BEVERLY HILLS, California - What, exactly, is online entertainment? With "entertainment" long defined by the passive mediums of television, film, print, and radio, the group assembled this week at Networked Entertainment World is struggling to adapt the idea of leisure activity to a medium that requires at least a little bit of work and engagement.
"What's entertainment? It's what you do when you're not paid to do something," said Hala Makowska, a vice president at Time Inc. New Media. "To say entertainment means you've got to shut your brain off is a wrong assessment."
Networked Entertainment World, put together by ZD Comdex and the American Film Institute and concluding today, has drawn together an interesting mix of futurists, Hollywoodies, Web developers and marketers to discuss the future of online entertainment.
In a strange twist, it was a panel of futurists - Paul Saffo, authors Douglas Rushkoff and Neal Stephenson, and Disney Imagineer Alan Kay - that opened the conference Thursday with a pessimistic outlook for Web entertainment.
The Web is great for communication and data retrieval, interactivity and "identity discovery," they said, but humans will still be heading down to their local cineplex for entertainment.
"The Net's not about entertainment, or playing with stuff. It's about interacting with each other," Rushkoff said. "Entertainment is hypnosis, it's zoning out ... They don't call it TV programming for nothing."
In another irony, it was the panel of marketers, brought on for a "Show Me the Money" discussion, who were envisioning a future that Stephenson and his ilk used to tout, one where the Net would replace newspapers, TV, and film.
But when the war-weary content providers climbed onstage to tell the audience "What Users Want" in their Net entertainment, they found answers elusive. Panelists included Charlie Fink, chief of America Online's Greenhouse Networks, who had just laid off half the staff of several ballyhooed content projects; Lara Stein of Microsoft's M3P program, which recently killed much of MSN's original content; and Hala Makowska, a vice president at Pathfinder. Having all seen their "TV-style" content crash and burn in recent months, these veterans were vague about what online entertainment does work, but convinced that the paradigms were all wrong.
"People's expectations of entertainment is TV and film. We couldn't come near that," Stein pointed out. Now, she says, they're focused on games, community, interactivity, and news.
More traditional Hollywood types were skeptical of non-narrative based entertainment. Said Robert Tercek, vice president of online programming at Columbia Interactive: "If we as entertainment companies continue to function under the belief that information equals entertainment, then the Web's going to turn into the telephone."
With Web-based video and audio still in their infancies, however, a lot of attention was paid to the growing emergence of broadband. Very soon, the more optimistic panelists postulated, broadband will provide "compelling content" with amazing video and audio.
Intel's Ron Whittier, senior vice president of the company's content group, demonstrated several broadband applications, including an impressive product called Intertainer, which helps provide books, video, music, other shopping, and TV on demand over the Net. Although broadband technology hasn't entered the mainstream (panelists guesstimated 2004), Whittier envisioned that media apps like Intertainer will attract mass audiences and drive broadband demand.
But even if broadband enables high-speed access to traditional narrative entertainment, the question remains: How will that content be viewed - by PC or TV?. While interactive applications like commerce, communication, gaming, and data retrieval are well-suited to PC interfaces, and traditional passive entertainments are best served by TV, the reverse doesn't work.
"The idea of the TV and PC converging is just not sensible," argued Hal Krisbergh, chief of Worldgate Communications. "The TV platform is an entertainment platform and you're not going to watch Sunday night at the movies on your PC. When people ask, 'TV or PC?' what they really mean is, are computing technologies going to make their way into the TV set?"
Regardless of the outcome of convergence, Neal Stephenson pointed out, what does emerge as online entertainment is going to have to be good enough to compete with TV, film, books, and radio for the tiny slice of leisure time that consumers have today.
"Most of the Internet is crap," said Alan Kay. "But how good is the Internet and its convolvement with computers going to be when it's trying to be good?" But he added, optimistically, "When it's trying to be good, it's very good indeed."
