As Discovery orbited the Earth early last month, millions of people visited Yahoo, which runs the most popular news site on the Internet, to see the nail-biting conclusion to the troubled shuttle mission. Could NASA find a way to bring the astronauts home safely?
Despite the drama and the huge number of people flocking to the site, Lloyd Braun, the television impresario hired last year to oversee Yahoo's media operation, was not satisfied. All Yahoo was offering its users, Braun fumed, was a white page filled with links to other sites on the Web.
He made his frustration clear to Scott Moore, who had defected from Microsoft to run Yahoo's news operation. Within a few hours, Moore orchestrated a quick fix to make the shuttle page comply with Braun's mantras: "more immersive," "more engaging," and most of all, more original programming.
PHOTO: THE NEW YORK TIMES
Braun's handiwork is just starting to be seen at Yahoo. And as he increasingly puts his stamp on the company, the rest of the media -- both old and new -- are watching carefully, if not nervously.
Offbeat sensibility
When he was chairman of ABC's entertainment group, Braun had a penchant for big offbeat concepts like Lost, which just won the Emmy for best drama. At Yahoo, why not create programs in genres that have worked on TV but are not present on the Web? Sitcoms, dramas, talk shows, even a short daily humorous take on the news much like Jon Stewart's The Daily Show are in the works.
There will be elaborate attention-grabbing events and video-heavy programs in nearly every category of content Yahoo offers, from sports to health. The first is called Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone, an audio-video-photo-blog-chat room, run by Sites, an experienced foreign correspondent, who plans to visit many war zones over the next year.
All this Hollywood frenzy raises a question: Is Terry Semel, Yahoo's chief executive and the former co-head of Warner Brothers, trying to turn Yahoo into the interactive studio of future?
The short answer is yes, but Semel's ambitions are far bigger and more complex than that. He wants Yahoo to be seen as akin to Warner's parent, Time Warner, which mixes content from the likes of Warner's studios and CNN, with distribution, like its cable systems. Yahoo is both of those and a lot of software, too.
Four pillars
Semel describes a strategy built on four pillars: First, is search, of course, to fend off Google, which has become the fastest-growing Internet company. Next comes community, as he calls the vast growth of content contributed by everyday users and semiprofessionals like bloggers. Third is the professionally created content that Braun oversees -- made both by Yahoo and other traditional media providers. And last is personalization technology, to help users sort through vast choices to find what interests them.
Madison Avenue's rush to advertise online is feeding this activity, both the simple but highly targeted text ads that flash on Web searches and the Internet versions of television commercials.
Increasingly, Semel and others are finding that the long promised convergence of television and computers is happening not by way of elaborate systems created by cable companies, but from the bottom up as video clips on the Internet become easier to use and more interesting.
Already, video search engines, run by Yahoo and others, have indexed more than 1 million clips, and only now are the big media outlets like Viacom and Time Warner moving to put some of their quality video online.
"The basis for content on the Internet is now shifting from text to video," said Michael Wolf, a partner at McKinsey & Company, a consulting firm. "This allows advertisers to take advantage of the kind of branding advertising they are used to on television."
Semel thinks that his approach of combining content and technology could well make Yahoo the place people go first when they decide what to watch, as well as where to surf.
"You are not going to have 1,000 channels; you will have an unlimited number of channels," Semel said. "So you aren't going to use a clicker to change channels."
Yahoo has no shortage of competitors. Google and Microsoft are aggregating video content of others, but not making their own. Big media companies are starting to package and produce online video programming, like new offerings from MTV, owned by Viacom, and ESPN, a unit of Disney.
Time Warner's AOL unit is Yahoo's most direct and ambitious competitor in video programming. AOL attracted a lot of attention with its interactive presentation of the Live8 concerts last month, and it is developing offerings, including a reality show about the music business and an entertainment news show.
Difficult competition
Indeed, Wolf predicts that Yahoo may face difficulty in competing with the integrated media companies like Time Warner.
"The television programmers now have the upper hand because they have a great deal of content. They can use it for a variety of purposes and promote it on their existing programs."
So Braun's job is straightforward: invent a medium that unites the showmanship of television with the interactivity of the Internet. Find a way to combine the best of Hollywood's talent with the voice of the masses. And do it all before the biggest media and technology companies get there first.
The afternoon after Braun complained about Yahoo's shuttle site, Moore was able to show his colleagues the fix at a brainstorming retreat at a resort in Santa Barbara, California: He had replaced Yahoo's trademark spare white graphic design with a deep space gray page. And instead of only links, the top of the page had a big box containing Yahoo's own video coverage of the shuttle right at the top. When the feed was live, a big headline trumpeted the action.
