It was an inspiring message for the Magic Kingdom's newest member and online hub. What followed over the next two years, however, was anything but a fairy-tale ending.
Andy Bensky remembers the Eisner visit well. "He said, 'We're going to form the Go Network, and we're going to put the full marketing muscle of the Walt Disney Company behind everything we do,'" said Bensky, a founder of Infoseek. "The closest that came was the Go Network logo that would appear on ESPN during games or on the ticker. We got no cooperation from the Disney side at all."
So much for the highly anticipated marriage of television and the Internet. The Disney-Infoseek relationship, which officially ended this month when a new search engine was chosen to power the latest incarnation of Go.com, underscores the myriad problems in the major TV networks' efforts to create a presence on the Web.
Confusion over strategy, internal politics, negligence from executive offices and a fundamental lack of understanding about new media have contributed to the failure of television's online initiatives, according to current and former executives from the online and offline arms of various US-based network ventures. And after some high-profile false starts--most notably by Disney's Go.com and General Electric's NBC Internet--any moves by the TV networks online have fallen into virtual paralysis.
"It does seem across the media industry that people are entering holding patterns in the hope of someone coming up with a better economic model" on the Internet, said Nicholas Weinstock, a spokesman for News Corporation, owner of the Fox network. "The jury's out."
For the most part, the networks began their online initiatives by taking one of two paths. Some created divisions that would go public and tap Internet wealth, experimenting with new ways to reach viewers in the process. Others held back and took minority stakes in different companies, hoping to profit from the Internet investment craze when those partners went public.
Neither course has proven particularly effective, especially since the value of almost all online companies has plummeted in the last year. Those that did attract attention became known more for their drawbacks than for their advantages or innovations.
At bottom, those in the industry say, the networks were never able to reconcile the fundamental difference between the two media: Television automatically delivers programming and information to viewers, while the Internet requires people to ask for information through their own initiative.
One former NBCi executive said the confusion has been so pronounced that online media insiders began calling the company "NBCy"--as in, why did the network create this online division if it was going to ignore it?
If they were confused about the Web, network executives were absolutely sure about one thing: They all feared the encroachment of Internet media companies, whose market values soared into the stratosphere before the bubble burst.
"A lot of their strategy was driven by fear and me-too-ism," said one former NBCi executive. "It wasn't driven by, 'Let's sit down and see if we can create a company.' I don't think people looked at the ways that it could be complementary to the core business."
