Seagate Chief Executive Bill Watkins has a reason to like easy, free ways to consume information on the Internet.

After all, his company is the world’s largest computer disk-drive maker, something that comes in handy for all the storage space required to back up online audio and video.

Here’s Watkins’s reasoning, which he gave us at the Reuters Technology, Media and Telecommunications Summit on Wednesday:

People will watch lousy content if it’s easy and cheap and free… . If you think about TV back in the ’50s … Hollywood and all those guys, they said “no way we’re going to let our actors get on TV.” … New York stage did the same thing. Radio did the same thing. So what did TV do? They invented their own content. It was the farm report, the Howdy-Doody show. And all of a sudden, people started watching it because it was easy and free. And then the advertising dollars started following TV. And so what happened? Everyone started having to put their content on TV. Radio had to give up. … You’re watching the same thing happening here on the Internet. And if people got nothing to do with their time, they’ll sit there and watch commercials. I mean, people watch commercials on the Internet and then they share them with friends. But that’s a great thing for us.

They may be empty calories, but they sure do fill up the bottom line.

We found out on Wednesday what happens when you mess around with Big Blue.

CFO Mark Loughridge came to the Reuters Technology, Media and Telecoms Summit to talk about all sorts of things, but it was his story about building the software services business in India that caught my attention. Loughridge was asked about whether it might make sense for IBM to hook up with a bigger Indian software services company. This was his response:

Well, you know, the Indian services software services company I’d think you want to team up with is us.

He then said that IBM in fact is the No. 1 software services business in India, and explained why:

It was some years ago and I forget exactly how this rolled out, but one of the co-chairmen I believe, of Infosys compared the relative services content of IBM to the Indian providers, and had likened IBM to Detroit and had likened them to the Japanese car manufacturers… The implication’s obviously they’re going to do to IBM what the Japanese car manufacturers did to Detroit. That statement was a seismic event for us. So we now have 74,000 employees in India.

Loughridge also talked about why it’s better to have a good mix of business coming from big, developed countries as well as high-growth emerging markets:

I do think that it’s a different environment now. … If I were in a business model where I needed double digit growth out of the G7 to drive performance, I would be in a cold sweat.

Hulu Chief Executive Jason Kilar was at the Reuters Technology Media and Telecommunications Summit in New York on Tuesday, where he told us about the best job in the entire world. Read on:

During the course of the beta, we actually had film school grads that are on the team, that actually cherrypicked the best moments from [shows like] “30 Rock” and “Prison Break” and “The Simpsons,” and we now have over 600 clips, for example, from “Saturday Night Live.”

Later, I asked him to tell me more about this job.

It’s a clipping operation — four or five people that focus on clipping and creating great short-form content. It’s a fun job. Every time I walk by their office — we’re all in this open area — it’s so fun because I see Elvin with his headphones on and he’s laughing, and it’s a pretty great gig because basically his job is to watch fun movies and funny TV shows and pick the best moments and put them together.

I can picture it now: Fassbinder’s greatest hits, a collection by Robert MacMillan.

Earlier in Kilar’s appearance at the summit, he talked about how Hulu.com gets a real spit-and-polish, time and again:

We’re neurotic in many ways and I want to be honest about that. We sweat over every pixel on the site. We have arguments internally about how small we can make the Hulu logo and yet have it still be legible because we don’t want it to have to get in the way of the video. We argue over font sizes and font choices and shadowing effects and things most normal people would think is silly.

But we think that’s important, because we think that if we can present franchises like … “The Office” and “30 Rock” in the best presentation possible, that’s critical to the user experience. And what’s interesting is that that carries over as well to how we treat the advertising franchises as well. We trans-code these things ourselves. We sweat over the volume levels so that the advertising commercial break volume level matches identically to the content.

It’s like Stanley Kubrick was resurrected as the head of an online video Web site.

(Photo: Reuters)

Say what you will, but Mozilla got back. In Firefox 3, the latest version of its Web browser, the foundation has made more than 15,000 changes from the last version. According to Chief Executive John Lilly, they range from big to small, including making the back button bigger.

“We did user studies that say people click the back button more than they click the forward,” he told reporters and editors at the Reuters Technology, Media and Telecoms Summit in New York.

Apparently none of us ever learned the old Bob Dylan line about not looking back.

Mozilla also is making some other interesting decisions for Firefox 3, including releasing it in 50 languages.

More from Lilly: “That’s not a commercial decision. That’s a health of the World Wide Web mission-based decision… We think there are important non-commercial considerations that need to be made by people who are innovating with the product. So there’s a difference between policy groups and product groups. We’re innovating with product; we’re competing with product, but with a mission.”

Maybe Firefox 4 will have a one-click solution for forgiving third-world debt.

(Photo: Mozilla Corp)

Some companies have thousands of ways to gauge their performance. Symantec figures it out on two fingers: loyalty and market share.

When asked how Symantec measures customer loyalty, Chief Operating Officer and President Enrique Salem told the Reuters Global Technology, Media and Telecoms Summit in New York on Monday:

Here is his answer:

We work with a company called Satmetrix, and it’s called the net promoter score. It’s a real simple metric. You ask one question: Would you recommend Symantec? And so, if they say yes, then you give it a score — 1 to 10. If you’re a 9 to 10, you’re a promoter. If you’re 6 or lower, you’re a detractor. If you take promoters minus detractors, that gives you a net promoter score. It’s not a complex thing. If you worked at a company, it’s “would you recommend your friends to work there.” If you did, you’d be a promoters, if you didn’t , you’d be a detractor.