Braun was grateful for the fast action, but he spent much of that afternoon pushing his team to think of how Yahoo could cover future space missions, once his media group team and their software was fully in place.
"I said if we would do this six months from now, think of all the things we could have done," Braun recalled.
"Should we have shown the launch from all these different camera angles?" he said. "Should we have the user go on the space walk with the astronauts so we literally watch live what they see, monitoring their vital signs? Should we be a fly on the wall, monitoring the conversations back and forth?"
Throwing out ideas a mile a minute, he talked about ways to bring in more information about the personal lives and families of the astronauts "so we are really connected to these people."
And he looked for ways that Yahoo users could add their own views and other content to the package.
Boundless energy
Braun's boundless energy and creative enthusiasm were the hallmark of his time at ABC as well.
"Lloyd was all about there are no rules," said Thom Sherman, who worked for Braun as the head of ABC's drama programs. "He was all about the big idea, not about things down the middle."
Michael Davies, the executive producer of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, said: "Lloyd has no creative restraint whatsoever. He is almost creatively reckless."
Braun, who turns 47 this month, grew up amid some of the most creative personalities of the 1960s and 1970s. His father, David Braun, a leading music lawyer, would invite clients like Bob Dylan, Neil Diamond and George Harrison to his home in New Hyde Park, New York.
Braun initially followed his father into entertainment law, but ultimately found contract negotiations too confining and moved into production, first at Brillstein-Grey, where he helped create The Sopranos, and then at Disney and its ABC network.
Braun's fondness for expensive, quirky ideas caused frequent conflicts with Disney's management, co-workers said.
Disney management's "style was to put the pressure downward, and Lloyd felt a lot of that," Sherman recalled. Braun tried to fend off what he saw as meddling and to allow his team to work independently.
"He said let me try it," Sherman recalled. "If I fail fire me, but let me have the reins."
In April last year, Disney management called Braun's bluff, firing him and Susan Lyne, the entertainment unit's president.
Mixed image
While Braun's willingness to fight for the ideas of his creative colleagues won him loyalty at ABC, his image at Yahoo is decidedly more mixed. Some inside and outside Yahoo criticize him for a slow start. And there has been griping as entrenched Yahoo workers in its Sunnyvale headquarters were ordered to move to Santa Monica and report to new bosses plucked from AOL, CBS and Fox as well as Microsoft. Several key executives quit and others asked to be reassigned.
"Sometimes you have to take a step back in order to take three steps forward," Braun said. Yahoo, he said, was organized around running discrete sections of its vast site and had no process for developing creative ideas.
"At ABC, if I had an idea, like Lost, the moment we decided to do it, we knew the process to take it to writers, get a pilot, ba da da. Here none of that exists. The whole infrastructure has to be created."
When he arrived at Yahoo, Braun immediately bonded with Bharath Kadaba, an Indian-born engineer who leads Yahoo's media technology group. Braun, hardly a techie, asked Kadaba to explain the history of the Internet, how computers work and to show him what Yahoo's programmers were actually doing.
Braun has never been shy about reaching out for help, like the time he hired Fred Silverman, the programming master who propelled ABC from last to first place in the mid-1970s, with shows like Starsky & Hutch, to teach him the art of network scheduling.
These are lessons he says he is applying at Yahoo. Indeed, he is planning a schedule of programs next year, much as a network might think about a fall season.
For this year, a handful of programs will emerge, in addition to the Kevin Sites site. Braun's group has introduced Blog for Hope, a series of celebrity blogs about coping with cancer.
And later this year it will introduce an adventure travel program with Richard Bangs, a self-styled trip leader, who had worked at MSN.
"I come from a medium which allows you to represent a pretty static linear picture," Braun said. "It's very passive." At Yahoo, he does not plan any half-hour or hourlong programs, but shorter segments that users can assemble into longer experiences of their own choosing.
A.D.D. Generation
The Internet reflects what Braun calls "the A.D.D. [attention deficit disorder] generation," where people watch TV, read something online, chat on a cell phone and send instant messages -- all at the same time. He talks of short, frequent video segments, surrounded by other information that users can interact with in their own way and contribute to as well.
One of Yahoo's weapons, Braun says, is that it can personalize information for the interests of each user, such as its My Yahoo page and the song recommendations provided to users of its music service.
Braun is weaving this technology into a video player Yahoo will introduce near the end of the year.
"It will almost be like a television set," Braun said, except as people watch one program, on the center of the player, other areas will offer additional programming choices, based on their past viewing habits. It will let them use Yahoo's video search to find programs from amateur videographers and video bloggers. And it will, of course, promote the glitzy shows Braun is creating.
"People want the freedom to do exactly what they want to do," he said. "But they also like to be programmed to, and reminded of the different things that exist. Yahoo is in a position to do both of those."
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