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.)