Media Moguls Make Their Move Online

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Still, it takes a lot of guts to break free from the mother ship—that is, the large media companies and their deep pockets. Several of the onetime moguls have ventured out with deals that will funnel some of their new content to mainstream media outlets. Jordan Levin, the former chief executive of Time Warner's WB Network, last year co-founded the part-talent-management, part-content-creation company Generate with a deal to develop content for MTV's television, online, and wireless outlets. His company makes the online comedy Home Purchasing Club (with its regular feature, the Men's Hygiene Forum) for VH1's VSpot site. The show was created for Generate by writer/actor Sean Masterson, who has appeared on Whose Line Is It Anyway? and Jimmy Kimmel Live, and was developed and directed by Emmy Award winner Brian Roberts, whose credits include The Drew Carey Show and Everybody Loves Raymond.

Big Media's Opportunity, Too

Moguls on their second careers bring a keen eye for what sells. Not all the user-generated content they get will be packaged for their sites, says Albie Hecht, a former head of Nickelodeon's film studio, whose company Worldwide Biggies is collecting user-generated pet content for its just-launched site, Worldwide Fido—which he calls American Idol for dogs.

Hecht, who also has a deal with Nickelodeon, scored his first hit when he saw a documentary film about kiddie stars The Naked Brothers Band. Hecht has since produced shows for Nick featuring the group, as well as 13 webisodes and 13 specially made podcasts. "Making multiplatform shows requires a different DNA than traditional media," he says. His six-person company—soon to expand to 20 folks, he says—is built "on the notion that people want content wherever they happen to be, so it has to be tailored to a different viewing experience."

As for the big media companies, they're also producing their share of online shorts. ABC, NBC (GE), and CBS (CBS) are all gearing up in-house operations to pick and choose from potential projects they can put on their new, hypercharged network sites. ABC.com has streamed more than 55 million episodes of Grey's Anatomy and its other hit prime-time shows. Bruce Gersh, ABC's senior vice-president for business development, says that in a two-week period the network served up more than 600,000 views of its short series Voicemail, a comedy about what a guy named Michael does while he is checking his messages. Even the pitch for the show had online written all over it: Creator Michael Wilde, who concocted the idea after saving more than 3,000 of his own voice mails, pitched the show to ABC brass on his iPod (AAPL). Says Gersh: "I've been in a lot of pitch meetings, but I have never seen that."

Grover is Los Angeles bureau chief for BusinessWeek.