Entertaindom Site to Take $1-Million Stake in Pulse

In the latest union of Hollywood and high technology, Time Warner Inc.’s Entertaindom Web site will announce today a more than $1-million equity investment in Pulse Entertainment, a San Francisco company that has developed technology to display 3-D animations on Web sites.

Under the terms of the deal, Pulse’s creative content will be prominently featured on the Entertaindom.com Web site, which offers such fare as animated shorts, interactive games and clips of old TV shows.

Entertaindom also will help finance and produce an animated Web series using Pulse technology called “L’il Green Men,” about a pair of 1-inch-tall aliens sent to explore Earth.

The characters are to be “voiced” by recognized Hollywood stars, said Jim Moloshok, Entertaindom’s president and chief executive--a signal that Web-based entertainment is beginning to aspire to the caliber of Hollywood film and television projects.

“As the Web begins to entertain the mainstream audience,” he said, “it’s going to be measured against traditional entertainment standards.”

The investment reflects a rush by entertainment companies to stay current with the latest technological advances in Web graphics and animation--and by technology companies to strengthen their ties with entertainment creators. The animation site Shockwave.com, for example, last month enticed Matt Stone and Trey Parker, creators of the hit TV series “South Park,” into an exclusive deal to create a Web series by offering them part-ownership in the site.

Pulse’s technology, known as the Pulse Player, allows 3-D animations to be displayed on Web pages without placing an inordinately heavy load on the user’s computer or Internet connection. It has already been used by several entertainment sites. NBC, for example, used Pulse to create an animated “Virtual Jay” Leno and subjected him to various comic indignities on the “Tonight Show” Web site.

The flexibility of the technology “makes it very cost-effective to use,” said Fred Angelopoulos, Pulse’s chief executive. Once a character image is created in Pulse Player--the hard part of computer animation--its movements and expressions can be easily manipulated via modest software changes, relieving creators of the need to regenerate the entire image to display every new motion.

Pulse has been producing three series of animated shorts for Entertaindom since its inception. Today’s deal means that more Pulse material, including content developed by outside producers and Pulse clients, will be given prominent display on Entertaindom.