Last week Google and the ANA presented an impressive display of content and headliners in a wide-ranging discussion of, well, "tv and everything video" (the official name of the forum). I won't review the full day of events -- which was sold out -- but several observations are worth noting.

Content ruled again this past week, as AOL shelled out a cool $315 million for the Huffington Post and Rupert Murdoch launched The Daily. What does this mean for those of us in the traditional TV business?

CIMM's Set-Top Box Data Lexicon is a compilation of terms and definitions associated with Set-Top Box data and its measurement. This Word-A-Week column highlights a term and definition from the CIMM Lexicon. It is our hope that this will help in creating a common language for Set-Top Box data usage and help expedite the roll-out of the data for its many industry applications. We tend to use the term "Set-Top Box data" as the generic data term for all the data available in the hardware. But this is not as accurate a term as Return Path Data (also known as …

The announcement of Keith Olbermann's signing with Current TV this week unfortunately made me think about the world of Infotainment, or OpinionNews, or whatever you want to call it. Now, it's easy to dismiss such a move by Olbermann as one of either hubris or desperation. Is this an act of someone who believes himself bigger than the medium, like Howard Stern and his jump to Sirius? Or is it a grasp to stay relevant, taking his opportunity in one of the only venues that didn't have a non-compete clause in his deal with MSNBC? Will the right have Keith …

Somewhere along the way, the media masters that have kept the football portion of the Super Bowl content fairly safe and "super" have unfortunately learned to slowly look the other way while the advertisers and agencies whipped out their checkbooks. Some might even suggest that, as the promotions for their own network shows got racier, they've lost the ability to say "No" to a wide variety of increasingly, yet equally, offensive ads.

When we last discussed the evolving role and nature of content in the MediaTech industry there was a concession of sorts (by me) that the content king might have slipped a notch to tech's senior partner. Then we had Super Bowl Sunday. And content was king once again, for a day.

There's nothing like a quick jump across the pond to remind you how small the world -- that is, our world of media -- actually is. And how quickly it's changing. I've just returned from London, where I spent last week meeting with media execs, data miners, and entrepreneurs. The trip was my third in the past year, and like my previous visits, an invigorating and eye-opening experience. I found a city and a media sector exploding with opportunities.

Stu Rodnick, Managing Director of Three Screen Nation, is a media expert in all video platforms. His work for AOL in the early years has given him a unique perspective on how media is evolving and how the changing landscape affects viewership, usage and adoption.

Why do we continue to ignore the fact that Super Bowl commercials have become de facto content here?More importantly, why can't there be more of a commitment to harness the power of this content during any other time of the year? Yes, this is a unique audience situation that is unable to be duplicated at any other point of the year. And sure, creating buzzworthy advertising content is expensive. But so is lackluster content that is skipped.

Previously, we broke down and defined all the different varieties of Set-Top Boxes -- those that can provide data and those that can't. This week we continue with the basics, defining the terms Clickstream Data (which exists in many areas of the tuning environment and Keystream Data (which is clickstream data specific to the remote). These data sources are the wellspring of all datapoints and can help form the basis of the measurement metrics, depending on which and how granular the data they can deliver.