Sam Blackman, CEO of Elemental Technologies: Unlike other forms of media the Internet will not destroy the pay-TV model. Consumers want a high-quality video experience across platforms (mobile device, laptop, monitor). Consumers will demand quality and ease of use.

Doug Knopper, co-founder and co-CEO of FreeWheel: Consumers are getting closer to the type of content experience they want when it comes to video. Winners will be twofold in this world: those that create compelling content and those who can figure out how to build a business model around that content. Allowing the media companies the control and flexibility to manage and monetize their content will help content creators survive this transition.

Avner Ronen CEO and co-founder of Boxee: It may be the year of TV Everywhere, but the future is Internet Everywhere.   Storytelling will change. There are no limits on the length of a story, and viewers will be able to direct their viewing experience. One can also run parallel stories within a show. By 2015, there will be an Internet show that will be bigger than a TV show today. You will have more Apple subscribers than Comcast subscribe. People will watch more video and they will pay more for it.

Jeremy Reed, SVP Content and Editorial, Demand Media: Next big thing is trying to understand there is an imbalance between supply, need and cost. You need to understand the ROI before you greenlight content. Is it quality and relevant to a community? And increasing the competitiveness — in a search world is a social world.

And perhaps the MOST controversial was James Spare’s demo of “my TV is watching me” (watch demo close to the end of the video). Everyone screamed Big Brother!

James Spare, president and CEO of Canesta: We’ve invented technology that can track objects in 3-D space. The market for 3-D is huge. A new market is 3-D input, which can, for example, have a screen detect your motion and then be able to interact in a 3-D environment. (Shows video of TV watcher moving channels with hand wave gestures). This will give rise to a whole set of new capabilities.

So here’s where I step back and ask: was the success of Paranormal an anomaly in the Blair Witch manner, or is it in fact the beginning of a wave? While I get that this film is probably scarier in a “real” way than say, Saw VI, that paragon of torture porn which it trounced at the box office, I have to wonder if the convergence of all these phenomena at the same moment spells more than just “great content”. There are a lot of “firsts” here: certainly the use of Eventful.com, which until now has been used primarily for live music events; there’s the suddenly powerful force of immediate social media like twitter and of course, there’s the sheer desperation of the studios to make a buck, any buck in the midst of a funding crisis akin to none other in recent Hollywood history.

Assuming that none of these factors are changing anytime soon – ie, access to social media, immediate audience responses (that can make or break opening weekends), and a cashflow issue not likely to be resolved so fast, will models like this soon become ubiquitous? It seems inevitable to me. I’ve always been dubious of Hollywood test screenings and the magic scores that determine whether a movie gets released or not, or if characters or endings should be changed. It seems that at a certain price-point (an din this case rather extremely low), these studio people should be delighted to have ways of gauging audiences interest in their films. It’s such a low-risk strategy that I wonder if Paranormal’s success will send a message to the powers that be.

But of course, the million dollar question remains unanswered: is this a marketing/distribution strategy that will work for a film without this sort of draw – the horror, the midnight screenings, the sheer “viral-ness” of it? And will there emerge other platforms, such as Eventful.com, which can perhaps draw different groups of people to an event they can feel they have participated in bringing to the rest of the public? Certainly, there are some indie film communities springing up around various audience engagement concepts. And I wonder how those will shake out in the months and year to come – since that is really how quickly I believe we will see vast transformation in the world of audience-content relationships.

So as a person who creates entertainment, I evaluate these games both in terms of what they mean for changing business models in an era of social media and what it says about people’s behavior, their tastes and interests. I am sure like all things in pop culture, people will get bored and Mafia Wars will give way to Yakuza wars, which will give way to Compton wars which will give way to Alien wars and on and on. You get my drift – these guys aren’t necessarily looking to create “art” per se – they are through and through commercial entertainers. But they are capturing audiences, something like 61 million sets in the case of Farmville, certainly nothing to sneeze at.

Hollywood has always prided itself on being the arbiter of popular tastes, having dipped their toes into every kind of mainstream entertainment, until this point. The innovation and creativity that goes into building these social games is coming from elsewhere. The stories are not conventional but I would argue, still narrative in their own way. Interactivity and social connections drive these forms of entertainment. And while Mafia Wars may not make as indelible a mark on contemporary culture as say The Godfather, the audiences ability to share these gaming experiences with each other and connect in a completely non-linear manner is clearly driving the popularity. And this is practically the cavemen days of the technology. I think as social gaming evolves both in the way it drives revenue for social sites like Facebook, we will see increasingly more interested and sophisticated narratives emerging.