Athome-Spun Ideas About Convergence

Entertainment companies have long been promising to turn the Internet into a mass medium comparable to radio and television. But so far, such pledges have produced far more hype than substance.

Stepping into that void are the cable companies, such as Athome Network, that are trying to sell super-fast Internet access over their own lines. The Redwood City, Calif., firm is backed by cable titans Comcast Communications, Cox Communications and Tele-Communications Inc. and provides Internet access at speeds between 1,500 and 3,000 kilobits per second to 50,000 customers in 14 states.

Charles Moldow, Athome’s vice president for media development, is in charge of creating content that takes advantage of the company’s so-called broad-band capacity, which is 50 to 100 times faster than Internet connections made over phone lines with standard dial-up modems. Moldow, one of Athome’s founders, will be speaking about the convergence of TVs and PCs at the Networked Entertainment World conference this week in Beverly Hills.

In a preview, The Cutting Edge caught up with Moldow to discuss the impact of entertainment on the Internet.

Q: All of the focus from cable companies these days is on the Internet. What ever happened to interactive television?

A: The interactive part of interactive television can be delivered better through the Internet than through a proprietary system. You can leverage hundreds of thousands of Web sites, and thousands of technology companies are already building for it.

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Q: But a lot of potential customers still say there is very little you can do with the extra bandwidth a service like Athome provides that you can’t do with a regular modem. Are they right?

A: Beyond the development efforts at Athome and some of the other broad-band companies, there are not a lot of folks in the marketplace doing broad-band content development. It’s a new market, and a lot of Web companies are small and very resource-constrained, so they have to be very pragmatic about where they spend their resources.

The cost of production in the broad-band space is significantly greater--with audio, video, graphics and animation. The people who are best suited for that are companies that have deep pockets and existing media assets. I don’t think it’s for everybody.

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Q: Is that why Athome has devoted so much of its own resources to developing entertainment content?

A: We’re looking for the equivalent of CNN, MTV, ESPN, QVC, E! and Nickelodeon. These are the things that we want to offer so that when our customers talk to their neighbors, the neighbor will say, “I want that.”

For example, we know that a large segment of the Internet audience today is heavy game users, and so we have put together a very high-speed game network. We also have video news on demand with CNN, where they package the best of their news and then our customers can go to a menu and pick the stories they want to see. We’re going to be doing the same thing with movie reviews, sports highlights and market roundups, which will be launching in a few weeks. We also offer commercial-free CD-quality music that you can listen to while you’re surfing the Web or reading your e-mail.

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Q: The big question for this conference is what role the entertainment industry will play in developing the Internet as a mass consumer medium. What’s your take on that?

A: In my opinion, the entertainment industry has been fairly quiet. If you look at the studios, the majority of their involvement has been using the Internet to promote movies. That’s not entertainment in and of itself. We need the entertainment companies to step up to the plate in this new environment where they haven’t to date.

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Q: Given all the pro-Internet hype coming from entertainment companies over the last few years, does that surprise you?

A: My belief is that narrow-band distribution [over standard modems] just doesn’t give entertainment companies enough bandwidth to create engaging uses for the Internet. The reason it’s primarily a communication vehicle with e-mail and chat is that those are things that you can do really well without a lot of bandwidth.

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Q: If that’s your estimation of the way things are today, how do you see the role of entertainment in the Internet’s future?

A: If you think the three legs of the stool are community, resources and entertainment, then to date I’d say that 40% of the value is community, 40% is resources and probably 20% is entertainment. In fact, I’d say 20% is generous. But once broad-band becomes commonplace, I think it will be 40% communication, 40% entertainment and 20% resources. It’s not that entertainment will steal from resources, it’s that the whole pie is going to grow.

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Q: At that point, will the Internet start to look more like television?

A: Well, the Internet is a vast thing and no one has any idea how to navigate it. People like us are going to provide much more of a navigated service, where there will be an Athome games channel and an Athome sports channel. Of course, our customers can go anywhere they want on the Web. But over time, as we pick up some of the less sophisticated users, they’ll want some help. That gives us a completely different role.

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Q: One of the things people really like about the Web is that it contains such a variety of information, especially compared with the media concentration you have with television. Do you think that kind of concentration is going to happen on the Web?

A: Yes and no. In the cable world, where you have a few companies controlling everything, it’s either MTV or VH1, which is also owned by MTV. We’re suggesting that our customers experience things that we put in front of them, but they can also connect to the whole Internet, and there’s no penalty for exploring out there. The customer gets the best of both worlds.

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Times staff writer Karen Kaplan can be reached at karen.kaplan@latimes.com