Take a moment to savor the pre-bandwidth days of the Web. Our deep-down body thirsts may be quenched when the digital deluge finally rolls in, but the rain-dancing will be sorely missed. The Web of today lacks velocity. It lacks mass. Everybody knows both are just around the next corner - maybe the next block - and the dizzying mix of anticipation and desperation for these deliverance mechanisms hides between the lines of almost every ambitious Internet business plan. But in the trickling present, it's like playing rock and roll without an electric guitar. It takes some imagination to pull it off.
Last week's not-ready-for-prime-time player was Digital Hollywood. Again. AOL's Greenhouse Network announced the Entertainment Asylum, the new project from the creators of the Spot and Brandon Tartikoff that promises to burn "four times more than AOL has ever spent developing an original content brand." A little like Sidewalk. A little like Mr. Showbiz. A little like TV Guide. It's a "category killer." If the category is "venture capital," it may well be.
Then comes Berkeley's Reel.com, the "planet's biggest movie store" (Amazon.com meets Blockbuster, for those of you who prefer conceptual triangulation). Reel.com's genuine brainstorm is to offer Cinema U, a virtual set of classes on film theory and practice wherein online lectures and discussion are offered for a nominal sum, plus the rental fees. Charging people for an education is a radical concept that shouldn't work but somehow does. Fee-based mailing lists are a terrific idea. Renting movies by mail isn't.
If this were 1999, both sites could be huge. If our VCRs were running Windows, Reel.com could be a solid niche-player, delivering movies and syllabuses on demand. People might ignore the academic dissertations, but those were just a hook to entice rentals of the films of John Woo. All of them. In one convenient debit, preferably. Ditto the Entertainment Asylum, which is, after all, a guide. Would you channel-surf your big-screen TV for URLs so you could Net surf them later on your computer? OK, you probably already do, but that's not the point. Worse yet, it's not the point-and-click. And it has to be, and will be, but only eventually.
When the map becomes the terrain, when the satisfaction loses its delay and becomes instant, the scheming might finally cease to outpace reality. In the meantime - minus bandwidth, minus interest, minus practicality - it's all Las Vegas, a dry mecca for luck-hungry gamblers. And if you feel a splash on your leg, don't be distracted. It's just the trickling present.
This article appeared originally in HotWired.
