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The Tiffany Network and avatars. Talk about an oxymoron.
Yet that's exactly where venerable CBS is heading. The network is said to be close to announcing an agreement this week with Communities.com to become the first broadcast network to stock its chat rooms with avatars -- graphical representations of visitors to its site that can move around, perform tasks, and interact with other visitors.
This from a network whose main site doesn't even have any obvious chat rooms.
"CBS has been labeled as being behind the times, but this is a very, very aggressive move," said Larry Samuels, Communities.com's president and chief executive.
Visitors to a CBS chat room won't just see words scrolling across a screen, Samuels said.
They'll enter the graphical representation of a room tied to a CBS show, then pick a cyber-persona to interact with other people. A visitor to, say, David Letterman's chat room might theoretically see a picture of the show's set and pick from among 20 identities to roam around it and talk to other people.
CBS will retain control over the identities its visitors pick -- preventing them from creating pornographic images and other avatars that may be offensive to mainstream visitors.
And Samuels doesn't think it's likely visitors will get their chance to play virtual Dave for a while -- although Dave himself and other talent could conceivably show up to lead a chat session now and then.
Samuels stressed that the chat rooms, including one for Letterman, have yet to be designed. But he also said that CBS plans to create chat rooms for many of its mainstream shows over the next six months, spanning prime time, daytime, and late-night TV.
A CBS official declined comment.
CBS didn"t invent avatars in TV chat rooms. Communities.com's Palace software already powers chat rooms for Comedy Central and ZDTV.
Those sites and others have helped propel Communities.com's growth from 40,000 active users a year ago to more than 600,000 today. But CBS is the first of the traditional broadcast networks to take the plunge, Samuels said.
Communities.com already has an in to Hollywood. Michael Crichton, executive producer for ER and the author of the book that spawned Jurassic Park, is an investor in the company.
As a corporate entity, CBS is hardly Internet-shy. It has substantial stakes in some of the most popular sites, including CBS Sportsline, CBS Marketwatch, and Hollywood Online.
But its broadcast TV Internet profile has been lower than competitors NBC and ABC.
"These types of avatars are more compelling to younger and more tech-savvy audiences at channels like MTV, Fox, or WB," said Peter Clemente, a vice president at Cyber Dialogue, an Internet market researcher.
"Those are the communities who are into avatars, not people who are watching Everybody Loves Raymond or CBS News.
Samuels prefers to see CBS' adoption of avatars as part of a natural progression on the Internet from "page"-based communication to "place"-based communication, and a precursor to full-fledged video conferencing.
"No network has ever taken their brands and graphically extended them into this type of environment," he said. "It's a very cool thing."
