Hollywood tech: It’s alive

Hollywood is dead. Long live Hollywood! For those who think the demise of Pop.com, DEN, Pseudo.com and others spells doom for the interactive tinsel set, this year’s Digital Hollywood exhibition in Beverly Hills, California, offers a strong counter.

Exhibitors overflowed into a tent hastily pitched next to a pool, and sessions on Web-based film, music, animation and other art forms were well attended. What’s different this year is who’s exhibiting. Other than a few stragglers like Atom Films, the exhibitors at the show are overwhelmingly “heavy metal” companies - those whose products form or enable the broadband network over which next-generation media flows.

And their target audience is largely those oft-maligned and frequently written-off behemoths, the studios. “We’re focused on helping companies with creative assets figure out how to monetize those assets,” said Jeffrey Stern, chief executive for LineUp.com, a Los Angeles Web content aggregation site that launched at the show. “Having loads of page views isn’t enough any more.”

For the most part, the people who own that content - and showed up at the show in droves - are representatives of studios with huge film, music, television and video libraries that they’re figuring out how to deploy on the Net. And the demise of all those media content plays excited little more than bemused comments from attendees. Here’s a nutshell view of some of the exhibitors:

Real Networks: The Seattle streaming-media giant ruled Digital Hollywood, from Rob Glaser’s 760-kb-per-second Godzilla 2000 clip during his keynote presentation to the company’s giant exhibition space fitted out like a movie theater, which included a ticket booth and giveaways. Inside, audiences piled into theater seats in a makeshift screening room to watch digitally projected film clips running at 1.5MB per second that Real says approaches DVD quality. (Microsoft was nowhere to be seen among exhibitors, although its WebTV arm was a show sponsor).

ZapMedia: The eagerly anticipated box-for-all-media will be officially released in select eastern and northeastern U.S. Circuit City stores in December, according to officials for the Atlanta-based company at the booth. The ZapMedia box - which enables users to stream audio and video, download MP3s to a 30 gigabyte hard drive, and play CDs and DVDs through their home entertainment system - has a pre-market order price of $599, but will likely sell for less once retailers get their hands on it. The box is equipped with Ethernet and modem connections, enabling users to hook up it up either through their cable/DSL lines or telephone lines.

A version under development will be able to store and download video directly from TV, a la TiVo and Replay.

Interactive Video Technologies: The Los Angeles and New York-based company is reeling in some major-league media clients like HBO and Showtime with its “sync-it” technology, which enables websites to synchronize streaming video content with companion text that scrolls in another window. In the closely followed Sopranos site, for example, the mobster family tree synchronizes with video streams embedded in the tree.

Cyberworlds: The Toronto company, which makes software for slapping together virtual Web worlds like Lego pieces, is one of the few exhibitors that has a thriving content play as a client - Stan Lee Media, which uses the technology to populate its comic book world. Studios like Warner Bros. and Universal Studios pay the company as much as $200,000 for unlimited use o f the software to populate their own animated universes. “We actually have a business model,” enthused Sharleen Sy, the company’s creative director and co-founder. “Can you believe it?”

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