I was at the Future of Broadcasting Conference earlier today and saw presentations by some industry big hitters including Jeremy Darroch, CEO at Sky, Cindy Rose, Executive Director, Digital Entertainment at Virgin Media, Daniel Danker, General Manager, Programmes and On-Demand at the BBC and Ben McOwen Wilson, Director of Content Partnerships at YouTube.

It was a good morning filled with stats, ideas and declarations of strategic intent. Here are some of the notes I made:

Jeremy Darroch

• NOW TV - Sky's new OTT service - would be launching in mid-July;
   
• NOW TV would initially carry movies but, in time, would add entertainment and sports content including Premier League football;
   
• Sky currently spends £2.2bn a year on content; promises to spend £600m a year on UK content by 2015 ("We've done a lot with our cost base and better back-office efficiencies mean that we can make a greater investment in content");
   
• In answer to a question about whether Sky would carry BT's recently-bought roster of 38 Premier League games (starting in the 2013 - 2014 season) Darroch said that he was open-minded and that Sky was an "open-access channel".
   
• Additionally, Sky Sports had "never been in better shape" with its mainstays of golf, football, rugby and cricket coverage. "Only 20% of sprts viewing is Premier League football".
   
• Finally, Darroch strongly defended Sky when asked about OFCOM's investigation into whether Rupert Murdoch was a "fit and proper person" to own a broadcast licence saying Sky was independently run and governed, that its brand metrics had actually gotten stronger over the past two years and that Sky was a forward-looking company: "We want to do more, invest more in content, create more jobs, pay more taxes."

Cindy Rose

• "We were confident about TiVo[before the rollout started] but were a bit concerned about whether customers would get it - the entertainment landscape was becoming increasingly complex and fragmented".
   
• "Discoverability and curation would be the keys to cracking the user experience and TiVo gave us the tools to do that."
   
• Related to this, TiVo was changing the way people watch TV. The new EPG was visited 37 times a week compared to 25 times a week for the legacy system and 85% of EPG searches  are for TV shows not in the BARB top 50.
   
• Rose said that Virgin Media is now the "fastest-growing pay-TV service in the UK… installing a new TiVo customer every 30 seconds… adding 250,000 customers each quarter."
   
• Virgin Media has an exciting roadmap and that it had opened up its TiVo APIs to allow over 40 apps to be created.
   
• Finally, that the company had spent £1.5bn on connectivity last year and this had "allowed a thousand flowers to bloom". For every £1 VM invest "£5 of value is added to the UK digital economy".

Daniel Danker

Danker announced a new role for the BBC Red Button in integrating online and linear TV. An accompanying blog post provides all of the major details.

In summary, the Red Button is to become "connected". As Danker says:

"Imagine you're watching Eastenders and realise you missed the previous episode. Press Red and instantly bring up iPlayer to catch up on the episode you missed.

Or you're watching a cooking programme and you see a recipe you'd like to try. Press Red, save it for later and access the recipe on your computer, tablet or mobile when you're ready to cook.

With a wealth of content at our fingertips, Connected Red Button seamlessly brings together broadcast and online television. Audiences will be able to experience this first-hand during the Olympics, where they'll be able to watch 24 live channels, in HD, available exclusively online but delivered to the TV in a way that blends the media and makes the technology truly invisible."

Ben McOwen Wilson

• Over 3 billion hours of video is watched each month on YouTube; the service is accessible on 350m "non-PC" devices today and is expected to be on 500m connected TVs by 2015.
   
• 600 million mobiles access YouTube every day - that's up three-fold since 2011.
   
• 72 hours of video is uploaded each minute.
   
• Close to half of all YouTube visits emanate from a 'share' - an email, instant message, tweet or Facebook update. McOwen Wilson described this as "measurably socially-driven viewing".
   
• The other half of YouTube visits emanated from the homepage where users could perform a search. Its 'related videos' algorithm is so successful that about a third of its visitors would watch 10 videos per session.
   
• With so much video content a traditional EPG "just wasn't going to cut it" in terms of content discovery. As a result, last November, YouTube launched its new homepage based on the idea of channels which could be subscribed to. They help make sense of the YouTube world and define the homepage activity feed (a little bit like Facebook).
   
• As a result, channel subscriptions were up over 50% since November. 

• YouTube is focusing on rights. Having content available on only some devices was "a poor user experience". Much better to aim for universal rights particularly as 'share' was so important for the company.