Click Flicks Seen as Promotional Video

The Internet was supposed to supplant cable and satellite TV as the next great pipeline of entertainment into the home. But when investors turned tight-fisted and the advertising market collapsed last year, a long line of online video and animation companies went on a dot-com death march.

Nevertheless, there’s still a steady supply of original material on the Web--much of it coming from companies that aren’t relying on banner ads to pay the rent.

A good example is the site that HBO and Razorfish Inc. are constructing for “Band of Brothers,” a 10-part miniseries due this fall about a regiment of paratroopers in World War II. A multimedia production, the site will feature six original videos about early events in the war, a searchable collection of personal reminiscences from veterans and an assortment of text and graphics to amplify the TV episodes.

The site, which is due in early June, shows how companies are developing original programming for the Web to promote their non-Web businesses. Unlike defunct dot-coms DEN and Z.com, these companies don’t need to make money on the sites themselves because the sites are, in effect, advertisements.

The “Band of Brothers” Web programming aims to boost subscriptions to HBO, directly or indirectly, explained Carmi Zlotnik of HBO’s original programming unit. On one level, the creators hope to spur nonsubscribers to sign up for HBO so they can watch the miniseries. But they also want the multimedia package to entice more big-name producers and directors to work with HBO, which in turn would draw more subscribers.

“It’s part of fulfilling our commitment to the filmmakers,” Zlotnik said. “When you’re working with people of the stature of Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg [the executive producers of the miniseries], you have to have big ideas.”

The same concept of programming-as-promotion is behind a number of short films made for the Net. BMW and Ford have commissioned a series of movies that give prominent, or even heroic, roles to their cars.

The Ford movies are housed in a special Ford section of the AtomFilms Web site; BMW’s are on a site created for the occasion, at https://www.bmwfilms.com.

BMW has mounted a blitz of TV and print ads for BMW Films, which is a bit like Pepsi running an ad campaign for its Super Bowl commercials. Then again, that’s just what Pepsi did.

The difference between the car makers’ films and HBO’s new site is that the films stand on their own as entertainment, whereas the “Band of Brothers” material works best as an adjunct to the miniseries. What HBO is doing really falls into the nascent field of “enhanced TV,” an amorphous concept that includes everything from interactive ads to TV shows laced with hidden layers of video, text and graphics.

The various elements of the new HBO site help provide a historical context for the miniseries, or as Zlotnik’s colleague Anne Thomopoulos put it, “putting the audience in the mind-set of being there” during the war years.

They also seek to build a community of veterans and history buffs by compiling “a giant national repository for people’s memories,” including letters and photos, Zlotnik said.

HBO hopes to keep the site going long after the miniseries ends and is talking to a few major museums about a permanent home for the material.

A few years from now, when the cable operators finally fulfill their promise to deploy set-top boxes with high-speed Internet connections, consumers could see many more multimedia entertainment packages like “Band of Brothers.” Just as film companies compete for DVD sales by loading discs with extra footage and commentaries, TV programs might vie for viewers by making such goodies available at the click of a remote.

Whether they do, however, depends on how consumers respond to early efforts such as HBO’s. Like everyone else in the field, HBO is still searching for the right model for how to pay for original programming on the Web.

Today, that model is to subsidize Web programming with subscription-TV revenue and hope that the former drives up the latter. Tomorrow, the model might be to sell subscriptions for the Web sites themselves.

For longtime Internet users, the idea of paying for content is laughable. But as Dr. Emilio Lizardo put it, “Laugh while you can, monkey boy.”

In the early days of cable, few thought the public would be willing to pay for something they could get for free over the air. Now, more than two out of three households pay a steadily rising amount each month for cable or satellite TV.

A few companies are experimenting with subscription programming services on the Web, and Zlotnik envisions a day when HBO joins them. “Whenever it does emerge,” he said, “we’re going to need to be good at it, and we’re starting now.”

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Times staff writer Jon Healey covers the convergence of entertainment and technology.