CONTENT PLAYERS JOCKEY TO RULE BROADBAND

No longer satisfied with sitting on the sidelines while cable providers and Bell companies market broadband to the tech-savvy and early adopters, big content providers in the last few weeks have started making their first serious moves to bring broadband services and entertainment to the mass market. And if the AOLs, Yahoos and MSNs of the world push hard enough, they may supplant the major carriers as the dominant players on the broadband mountain.

AOL last week hired away a former NBC and TV/film/Internet guru to head up its broadband programming efforts, following up the announcement with the launch of a broadband-exclusive live music show. Earlier in the month, Yahoo signed a deal with SBC Communications, effectively eliminating all of SBC's disparate ISP brands and bringing the Web's king of content into the access business.

The major content providers say this is just the beginning and that their broadband efforts will progress as the year goes on. The timing is right. Broadband is no longer just a dumb pipe sold by cable companies or RBOCs to techies ferreting out their own content from the Web.

“Broadband isn't about faster speeds anymore,” said Bill Wilson, vice president of marketing for AOL's music division. “It's about viable content and entertainment that you can only access over a broadband connection.”

The content providers' new moves could shunt service providers, particularly RBOCs, to the sidelines as simple pipe providers. Cable operators, with experience providing content and ownership in many entertainment properties, stand a slightly better chance, said Cynthia Brumfield, president of Broadband Intelligence.

Meanwhile, content providers are acquiring, or partnering with, every entertainment company imaginable. Yahoo, for instance, lacks the big mainstream media properties owned by MSN and AOL, but it has the largest user base of any Web portal in the world. And while it has yet to secure a single broadband customer — and won't until later this summer — it has powerful online resources in broadcast.com and music content service launch.com, Yahoo officials said.

“Yahoo already has a lot of broadband content out there people want to see,” a company spokeswoman said. “Yahoo historically has programmed its content to be accessible to anyone regardless of their connection speed. With a new broadband portal, we''re bringing that content to the front and center.”

MSN, meanwhile, is offering its broadband subscribers access to content via MSNBC and CNBC at speeds three times faster than other broadband users.

Of all the content providers, AOL has received the most criticism for the lackluster results of its broadband division. As the world's largest ISP with 34 million customers (26 million in the U.S.), AOL serves as the role model for bringing the Internet masses a mixture of exclusive content and ease of use. But AOL's broadband division has been subdued since it launched in late 1999. AOL has refused to release its broadband subscriber numbers, leading most analysts to believe the company hasn't fared well.

AOL claims it has merely been incubating the offering and will flesh out the details in the coming months. Last week's hiring of former NBC executive Shawn Hardin to head up AOL Broadband's programming provides some indication that the content will lean heavily toward entertainment. Hardin's background spans the gamut of the entertainment industry. A former television and film director and producer, Hardin headed up NBC's interactive TV and NBCi efforts.

Perhaps coincidentally, AOL followed up Hardin's appointment with the launch of a major content offering exclusive to its broadband customers, debuting Sessions on Friday, a 30-minute streamed music show featuring performers such as Alanis Morissette, Tommy Lee and Busta Rhymes.

The program started earlier this year as four-minute streamed performances available only to broadband subscribers, said AOL Music's Wilson. Traffic to the broadband music portal doubled between February and April, prompting to AOL to create a full program for broadband consumption. AOL plans to augment that program with other offerings. It already debuts songs and videos online before they reach MTV and radio, and it plans to stream whole DVD-quality live performances and music-oriented feature films as broadband exclusives.

Wilson said AOL Broadband's first mass-market advertising campaign is complete and would launch in coming weeks, highlighting its music and other entertainment offerings. AOL plans to keep the new content in the broadband fold, Wilson stressed.

“A bunch of television outlets have approached us about broadcasting Sessions, but we feel we have to keep the program on AOL,” Wilson said. “We're trying to show people the value of broadband as a content service, and we can''t do that by releasing our content to every one.”