For anyone still harboring the illusion that the World Wide Web is going to overtake the television set anytime soon, Buzz Potamkin has a story to share.
Potamkin, a former executive producer at Hanna-Barbera Productions who helped develop the 1980s hit cartoon The Berenstain Bears, left Hollywood three years ago to produce an animated series called WhirlGirl for Visionary Media, a Web site based in New York.
WhirlGirl seemed like an allusion to what Potamkin's company promised to do to old media companies. The main character, Kia Cross, nerd by day and superheroine by night, prevents an evil media empire from controlling viewers' lives.
But for Potamkin, it was much easier in cartoonland than it has been in real life.
"At first we thought we would be a destination site that would attract millions of people and advertising, then we tried licensing our shows to other sites like Showtime," Potamkin said. "What we've learned is that the audience is just not out there on the Web yet."
Potamkin is still the chief executive of Visionary Media, one of the dotcoms that vowed to circumvent the major networks. But now, Visionary is among the few online animated companies remaining, and it is trying to survive by turning to the very networks it promised to make obsolete.
Most online television companies that once sprouted in San Francisco and Silicon Alley in Manhattan have faded out, abandoning their loft studios and selling their equipment at dirt-cheap prices. When Pseudo.com, the high-profile online television and animation company, went out of business last summer, it seemed the sector would collapse.
Critics say these companies miscalculated how long it would take for high-speed Internet connections, which make watching television on the Web practical, to spread into homes and offices. Experts now say the all-purpose box that delivers the Web and television and monitors the heating in the house is a long way from reality.
"It may never happen," said David Card, an analyst at Jupiter Media Metrix, the New York Internet research firm. "We are still feeling our way around it and certainly have not come up with an online television business model."
Two of the most prominent Web animation companies left standing, Visionary and Bullseye Art, both based in Manhattan, are trying to stay alive by using the technology and techniques they developed for Web animation to create broadcast television programming more quickly and cheaply.
Visionary and Bullseye both started as Web animation companies in 1997, with hopes that they would become destination sites where viewers would come for animated programming, and that profits would flow from the advertising. But as it became clear that they could not attract the advertising dollars, both companies adjusted their business plans and began licensing cartoons to other Web sites.
Visionary landed a deal to produce weekly episodes of WhirlGirl to be broadcast on Showtime's Sho.com, and Bullseye was able to place its cartoons at Razorfish Studios, Icebox.com, Atom Films and other sites. But the companies ran into trouble last year as the economy began to slow and the companies they were working with began to reduce spending.
"People were eager to produce content for the Web, they had the talent and the tools to do it, and people were going to the sites," said Mark Schneider, the president and self-proclaimed designated adult at Bullseye.
RSS