Forget the TV, tomorrow's screen of preference will probably be the Internet, AOL chief Jonathan Miller predicted at the influential "MIPTV featuring MILIA" trade show here.
"Video consumption is exploding on-line and on-demand is going to be the dominant way to consume content," Miller said in a keynote speech late Tuesday that must have sent shivers down the spines of the packed audience of TV execs.
Miller was Wednesday to be awarded the show's inaugural Pioneer Prize at the first-ever International Interactive Emmy Awards ceremony for AOL's innovative, high-quality live Web coverage of the 2005 global Live 8 rock concerts.
Live 8 "was the starting gun that showed that the Internet is a mass entertainment medium, very different from TV, because people could watch any of the concerts going on around the world," Miller told the conference.
The sheer numbers of people that chose to participate in the huge July 2 rock event rather than watch it on the television was staggering.
That showed that TV over the Internet has the potential to be a "mass entertainment medium", Miller stressed.
Not only was AOL delivering 175,000 simultaneously high-quality video streams to users in 160 countries at the height of the concerts, but there were also 90 million video streams of concert footage watched by AOL users in the six weeks after the event.
Internet users are also showing that they want to consume and watch entertainment in different ways today, Miller pointed out.
Live 8 triggered almost 15,000 Internet blogs on AOL between users watching the concerts and wanting to exchange their comments and feelings with others around the globe.
"The industry is in the middle of a truly massive change," Miller emphasised, pointing out that video consumption is exploding around the world.
"We will see video-on-demand" (VOD) becoming dominant in the next few years," he said, adding on-demand programming is clearly what viewers want.
The revolution starting to sweep the audio-visual entertainment industry is pushing users firmly into the driving seat, Miller believes.
The amount of different forms of media being consumed will all increase. "Prime (TV) time will morph into My Time" and everything will go portable, were Miller's predictions.
Owned by entertainment giant Time Warner, AOL has been actively moving into the video space since its Live 8 scoop with its recently launched In2TV entertainment service.
Miller demonstrated that AOL is successfully increasing the video quality of the massive Time Warner video library that it recently put online to its users.
That is good news for users but not so great for the TV world, which had been hoping the current poorer viewing experience on the Internet might persuade viewers to stay with more traditional screens.
Big entertainment companies attending the show will also not be reassured to learn that AOL is financing its major foray into TV though advertising, the very heart blood of the TV industry.
Miller and reality TV guru Mark Burnett, the brains behind smash hit reality formats as "The Apprentice" and "Survivor" revealed that companies are lining up to switch their advertising budgets into the entertainment offerings of Internet giants like AOL.
Burnett has linked up with AOL to produce a new Internet-based entertainment format "Gold Rush", which will be launched shortly.
Set in the United States, "Gold Rush" will start off with trucks - ad-sponsored of course - driving away from Fort Knox laden with gold that will be buried at secret locations around the country.
AOL players will have to try and locate the million-dollar stashes through clues left on the Internet.
So there will be a pot of gold at the end of the TV rainbow. The burning question is who will win it!.
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