Time Warner Site Is Purely for Entertainment

And now for the $64-zillion-dollar question: Is there really a market for entertainment on the Internet?

That is the question Time Warner begins asking today with the launch of its long-awaited Entertaindom.com Web site. The site is, by most assessments, the most comprehensive effort by a major media company to present on the Web actual entertainment content--cartoons, short live-action films, snippets of old television shows and the like--as opposed to publicity and chat about entertainment content.

“I’ve got to take my hat off to them; they’re being pioneers,” says Joe Butts, an entertainment analyst for Forrester Research in Cambridge, Mass. “They’re being aggressive in the belief that they can create something that will be a Web destination.”

To a certain extent, Warner’s move is based on faith. Pure entertainment sites are somewhat rare on the Web and rarely rank high in audience draw.

One reason is that the process of receiving animated or filmed images on a personal computer can be laborious and time-consuming, especially for users confined to relatively slow dial-up Web connections. That means well more than 90% of all users.

Even modem-friendly animation applications, such as those based on Macromedia Inc.’s Shockwave Flash, generally require users to download a special program to enable viewing.

Once all that is done, the result is often less than a compelling entertainment experience. To view the latest output of the young, creative artists whose work is available on sites hosted by Atom Films or Digital Entertainment Network, viewers must put up with the choppy motion, coarse resolution and static-laden audio characteristic of downloaded material.

Warner Bros. executives don’t believe that represents a major obstacle to attracting users on a large scale.

“We’re doing this because we believe there is a business in entertainment on the Web,” says Jim Moloshok, president of Warner Bros. Online.

For all that, the online team has taken much longer than expected to launch Entertaindom. The site launch was originally planned for early this summer and the delay led to questions within the Web community over whether the company was rethinking its plans. Moloshok says, however, that the delay occurred because the site expanded from a Warner Bros. entertainment venture to a Time Warner corporate venture.

That enabled the designers to incorporate material from other Time Warner divisions, including People and Entertainment Weekly magazines and CNN, but also forced them to push the launch date back by several months. The company also decided to wait until the end of the November sweeps period in broadcast television, when highly promoted special events might have drawn potential viewers off the Internet.

Ironically, Warner Bros. candidly designed Entertaindom to mirror a television network lineup. (“We’re doing on the Internet what NBC does on Thursday night, with a schedule bookmarked by ‘Friends’ at one end and ‘ER’ at the other,” Moloshok says.)

Visitors to Entertaindom will see a mix of original programming, reruns and “repurposed” material from other media. The first category is exemplified by “The God and Devil Show,” a Flash-animated series of comic shorts in which a toga-clad God and a power-suited female Devil revisit the lives of such celebrity guests as Rolling Stone Keith Richards. The site also features a 3-D animated Superman series and other new programming.

Other offerings include shorts from the Atom Films catalog, a rotating roster of classic Looney Tunes cartoons and clips from such old TV shows as “The Monkees.” Conventional entertainment-site features such as chat rooms, publicity promotions and stories from Entertainment Weekly and People magazines round out the mix.

Other mass media Web sites are beginning to experiment with original programming, albeit on a smaller scale and with more self-promotional purposes. Fox.com, for example, will run original programming by the creators of this summer’s “Blair Witch Project” in anticipation of Fox Television running a related series next year.

In all, Warner’s site producers are hoping to create unique new brands and features, and offer familiar old material, that Web users can find only on this site. That strategy reflects Warner’s conviction that successful Web sites are going to have to move from offering users access to everything on the Web--as do portal sites such as Yahoo and Excite--to offering exclusive content, just like television.

“The product is going to be the programming,” says Jim Banister, executive vice president of Warner Bros. Online, “and you’re going to find it existing exclusively on one site.”

From an advertiser’s standpoint, what the Internet offers that broadcast TV does not is the ability to deliver a targeted audience: “We’re selling personalization,” Moloshok says. “Either actively--the user tells the site he or she likes movies--or passively, by our putting a cookie on the user’s computer that tracks where he goes on the site.”

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Times staff writer Michael Hiltzik can be reached at michael.hiltzik@latimes.com.