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Taking its message into the teeth of the dot-com collapse, CTAM opened its 25th annual summit in San Fran Mon with speakers who affirmed cable's health from broadband, advertising and financial perspectives. The show actually kicked off with a Sunday night party at the trendy Ruby Skye club. OpenTV (OPTV), which sponsored the party, is courting a lot of attention, taking advantage of the SF location to bring hacks to Half Moon Bay, CA, where it is touting its ITV offering (29 services from ordering pizzas to e-commerce using a Motorola (MOT) DCT-2000 set-top). OpenTV's service only reaches 12 HHs (with plans to ramp up to 50 soon), but the company's ITV results put a face on the glass-is-half-full approach espoused by several of the summit's speakers. In a speech that too frequently sounded like a 60-minute AOL (AOL) ad, AOL pres Barry Schuler stressed that the failure of many SF-based dot-coms doesn't mean the broadband market has tanked. Instead, Schuler argues the industry is at the beginning of a home-networking movement. "Broadband will become as fundamental as plumbing and electricity," he said. "Everyone will have it." But more industry cooperation is needed to realize this vision. Partnerships are necessary since "no single company out there has all the pieces to the puzzle." He decried the turf wars that have dominated ITV, noting that the phrase, "Who owns the customer," is the most paralyzing one in the industry. "No one can own a customer and force them to do things they don't want to do." The day's most entertaining speaker, Roy Spence, pres/founder of GSD&M Advertising, echoed Schuler's jeremiad, saying, "We can not perform in this economy unless we perform partnerships." But Spence also warned that companies should keep a healthy skepticism when it comes to forming partnerships. "AOL wants to take you out of business," he said. "Microsoft (MSFT) wants to take them out of business."