How Digital Entertainment Network soared on the passion of its young true believers and fell into the squalor of sexual abuse charges, bankruptcy, and an FBI investigation. A tale in Internet time.
"Good? It was beautiful!"
Amalia Terrazas is slouched on a white plastic café chair, out-of-doors on a sun-dappled and drowsy California afternoon, a block from the boardwalk in Venice. All around her, young people skate and chatter and drift toward the sea, their thoughts most likely on sun and surf and the blazing bright future. But Terrazas is talking about how a dream died.
"They were revolutionary," she says, with a zealot's passion. "They were doing something that nobody else was doing -- at least not like that." She is mourning the demise of Digital Entertainment Network, and four months after the company closed its doors, she is still eager to talk about what might have been. "How many people are at the forefront?" she asks wistfully. "When I came on board, it was the best thing that ever happened to me."
Digital Entertainment Network, or DEN, as it was known, may have been the most vaunted, most talked-about launch in the short, gory, glorious history of the Net. Formed in 1998, DEN went on to attract some $65 million in investor backing. Hyped by media outlets large and small, DEN was everybody's pick of the pack, a startup that promised to reinvent television as an online video stream aimed straight at the 41 million Gen-Yers between 14 and 24 years old. This audience would be able to turn to DEN for everything from extreme-sports programs to Christian fare, from youth-oriented news to gay soap operas. More important, perhaps, is that each of these viewers, armed with only a modem and a phone line, could become a foot soldier in the great crusade to snatch the future from the wrinkling hands of the Boomers.
"The boob tube zombie television is dead," DEN's prospectus crowed. "Digital Entertainment Network will create the last network."
From the start, DEN was fueled by high-octane hubris. Not for one moment did its founders -- Marc Collins-Rector, Chad Shackley, and Brock Pierce -- doubt that they could remake the face of modern entertainment, as surely as the first black-and-white Philco in the living room redefined the life of the '50s family. They were true believers, it seemed, and for a few dazzling months many people believed right along with them.
But that was before DEN became a soap opera in its own right -- before the lawsuits and recriminations, before the charges of deceit and excess and uncurbed appetites, and before a boy named Daniel S. sat down to compose a suicide note detailing how DEN had destroyed his life. In a lawsuit he filed, and in reports and complaints that have begun leaking into lawyers' offices and press bureaus throughout Los Angeles, Digital Entertainment Network the artistic-technological wonder was transformed into the DEN of infamy, where young boys, drugged and doped and zombified, were hired and used and bribed and threatened by adult men.
In the end, DEN wasn't the synergistic, revolutionary blend of youthful idealism and technological wizardry that sounded so good to so many not too long ago. It was, to put it cynically, simply show business as usual. And these days, the three men who were once so vocally behind it aren't saying much of anything. Although hordes of reporters, lawyers, and, no doubt, investors would like to talk to them, Collins-Rector, Shackley, and Pierce are nowhere to be found.
Think back to the fall of 1998, when the dot-com gold rush was in the first throes of its mad growth and the wonders of broadband were being loudly touted. While today only a small portion of Americans -- about 22 million -- have access to high-speed services at work, home, or school, the prospect of ultra-fast, ultrarealistic video and audio had captured the Web community's imagination. Perfect video on every desk was just around the corner. And the old TV networks were still missing the point: 30-second clips from last night's news, parceled out at an excruciating 56Kbps, were not what this revolution was all about.
