Revamped Disney Entertainment Site Debuts on Web

Striving to keep pace with the rapid evolution of Internet technology, Walt Disney Co. on Monday launched a dramatically redesigned entertainment Web site that offers users an unusually broad range of animations, games and other multimedia experiences.

The site also provides vastly expanded e-commerce opportunities, including the ability to book vacations at Disney resorts and to purchase Disney videos, clothing and other merchandise.

It also absorbs much of what was the subscription-only Disney Blast, an online children’s entertainment service. In its new incarnation, according to Disney Online President Ken Goldstein, the site offers many more games and other features for free, while still reserving some features for subscribers to the renamed Club Blast, including a new instant message capability.

Disney has also made Club Blast easier to join, largely by removing the need for users to install enabling software from a CD-ROM. The subscription price remains the same at $9.95 a month or $39.95 a year.

The Disney.com redesign, which Goldstein said has been in the works for months, is part of a refurbishment trend taking place throughout the converging world of traditional and new media.

Viacom Inc., for example, recently announced a planned redesign of its popular Nick.com and MTV.com Web sites to improve their appeal to their increasingly techno-enabled audiences weaned on the cable channels Nickelodeon and MTV. Among other things, the MTV site will allow users to program, within limits, their own “radio channels” to pipe music of chosen genres directly through the PC.

Warner Bros., meanwhile, will shortly roll out a richly featured entertainment site called Entertaindom that will provide entertainment information from a wide range of sources.

But Goldstein, who as founder and general manager of Broderbund Software’s Red Orb Entertainment division oversaw the development of the hit PC game “Riven,” said Disney.com’s revamping has been “in the works since I got here” in November. “I wouldn’t have dedicated my heart and soul to the Walt Disney Co. if I couldn’t innovate,” he said in an interview.

Among the mass media entertainment sites, Disney’s effort is perhaps the most accomplished to be rolled out thus far, while remaining closely integrated within Disney’s corporate Internet strategy. Every screen on Disney.com, for example, is crowned by a banner-sized header offering one-click entry to the Go network, the portal site Disney hopes to establish as one of the leading centralized sites on the Internet.

Heavily reliant on Macromedia Inc.’s Flash 3 graphics technology, Disney.com is rich in interactive animation, sound effects and music--much of which would have strained the resources of most home PCs until recently. However, people with older Web browsers will have to download a special plug-in program to view the graphics.

“Two years ago you could never have made a page like this,” remarked Irene Tchaikovsky, a Disney Online producer, during a prelaunch demonstration of the new version. “Even if you could, no one would come to it because it would take so long to download.”