KEY POINTS:
The sun always seems to shine in Idaho's Sun Valley mountain resort when top media and technology brass convene for a retreat hosted by the investment banker Herbert Allen.
But the darkest of thoughts race through the minds of the media power elite as they go between meetings, golf and family activities: How can they survive the technological changes transforming their industries?
Conveniently, many of the players who control major internet and technology companies will also be on hand to discuss strategies for distributing video, music, text and other content digitally.
This year's five-day conference kicked off yesterday. The attendees are among the most powerful figures in media: News Corp chairman Rupert Murdoch, Time Warner CEO Dick Parsons, Walt Disney CEO Robert Iger and CBS CEO Leslie Moonves, among others.
Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin will also attend, as will Craig Barrett, chairman of chip-maker Intel. The two top players from Yahoo will be there - chairman Terry Semel, who was ousted as CEO less than a month ago, and Jerry Yang, the co-founder of Yahoo who took his place.
And, yes, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates will also be in Sun Valley, as will his bridge buddy, billionaire investor Warren Buffett.
Some of the really intriguing guests are coming from companies that are just beginning to make names for themselves but could show media dinosaurs and technology giants some new tricks - or takeover targets.
Janus Friis used to be reviled for helping to create music file-swapping service Kazaa but he's back in favour with a new venture called Joost, which delivers video over the internet on to PCs - legally.
Also in attendance will be Owen van Natta, the chief operating officer of Facebook, a social networking leader. Media companies are intrigued by Facebook and companies like it because it represents an efficient, fast and potentially low-cost way of accumulating audiences and attracting ad dollars online.
Then there is Blake Krikorian, the co-founder and CEO of Sling Media, maker of the Sling Box, which allows users to watch their home cable feed from any internet connection - and even over certain cellphones.
However, certain guests are not likely to be sharing small talk. Sumner Redstone, the chairman of Viacom, will be attending as will Viacom's CEO Philippe Dauman, but don't expect to see them with Google's founders or CEO Eric Schmidt. Viacom slapped Google with a US$1 billion ($1.29 billion) lawsuit in March claiming that Google's YouTube was engaged in "brazen disregard" of intellectual property law by allowing users to post clips from Viacom's properties.
That's exactly the kind of conflict between traditional and emerging media that many would like to avoid. So several technology entrepreneurs with intriguing new media distribution models are also on the guest list.
There's Marc Andreesen, a founder of Netscape, whose new company Ning allows people to create their own social networks, as well as top officials from article aggregator Digg and a professional networking site called LinkedIn.
Yet even as technological innovation mints new winners, not all of them manage to stay on top. Consider a telling remark that Murdoch made just last month.
Murdoch pulled off what seemed a master stroke two years ago by acquiring the online social hangout site MySpace. Two years later, he appears to be having second thoughts.
Reports have circulated that he'd like to swap it for a stake in Yahoo and, in early June, he lamented to The Wall Street Journal that online users weren't abandoning newspapers for MySpace.
"I wish they were," he said. "They're all going to Facebook at the moment."
- AP
