As evening began at the NewTeeVee conference in San Francisco today, some big money movers weighed in on the video industry. Allen Delattre, managing director of Electronics and High Technology at Accenture, moderated a panel discussion featuring a number of heavy-hitters from the venture capital community. They included:

• Bill Gurley, general partner, Benchmark Capital
• Chris Hollenbeck, managing director,Granite Ventures
• David Horowitz, managing director, Comcast Interactive Capital
• Dan Beldy, managing director, Steamboat Ventures

The last event of the day was one of the most interesting, and the VCs were mostly positive about the prospects for online video.

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PBS isn’t just about Antique Roadshow anymore, PBS Interactive SVP Jason Seiken told the audience at our NewTeeVee Live conference today. But he’s the first to admit that PBS isn’t really the hippest brand around. The average age of PBS television viewers is “pushing 60,” he estimated. Consider that countless Elmo-addicted toddlers actually bring that age way down, and you start to understand that PBS has a bit of an age issue.

That’s a problem that the network wants to solve with an online video platform it launched this spring, and Seiken was happy to report that these efforts are starting to pay off. Forty-eight percent of PBS Video visitors are under 35, he said, and the youngsters seem to dig PBS programming as well. Viewers tune into a stream for 26 minutes on average, which is far longer than many commercial platforms. PBS is clocking 12 million uniques a month for its video site, and video views are growing 80 percent month to month.

One of the more interesting aspects of the site is that it’s also a content repository for PBS’ 357 local member stations. These stations can take shows like Frontline or NOVA and combine them on their own sites with small-town news and other local programming. PBS wants to make this relationship a two-way street next year with the launch of the site’s next version, which will automatically syndicate locally produced content and present it to a national audience.

So what’s the secret of the site’s success? Failure, actually. Seiken said that performance reviews at PBS Interactive now track the times an employee failed at their job, with the goal being not to punish, but to reward failed experiments. “Our engineers actually really love this,” said Seiken.

Roku in the next few weeks will roll out a new marketplace for video channels, enabling users to pick and choose the content that appears on the home screen of their broadband-connected set-top boxes. At NewTeeVee Live, Roku vice president of marketing Chuck Seiber showed off a preview of the new Roku user interface, which included an icon for the device’s new Channel Store and icons for video channels from new content partners Revision 3 and Blip.tv. Seiber said that the company is also adding channels for unnamed photo-sharing and video-sharing services.

The marketplace is one part of Roku’s plan to create an open platform on which any content provider could create their own video channels with a software development kit that the company freely released earlier this year. “We’re trying to turn our product into an open platform, and giving our users all the choice they could want,” Seiber said. Read more of this story

CNN and Facebook’s live coverage of the Obama inauguration was hailed by many, including our own Liz Gannes, as the future of social TV. CNN Worldwide VP of Digital Marketing and Development Andy Mitchell joined Randi Zuckerberg from Facebook’s marketing arm onstage at NewTeeVee Live in San Francisco today to share a little bit of the backstory of this cooperation.

The two tried to add social context to live news events during the months leading up to the election with an idea called “debating the debates.” Facebook had just launched its Facebook Connect platform, and both companies tried to have users watch the debates and exchange arguments online, signaling their allegiance for either candidate with a badge on their Facebook profile. Except that it didn’t work. Facebook Connect wasn’t ready to scale.

Then, the day after the election, Zuckerberg was approached by two engineers who told her about their election night experience. They had watched Obama win state after state via a live-stream in one window on their computer screens, and monitored their Facebook status updates in another window right next to it. The folks at Facebook immediately fell in love with the idea and sent a screenshot over to CNN. “We thought: Why isn’t everybody doing is? Let’s make it happen,” recalled Mitchell.

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Televisions are going to transition from having nice pictures to becoming smart, app-filled, interactive machines, Matthew McRae, VP and GM of Advanced Technology Products at Vizio, said at the NewTeeVee Live conference today in San Francisco. Vizio plans to ship a connected television in January of next year. The company has learned from mistakes made by previous broadband television makers, McRae said, and so has focused on creating a good user experience and a developer ecosystem akin to Apple’s App store.

To satisfy that developer ecosystem, the Vizio television will use Flash and the Yahoo Widget platform to provide an easy way for programmers to build applications for the television. Vizio will integrate apps into the TV that can trump all things happening on the television, so tweets could interrupt a movie if the user wants them to, or an email could come through even when you are playing a game. Read more of this story

At our NewTeeVee Live conference today, Om kicked off his fireside chat with Quincy Smith, CEO of CBS Interactive, saying: “This is the official exit interview of Quincy Smith leaving CBS interactive. Somebody better take some notes.” OK, here goes!

While Smith didn’t give us much of an “exit interview,” he did give us some insight into what CBS and other TV networks are looking for in the push to get content onto the web. In reviewing the last three years at CBS Interactive — and a look ahead at the next three — Smith gave his “one man’s opinion” that “the future of TV is video. It doesn’t matter what screen you watch Ghost Whisperer on on Friday, Saturday, or Sunday.” What matters, instead, is that it’s viewed, those views are counted, and the people involved in making and distributing that content get paid. “That’s the next focus of the next few years,” he said. “It has to work for the user, and it has to count.” Read more of this story

Despite standardization happening around HTML 5, the CTO of Adobe Systems told audiences at NewTeeVee Live that members of the W3C are just catching up to what his company has already developed. “It’s good to see innovation happening in HTML,” said Kevin Lynch. “There hasn’t been much happening in HTML in about 10 years. But a lot of that is trying to do what Flash already does today.”

The development of a video tag, which would enable the rendering of video in a browser without a plugin is being touted as one advantage of the new HTML standard. Some suggest that the tag could serve as a potential threat to Flash, Silverlight and other cross-browser, cross-platform video technologies. But Lynch said there are still issues with the standardization process, including the inability of W3C members to decide on a standard codec.

“Standardization already works around the video tag, but the format of video and codecs — those are not part of the HTML standard,” Lynch said. “What that means is that it’s up to browser manufacturers to decide on the video codec, which I see is a continuing advantage of Flash.” Read more of this story

At our NewTeeVee Live conference this morning, Comcast Interactive Media President Amy Banse narrowed down the time line for how soon customers will be able to use On-Demand Online service, which will allow subscribers to access premium cable content on their PCs. The verdict? Sometime before Hanukkah.

“If you were to present On-Demand Online to me as a gift, would it be a Hanukkah gift, or a Christmas gift, or maybe a Kwanzaa gift?” NewTeeVee co-editor Chris Albrecht asked.

“I can’t be very specific, but I can say that we will be able to accommodate all religious groups,” Banse replied. Later, she reiterated that the service would become available to subscribers sometime in early December, before the Jewish holiday begins on Dec. 11. Read more of this story