get on prime time that can’t make it. We have 120 million customers between our various properties that are looking for that talent.”

Then later, upon questioning from Om, de la Vega admitted he himself doesn’t watch such content: “I don’t go to the videoblogs,” he said. But de la Vega thinks his customers may be interested in niche programming, provided it is licensed onto all platforms, available in high definition, and high quality.

Want to see the speech and Q&A for yourself? Here it is on video, in two parts. De la Vega starts at about 18:30 into the first clip and continues through to the end of the second.

For more coverage of the speech, which included a number of demos of yet-to-be-released AT&T Labs products, such as live streaming video from handsets to TVs, see also:

• our NewTeeVee liveblogged post
• HipMojo
• The Tech Chronicles at SFGate
• The Kelsey Group Blog
• Spark Minute
• last100