LOS ANGELES -- Silicon Valley, beware. The Digital Coast is preparing to challenge your position at the top of the Internet food chain.
That's one of the key messages at the first Digital Coast '99 conference developed by the same brash New York entrepreneur who launched the Big Apple's Silicon Alley Reporter several years ago.
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Most conferences exploring Hollywood's relationship with the Internet "are excuses for nerds from the Valley to come down and hang out at the Sky Bar. It's like their bus trip ," said Jason McCabe Calacanis, the twentysomething editor of the newly launched Digital Coast Reporter magazine and Digital Coast Weekly Web site.
The sold-out conference -- presented in association with the Director's Guild of America, Variety, and the National Association of Television Programming Executives -- is aimed squarely at Hollywood programming executives.
While technology will be a subtext at the conference, the real story will be how Hollywood's content will play on the Net, Calacanis said.
Thus, the program pairs Spider-Man creator Stan Lee, who's launching his own online super-hero universe, with Rob Burgess, the CEO of Macromedia. And Mark Cuban of Broadcast.com is joining a discussion about the future of video on the Web.
Other panelists include the creator of "Buffy, the Vampire Slayer" and the producer of Godzilla. The head of television at Creative Artists Agency will discuss how Hollywood's skills in movie and TV production will translate to the Web.
The assumption, Calacanis said, is that Hollywood is here to stay, a presumption that one might doubt at many Internet content conferences, where big media companies are often derided as dinosaurs soon to be replaced by the MP3.coms and the Broadcast.coms of the world.
That presumption "is a very immature and simplistic view of what's happening," Calacanis said. "Anyone who's been around for a while realizes these companies aren't going anywhere. Our tagline is: Hollywood is changing. Let's talk about it."
The pending merger between Viacom and CBS is, at least partly, about building the two companies' presence internationally on the Internet, Calacanis said. Viacom owns properties such as MTV, Paramount Pictures and Blockbuster, while CBS owns stakes in promising Internet properties such as CBS Marketwatch and CBS SportsLine.
In the emerging landscape, Los Angeles and New York will be the dominant suppliers of Internet content, while Silicon Valley will control the development of the Web's infrastructure, he said.
As a sign of his belief in that vision, Calacanis said he's renting an apartment in Santa Monica and spending a third of his time there.
