in and of itself, not just tied to an offline movie or TV show."
Figuring out what to do online took longer than expected. "For three years we focused on listening to the consumer," Banister says. One experiment, "Hip Clips," offered consumers "whole entertainment thoughts" and unexpectedly drew millions of pageviews. The line between marketing and pure entertainment was further blurred with the development of brand extensions like Rosie O'Donnell's "Interactive Mondays" on AOL, ERLive.com and Seinfeld.com. But Banister says those early days were "relatively inarticulate in terms of a real entertainment experience," he admits. "We knew the day would come when we'd cross over a technology threshold that would allow us to create really immersive entertainment experiences."
Entertaindom began in the fall of 1997 as a "skunkworks" project. By March 1999, the Warner Bros. team was weeks away from launching when Time Warner CEO Gerald Levin came to Burbank for a demo. "He laughed," Banister says simply.
"We saw some five and 10-minute programs ... just as funny as anything you see on 'Saturday Night Live,'" Levin told an audience at the Variety/Schroders Big Picture Media conference soon afterward. But the launch was put on hold to allow time to integrate Entertaindom into Time Warner's emerging "vertical portal" structure.
Whether Entertaindom catches a ride on the second wave of online entertainment depends in part on Time Warner's ability to overcome its past corporate heavy-handedness on the Web.
"Time Warner is an institution weighed down by its history," one former insider notes. "It's not a company that has been able to move quickly or that embraced the Net with any kind of conviction."
The recent departure of Jake Winebaum from Disney's online unit underscores a key challenge facing large media companies like Time Warner: Matching the kind of wealth-generating opportunities and entrepreneurial environments that can be had in a dot-com company like Yahoo or eBay. Rumors have circulated for months in media circles that Time Warner might spin off its Internet assets to solve that problem and take advantage of the hot Internet IPO market.
Richard Bressler, CEO of Time Warner's Digital Media unit, agrees that the company will have to adapt "as we always have" to attract the best people.
"Clearly part of that is going to be breaking some of the eggs about the way we have compensated people historically," he says. But the bigger issues involve corporate culture. Says one, "The fun and nimbleness of doing these businesses outside of the large media umbrella," says one former insider, "is going to be even harder for them to duplicate than some of the financial/structural issues."
Inevitably rumors have circulated that Banister might follow the lead of Winebaum or former CNN/fn President Lou Dobbs and leave Time Warner for more entrepreneurial pursuits. For the record, Banister says that "money alone is not reason enough for me to give up my passion."
The interview ends about three in the afternoon, as Banister flees to the Marina and the Koan. Over the weekend, he takes the boat on a maiden cruise to Catalina Island, and has the "double good luck" of being escorted by two separate schools of dolphins along the way. Banister is betting that Entertaindom will receive a similarly inspiring reception.
It's a Zen Thing
Given Jim Banister's interest in Eastern mysticism, it seems fitting to summarize his vision for online entertainment in five Zen-like koans:
Koan #1: When is narrow also broad?
Translation: Broadband isn't about pipes, it's about experience.
Solution: Employ "pseudo-broadband" technologies like Flash and "broadband-bridging" technologies like WebDVD to deliver the broadband experience now.
Koan #2: What is the sound of one fan clapping?
Translation: Protect and manage intellectual property.
Solution: AcmeCity is more than just a community-building resource for Warner Bros. Online; it is also a strategy for managing the use of Time Warner intellectual property. WebDVD also doubles as a way to control the distribution of intellectual property, since much of Entertaindom's video content
