Jim Banister may not be one of the pirates of Silicon Valley, but he nonetheless cuts a swashbuckling figure. Standing 6 feet 4 inches, sporting a black beard, wearing an earring and favoring open-neck white cotton shirts, Banister certainly looks like a pirate - especially at the wheel of his newly purchased 45-foot yacht, the Koan, named for the paradoxes Zen devotees meditate upon to help them achieve enlightenment.
For the past four years, as executive VP of Warner Bros. Online, Banister has focused on the riddle of Web entertainment. His proposed answer: Entertaindom, Time Warner (TWTC)'s soon-to-be-launched entertainment site.
Banister arrives at his fifth-floor Burbank office for a two-hour interview bearing fries and chicken-breast sandwiches. Earlier that day he suggested moving the interview to the Koan - an idea that got quickly nixed. A far-ranging talker, Banister is hard enough to corral in his landlocked office, let alone amid the distracting expansiveness of the open sea.
As Banister sits down to his fast-food feast, his office looks like a microcosm of Entertaindom: Looney Tunes dolls are everywhere. The Tasmanian Devil rests atop a bookcase. Spiderman is poised on the desktop. Squashed on a shelf of technology and management texts is a fat volume called Suzanne White's The New Astrology. A retro-looking Missile Command game stands in the corner. The office reflects the restless and eclectic mind of this good-natured bad boy of the new-media world.
When entertaindom launches in late August or early October - Time Warner wants to launch either before or after the start of the fall television season in September - the site will be one of five Internet "hubs" replacing Time Warner's ill-fated Pathfinder. Entertaindom, Banister says, will offer consumers a mixture of "service programming," consisting of news, listings and databases and "pure destination programming."
Banister and his boss, Jim Moloshok, promise "great heaps" of video, animation, music and game-based content. "We're not a portal," Banister explains. "We're a cul-de-sac where people come out to play and be entertained."
On the informational side, Entertaindom will feature Driveon.com, a "broadband interactive show" that offers video clips, behind-the-scenes interviews with celebrities and other TV magazine-style offerings. Time Warner's entertainment-news assets, such as Entertainment Weekly and People, are being integrated into Entertaindom, complete with a Java-based ticker that provides breaking news.
On the destination side, Entertaindom is already front-loaded with weeks' worth of short-form entertainment from several outside digital-content companies. The site has announced partnerships with both Macromedia (MACR)'s Shockwave.com and Seattle-based AtomFilms, which will have its own channel on Entertaindom.
Warner Bros Online joined former Universal (UEIC) Studios chief Frank Biondi's WaterView Partners and the London-based Arts Alliance in investing in AtomFilms, which distributes short films over the Internet. Original content offerings will be bolstered by old favorites drawn from Warner Bros.' vast animation, film and TV libraries.
What will separate Entertaindom from its competitors, says Moloshok, is "made-for-online content designed for the mainstream, not for four blocks in SoHo." Banister believes that animated, claymation and live-action shorts are well-suited to the Web, which he dubs "short-attention-span theater."
While the disaster that was Time Warner's now-defunct Pathfinder site does not exactly inspire confidence in this new approach to the Web, some outsiders think that this time, Warner's got the right formula.
Peter Clemente, an analyst with Cyber Dialogue, an Internet research firm, says Warner is ideally positioned to launch an entertainment hub. He says the studio has the two critical components needed for a successful online business: "strong relationships with large communities of consumers and long-standing relationships with advertisers."
In an attempt to leverage both, Warner in January launched AcmeCity, a GeoCities-style online community. The site offers fans of Time Warner properties like the film Wild Wild West or TV shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer a place where they can make legal use of Time Warner content to create their own fan pages. At last count, the site had 300,000 homesteaders, with 900,000 pages
