A Perplexing Footnote in the History of Internet Entertainment

Most of us weren’t paying attention, and that was part of the problem. During the years 1995-98, we were jogging along as usual, reading books, watching TV and sending a little e-mail, while in warp speed “Internet time” a would-be revolution in online entertainment got off the ground, wobbled furiously and crashed. The corporate landscape was littered with the wreckage of start-up firms. Hundreds of millions of dollars were lost.

What happened? John Geirland, a new-media consultant and writer for Wired magazine, and Eva Sonesh-Kedar, a Silicon Valley management consultant, try to put the pieces back together, focusing on the efforts of Scott Zakarin and Troy Bolotnick, originators of the pioneering “webisodic” show “The Spot,” and others who tried to cash in on their success.

“Digital Babylon” is a selective history, Geirland and Sonesh-Kedar acknowledge. Even as it is, the book isn’t easy to follow. The prose never rises above newspaper-article quality. It’s strewn with jargon (“ramping up,” “cratering”) and acronyms (a curriculum vitae is a “CV”). The people involved, despite superficial differences in style and dress, blur together in their youth, their ambition, their single-mindedness and their frenetic energy. A chart would have been helpful, to explain how the various companies metastasized, merged and imploded.

To oversimplify, however, it happened like this, Geirland and Sonesh-Kedar say: “The Spot,” an interactive show in which viewers could exchange e-mail with the characters and influence future content, acquired a small but devoted following. Zakarin and Bolotnick, however, broke with their parent firm, American Cybercast, over issues of creative control.

Their own firm, Lightspeed Media, tried to follow up with a show called “GrapeJam” but ran out of money. It agreed to be bought by America Online as it was gearing up to compete with a revitalized Microsoft Network, which had hired Hollywood executive and former Broadway dancer Bob Bejan to bring a show-biz sensibility to software-oriented Redmond, Wash.

The cultural clashes among the Geeks, who were intent on advancing the technology of the Internet; the Ponytails (such as Zakarin, Bolotnick and Josh Greer of Digital Planet, creator of another Web show, “Madeleine’s Mind”), who were obsessed with content; and the Suits (such as Ted Leonsis and Charlie Fink of AOL), who upheld the primacy of the bottom line, proved debilitating, “Digital Babylon” reports.

Bad luck also played a part. The need to adopt flat-rate pricing for Internet service plunged AOL into a temporary financial crisis that drained resources from Zakarin’s group. And the entertainment the pioneers produced--Geirland and Sonesh-Kedar describe it only sketchily--wasn’t that wonderful anyway. “Digital Babylon” is full of hustle and movement, but there’s little sense of artists burning to tell stories that could be told properly only on the Web.

A century ago, movie pioneers were in the same position, experimenting with films like “The Great Train Robbery” to exploit the new medium’s possibilities. Art would come in time, just as backyard mechanics tinkering with horseless carriages would give way to Henry Ford. Another, higher wave of Internet entertainment is inevitable, relegating the events in “Digital Babylon” to footnotes--except for one disquieting thought: If the technology keeps advancing so fast, will artists ever truly master it?