Wanted: An Online Aaron Spelling - to develop online entertainment programming

Brandweek, July 20, 1998 by Anya Sacharow

The Web is a great medium for sports and news, but no one has found online entertainment's killer app.

If you're looking for a New Media Hollywood, you won't find it in Redmond, Wash. Microsoft is the biggest, but by no means the only, technology company to abandon its quest to develop online entertainment programming. Despite the success of Yahoo and Amazon.com, no one has been able to devise an entertainment "killer app," a Seinfeld for the Web.

The war is not over, insist those who keep trying to crack this code. Online executives, especially those based in Hollywood, return to a familiar metaphor to justify what seems like a losing battle. The Internet, still in its infancy they insist, is simply going through the same growing pains that television went through a half century ago, when TV was an ungainly "new medium."

Lewis Henderson, head of new media at the William Morris Agency in L.A., is a proponent of this point of view. "When TV was first invented, all these people trying to create entertainment content for TV bombed," he argues. To prove his point, Henderson cites a Life magazine article from the late 1940s with the following headline: "Television: It is a commercial reality but not yet an art." The article reports that the fledgling television industry was increasing its news and sports coverage, "the things it does best." But a good drama or a quality movie were still impossible to tune into on the home screen.

Sound familiar? The same thing can be said about the early days of the Web (the past three years). All the major TV branded Web sites, including CNN, ABC, MSNBC, ESPN and CBS, have put their news online. The next challenge: how to entertain the audience.

That leads to the big question: What is online entertainment? Or what should online entertainment be? Is it a game, a motion- and sound-filled video clip, or some version of' an interactive encyclopedia-a large database that's fun to use?

Some 50 years ago, TV tried to solve the programming problem with repurposed forms of older entertainment formatted for the small screen. The first big sitcom was 1949's The Goldbergs, about a Jewish family who lived in the Bronx. It was a spin-off from radio.

But concocting hits purely for the new medium was no easy task. By the time I Love Lucy brought TV to the next level in 1951 by using three cameras, there had been scores of failed shows, such as the now-forgotten Gay Nineties Revue and Actors' Studio.

As with those early flops, a successful grafting of Hollywood-style entertainment with new media has proven elusive. Famous among failed attempts at an online "hit show" is a cybersoap called The Spot that chronicled the Gap-clad lives of friends in a Santa Monica beach house. The site, established in 1995 and sold to American Cybercast a year later, folded, along with its parent, in 1997.

But, more ominously for believers in the cause, two giants of the Internet programming world have hoisted the white flag or scaled back after spending millions to create programming that no longer exists.

America Online's Greenhouse Networks, founded in 1994 to develop original content for AOL, was folded into the online service in February. Meanwhile, Microsoft, which announced with great fanfare its commitment to entertainment programming for the Microsoft Network in 1996, backed away from this area of programming that same month. According to a statement from Laura Jennings, vice president of MSN, "Our research shows that with the exception of games, pure entertainment is not what people find most valuable on the Web. What they're looking for are tools and services that enable them to get everyday things done faster and more easily online." MSN would no longer provide was original narrative entertainment.

Still, there may be another way for technology powerhouses to help foster quality Internet entertainment programming. Intel has resorted to a form of investment that harkens back to TV's earliest days: The dominant chip manufacturer has become a "proud sponsor" (to use an old TV term) of a wide variety of Internet programs. The only catch: the programs have to be so advanced that the best way for a user to view them is on a computer equipped with Intel's marquee product, the Pentium II processor.

Intel has invested in such sites as Wired, National Geographic, and CBS SportsLine to develop scalable content that is sound- and motion-filled. The idea is to foster development of sites that are optimally viewed with a Pentium II.

However, the nexus of the music and technology industries makes content available to those without a Pentium II. The chip giant funds the Intel New York Music Festival. Ron Whittier, senior vice president and general manager of Intel's Content Group, specifies that the interactivity added to music, sampling, and electronic commerce are easily accessible with dial-up modems. Other Intel investments such as the streaming video-heavy site Mediadome or the cable broadband yet-to-launch Intertainer are geared toward the narrow segment of the audience with the fastest Internet access.