Today, I attended the Digital Hollywood: Building Blocks conference in the San Jose Marriott. It was pretty boring, and very long.

If I could sum up the event in one sentence, it would be: “venture capitalists and C-level executives attempting to sound intelligent all the while protecting their secrets.”

There were a couple of bright spots, of course. Art, Ryan, Cathy and I sat in on product demos for some exciting start-ups. A few were good. Others were hilarious.

One company presented a program that allowed you to share videos by dragging and dropping. Yes, the same way you can drag and drop videos with Pidgin. Except, the program had a desktop, which they called a “canvas” where you could watch the videos while sharing them. When someone pointed out that these features already exist in one form or another online, the presenter responded that modern day technology won’t allow you to queue up videos to watch them in succession. Clearly, this guy had never heard of Winamp.

Another company specialized in providing streaming HD-quality video. This was pretty cool because I must admit that the YouTubes, DailyMotions, and Veohs of the world sacrifice clarity for speed and accessibility. Trade-offs are a necessary evil, but the prospect of HD-quality video at acceptable speeds was too good to be true. Alas, the presenter was clearly lacking the common sense necessary to competently sell his product.

He showed us a five minute reel of really flashy footage. First mistake: there was no side-by-side comparison of the HD and low-resolution versions. As a result, the video didn’t have an impact. Well, scratch that. The footage had a negative impact because it was edited like a ‘brainwashing’ tape from Zoolander, complete with rapid image movement and new age soundtrack.

Said footage included oddities like:

1. A woman getting her face smashed into a wall
2. A man putting a bag over another man’s face and killing him

Clearly, the best way to sell your video technology is to show an HD video of people in bondage gear hitting each other in front of 30-40 VCs.

The fun didn’t end there. Once the video was over, he started talking about how the company developed a lot of editing technology for The Jerry Springer Show. If the best example of a client they could think of was a trashy and controversial talk show… well, never mind.

The last session we attended was about online gaming. The panelists mostly talked about the cultural differences between Asia and US, DRM issues, and opportunities in the mobile and social spaces. On the console front, they came to the genius consensus that the Nintendo Wii did not in fact make casual gaming popular. Rather, the Wii just assured the millions of Americans who had been playing casual games in secret for the last two decades that it was okay to admit to they were a gamer. Okay.

The highlight of the session was getting to meet Don Daglow on a panel. Daglow is the CEO of Stormfront. But back in the day, he was instrumental in developing Prince of Persia and Carmen Sandiego. He also helped program Utopia, the first god-simulation game.

As a gamer, history buff, and child of the 80s, meeting Don was pretty cool. I was blown away by the realization that this guy made decisions that defined my childhood. Those annoying spikes in Prince of Persia? Probably his doing.

I shook his hand and told him he was the man. And that made the conference worth it. Almost.