Through the Wire

We'll take corporate synergy for $200 please, Alex!

On June 14, FearNet, Comcast's video-on-demand and online horror channel, was one of the categories on the ever-popular syndicated quiz show Jeopardy! What's the connection? FearNet, which debuted last Halloween, is a joint venture of Comcast, Sony Pictures Entertainment and indie horror-movie studio Lionsgate Entertainment. Sony Pictures Television, an SPE unit, produces Jeopardy!

“For us, it's a testament that we have very good partners that we're working with in Lionsgate and Sony, and they definitely really want to make this work, and they're pulling [out] all their marketing tools,” FearNet president Diane Robina said.

Jeopardy!'s FearNet questions were strictly drawn up by the show, Robina said. She was told she could not help out on that front when contacted by executive producer Harry Friedman in the spring. “We just really kind of told them about the network,” she said.

The answers — to which contestants supply questions — were more about FearNet than the horror genre. One example: As voted by FearNet members, the most popular shockers include The Shining and this '73 Linda Blair film. The question: “What is The Exorcist?”

FEARnet is using a clip of the show as an “ice breaker” in meeting media buyers, some of whom assume it was made for the presentation and didn't air on the show. “And I go, 'It's real!' ” Robina said. “The funny thing is, people [in the meetings] are shouting out the answers, because everybody loves Jeopardy!”

“It's worked very well for us pitching the clients, and also, when you're in Jeopardy!, you're definitely hitting pop culture,” she said. (To see the clip, go to www.multichannel.com.)

Breaking news from the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers' Cable-Tec Expo last week: National Cable & Telecommunications Association president and CEO Kyle McSlarrow has banned the use of “OCAP” in the association's corridors. The prohibition, he added, was “not quite tongue-in-cheek.”

OCAP, of course, stands for the CableLabs-developed OpenCable Application Platform, the middleware spec that will let anybody's interactive-TV application run on any compliant set-top box (in theory, anyway).

“I know we in Washington are also guilty of jargon, but this is really a case where the acronym completely hides the ball,” McSlarrow said. “We should be proud of what this platform represents.” His preferred nomenclature: Just “OpenCable.” No mention of what the penalty is to violators.

The Wire has never had an antipathy toward OCAP the acronym. It sounds to us a little like iPod, and it has a nice snappy bite that conjures up, say, a muscular young sailor on shore leave.

But Multichannel News tech-translator Leslie Ellis said McSlarrow “should get some kind of award. Anybody who's given a presentation in front of a roomful of people about OCAP” — as she has — “might as well have a big sign that says 'dork' hanging around their neck.”

Also at Cable-Tec Expo, Time Warner Cable chief technology officer Mike LaJoie said he didn't get IPTV.

Oh, he understands how it works. It's the notion of marketing Internet Protocol transport as if it were a sexy differentiator that befuddles him.

“IPTV — it's like talking about 'fiber,'” he said. “As a consumer, I don't care how it got to me.”

(An aside to Mike: Verizon is betting billions that “fiber-optic” sounds sexier than “hybrid fiber-coax.”)

LaJoie prefaced those remarks with a hilarious, step-by-step account of how a facsimile transmission traverses several different network types, undergoing various levels of IP encapsulation along the way.

It was hilarious to the show's attendees, anyway. You had to be there.

Continuing to riff on Internet TV, LaJoie said, “This notion that the Internet is going to replace multichannel video … I don't believe it.” Years ago, he pointed out, there was a debate about whether the PC would displace the TV or vice versa. “It didn't happen. It's not going to happen. Devices are going to continue to diverge. People are going to consume content wherever they want to.”

Costumers and donated designer goods are being put to good purpose by USA Network, which has taken some of the chi-chi designer items used on-screen for its The Starter Wife miniseries and created a public online auction to raise funds for charity.

Though auctioning designer gowns has become common after events like the Emmy Awards, this is the first fashion auction for USA Network, representatives of the cable channel confirmed. That's because the mini-series is the first program to lend itself to such a fundraiser.

Fashionistas with bodies like Debra Messing — or Miranda Otto (pictured) — can bid on such diverse items as a Givenchy bag, Jill Sander shoes and the costumes created for a Wizard of Oz dream sequence within the show. (Pudgy bidders, we guess, will be copping the clothes for re-auctioning on eBay.) Other designer items are from Hermes, Dolce & Gabbana and Versace.

Auction action was slow at the site late last week (http://starterwifeauction.com). But this isn't like a sale at Barney's: The point is to be last in line with the final bid on June 29 at 3 p.m. ET.

Seventy percent of the proceeds from the auction will go to Dress for Success, the international charity that supplies disadvantaged women with professional attire so they can get jobs and become self-sufficient.

The network is also selling series tanks tops at the site, with 10% of the purchase going to charity.