We can then go and look at the groups of folks who say no and say “why not?” And when they say no, there are specific reasons. And when they say yes, we’d like to figure out why you say yes. And it usually [is] innovative products, quality or great support. And and when they say no, it comes down to quality, support or ease of doing business. So at the end of the day we are driving those two metrics - loyalty and market share.

It’s simple, really. Almost like Ross Perot explaining the deficit.

The heads of two of America’s most popular sports — NASCAR chief Brian France and National Hockey League Commissioner Gary Bettman – are coming to the Reuters Media Summit on Tuesday.

Also expected to show up is Bobby Kotick, chief executive of Activision. The second-largest U.S. video game publisher already is in the news on Tuesday after it raised its earnings and revenue outlook for the third quarter on better-than-expected consumer response to its holiday slate globally. (Reuters)

And look out for appearances from top executives from Blockbuster and Corbis.

The Media Summit’s first day, meanwhile, featured appearances from the chairman of XM Satellite Radio, the head of News Corp’s Fox Interactive Media and the chairman of video game maker Take-Two Interactive.

- Fox Interactive Media’s Peter Levinsohn said the MySpace online social network will launch Facebook-style news feeds in the next month to 45 days. These are the alerts that people use to let their friends and colleagues know what they are up to. (”Robert is blogging,” for example). MySpace also plans to let users create more than one profile so users can have one visage, say, for work and one for friends. 

- Levinsohn also said that the company will launch an online network to sell advertising across sites owned by parent company News Corp. Known internally as FIM Serve, the business could be made available outside of MySpace as early as next year.

- XM Chairman Gary Parsons said the satellite radio company expects car radio sales to remain solid even if the most dire projections of slowing U.S. auto sales come true.

- Take-Two Chairman Strauss Zelnick said games and other media do not encourage real-life violence and that the graphic behavior depicted in games “Grand Theft Auto” and “Manhunt 2″ are even more easily found on the Internet or at the bookstore. As he said: “I could send my 9-year-old daughter to a book store and she can buy any book in Barnes and Noble no matter how vivid the content is.”

Keep an eye on:

• Google Inc is preparing a service that would enable users to store data from their personal hard drives on its computers, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday in its online edition. (Reuters)
• The new Imus radio program will premiere next week with “advertisers who are strong Imus supporters and … stayed with him throughout the controversy,” Ad Age says. Ad Age contacted several national advertisers that bought his former show, and several seem to be taking a wait-and-see approach before committing to Imus 2.0. (Ad Age)

(Photo: Reuters)

The adversarial relationship between cable companies and broadcasters is legend in the media industry.

But not for long. They need each other.

So says Time Warner Cable Chief Executive Glenn Britt, who got into a little of that history at the Reuters Technology, Media and Telecommunications Summit in New York on Wednesday.

“There’s been a hostility between the broadcast industry and the cable industry, and the reason for that is because broadcasters saw cable as competitive,” he said. “So there’s a whole set of emotions around that.”

Broadcasters, which own many of the cable networks born out of favorable regulatory environment, re-negotiate rates that cable operators pay the networks every couple of years.

Now they find that a host of competitors, notably the phone companies and Internet video, are bringing them together as they try to remind advertisers why they matter.

“I think it’s getting better now because I think there’s a growing recognition that the kinds of products I’m talking about can really help the program networks … The other piece is the advertising space … It’s no big secret that 30-second spot, bought per thousand eyeballs, is under attack. Advertisers feel it doesn’t really do what they need anymore. All the networks are frustrated by that.”

Enter the cable guys.

“Advertisers like the ability to target audiences really narrowly…they like to be able to measure and like to know that people are actually looking at their ads. They like some interactivity…we thought well, gee, we have the technology to bring those things to television … We’re starting to do these things.”

WPP Chief Executive Martin Sorrell is one of the world’s most powerful advertising chieftains, but he has a thing about garages.

Speaking at the Reuters Global Technology, Media and Telecoms Summit via videoconference from London on Tuesday, Sorrell expressed concern over new technology and ideas that young unknowns could be toiling on that could completely alter his business.

“I think it was (former Disney CEO) Michael Eisner who said: ‘Six or half-a-dozen PhD students in a shed in Silicon Valley is what worries me most.’ Well, what worries me is half-a-dozen students in a garage in China.”

Sorrell also dipped into a bit of numerology when he responded to a question about whether the world still needs four to six big advertising companies:

“There’s a sort of funny logic to the number four,” he said, noting the existence of four big accounting firms, four big consulting companies and ”four or five” major investment banks. “There is some sort of strange magic to four.”

Those PhD’s in the Chinese garage might be able to explain the magic behind the number four.

Other Sorrell revelations:

- On why WPP’s acquisition plans are modest compared with Google and Yahoo: “If I add up the market caps of the four parent companies in our industry, I get to about $50 billion. If I add all their revenues together… I get to about 33 [billion dollars]. Google has a third of the revenues at 11 [billion dollars] and a market cap three times the size, so they have considerably more firepower. They can breeze in and pay $3.1 billion for DoubleClick. We’re sort of a little bit handicapped in comparison so our ambitions would be substantially more modest.”

- On advertisers experimenting with digital media such as Second Life: “You’re not going to get fired for experimenting and failing in these new areas.”

You want to put that in writing?

(Robert MacMillan in New York and Georgina Prodhan in Paris listened in via videoconference and wrote this together.)