Walt Disney, ambitious as ever, plans to pen a new page in the brief history of the World Wide Web.
In concert with technology partners Infoseek and Starwave, the world's largest media company is planning to launch a so-called portal Website this year. It will be designed to attract "ordinary" consumers (i.e., non Web-heads) whom Disney believes are ready to get online. If it works, the company hopes it will mark the transition of the Internet from a loss-making techie enclave to a huge and profitable mass medium with Mickey Mouse ears.
The question is: is this Fantasia, or could Disney emerge as the Sleeping Beauty of the Internet?
The company sounds committed enough. In a sweeping declaration of intent, Mr Jake Winebaum, chairman of Disney's co-ordinating Buena Vista Internet Group, called the project "mission-critical" to the entertainment group. Usually when Disney moves into a business, it is a sign that that business is becoming highly organised, user friendly and profitable.
The basis for the grand design is last week's acquisition of a minority stake in Infoseek, a Silicon Valley operation with annual revenues of about $50 million (£35.7 million). Disney is not alone in buying into this sort of business. Web portals - also known as "supersites" and featuring news, entertainment, messaging services, directories and electronic shopping - have suddenly become hot properties.
Telecommunications group AT&T tried but failed last week to forge a link with the biggest portal of them all, America Online (the world's leading online service provider). NBC, General Electric's television subsidiary, has taken a stake in Snap!, a portal operated by Cnet, a San Francisco Internet media group. As Mr Winebaum said, he assumed all other entertainment groups were talking with the likes of Yahoo! and Excite, so-called search engines (indexes to the internet), which offer one-stop access to the myriad services available online. Analysts have wondered if Disney might next go after the biggest service providers, such as Yahoo! or AOL.
The issue is whether old media's sudden appetite for "new media" properties makes sense. It should gain them expertise. While Disney and others from traditional film, TV and publishing businesses have tried to penetrate cyberspace before, portal operators such as Yahoo! are outshining them.
More important, the timing seems right. Portals are transforming the Internet from a chaotic collection of thousands of Websites into something more manageable and familiar, for consumers and investors, by capturing large audiences and establishing themselves as the primary internet "channels". They seem to be preparing the Internet for the big media companies.
Portals are beginning to pose a challenge to television, radio and print media. "Portal sites are global, interactive and transactive," say analysts at Zona Research, an Internet market research firm. "No other media distribution network has those properties." They add it is conceivable Disney's new portal may some day produce more revenues, from advertising and from shopping transaction fees, than its television channels.
With virtually all leading Internet media focused on creating portals and the biggest software companies jumping on the bandwagon - Netscape with its Netcenter and Microsoft with its "start.com" collection of Web services - it is tempting to see this as the maturing of the Internet.
There might be another explanation: it could be a technology fad. There have been several attempts to rationalise online services and turn them into a more profitable mass medium. The first two, proprietary online services and interactive television, failed.
A year ago came "push" technology. Media companies were excited by the prospect of delivering news and entertainment to desktop computers in much the same way they broadcast to TV sets. Internet users rejected push technology, too. It was less convenient than turning on the TV channels it imitated. It also put the information provider, rather than the user, in charge.
If portal Websites are to avoid the fate of their predecessors, they must tread carefully. To generate revenues they have to draw Internet users and keep them within their cyberproperties - looking at advertisements and purchasing products - rather than clicking to another Website. Yet the essential quality of the World Wide Web is that it enables users to click underlined "links" and hop from one site to another. If portal sites discourage this, they risk going down the same path as "push" technology. Moreover, while traditional media companies may like the look of the Internet, with its growing user base and increasing concentration on a dozen or so sites, new technologies could soon change the landscape. A trend worrying conventional publishers is the aggregation of information and services by third-party Websites. Using search technologies, these services pull the best information from hundreds of Websites and compile useful collections, without creating original content.
Another potential challenge to portals is "robot" technology. These automated helpers scour Websites to find the lowest cost airline ticket or a rare book, jumping from Website to Website, ignoring adverts and other revenue-generating services that such electronic storefronts might offer.
Disney's endorsement of Internet portals could have a powerful influence. According to Harry Motro, Infoseek's chief executive, his and similar companies had successfully added services such as chat and commerce, but lacked the "editorial sensibility" knowledge of mass-market consumer tastes and promotional clout - that are the stock-in-trade of companies like Disney.
"The Internet is still in the Stone Age," Mr Winebaum claims. Although nearly half of US families owned a computer, he said, fewer than 20 per cent were on the Internet. "There is no product that meets real consumer needs." But there will be.
