The TV Of Tomorrow NYC conference is to cutting-edge media intellectual property what the CES is to electronics: standing on the cusp of new innovations for the media industry. Even its conference location this year -- in a warehouse building near the new Hudson Yards development -- spoke to an early insider's look of what the future will bring.

It hardly seems possible that the big three Christmas specials of my youth - "Dr. Seuss' How The Grinch Who Stole Christmas," "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" and "A Charlie Brown Christmas" - still attract such large audiences nearly 50 years after their first airing. According to all conventional wisdom, these shows should not do so well. They are not broadcast live, have no major stars, are not edgy or ironic, and have no sex appeal. Moreover, most of the audience has seen the shows multiple times.

It's not every day that you get to sip a glass of wine while listening to NBCU's Linda Yaccarino and Magna Global's Tim Spengler talk about their college days. But Simulmedia's Salon series offers such an opportunity. However October's event was not all waxing nostalgia. Simulmedia CEO Dave Morgan also wanted to know how media companies recruit and retain new talent. And that is the $64,000 question today. View video excerpts of the panel here.

Innovative cross-platform marketing has been part of the sports marketplace for years. Now, with the ability to leverage social media and partner with a variety of brands, sports is heralding in a new era of cutting-edge partnership and measurement efforts. The recent Promax Sports Media Marketing Summit showcased some of the more ground-breaking campaigns from a range of programmers, brands and advertisers.

You can tell that television retains its cultural importance by the number of online communications platforms it helps keep afloat. Social media, for example, was supposed to undermine television's dominance -- but Twitter, Facebook, etc., would be considerably less active if users didn't have television to talk about. Similarly, there would be considerably less for bloggers and recappers to write about if television didn't exist. You know there's a power imbalance when one party obsesses constantly about the other (e.g., a teenage girl mooning over the high school quarterback) -- but the other side barely acknowledges its existence. And then …