by Gary Welz, Tangent Design
by Gary Welz, Tangent Design
T3 Media
T3 Media is a full-service online marketing company described by its founders as "a marriage of technology and media," bringing together sophisticated database development, interactive multimedia programming, high-end design, and strategic planning.Chris Bryant and Michael Diamant started T3 in late 1995. Since then it has grown to a staff of 14 and produced high-profile sites for Broadway shows, feature films, and major corporations. Revenues in '96 were $600K; projected revenues for '97 are $1.5 million.
The company's award-winning projects include sites for the Tony Awards and Andrew Lloyd Webber's Really Useful Company.
The Really Useful Company created some of musical theater's most beloved productions, including "The Phantom of the Opera," "Cats," "Sunset Boulevard," "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat," "Evita," "Jesus Christ Superstar," and many others. The Web site includes a complete worldwide tour database, and RealAudio tracks of many of the hit songs.
Included in this megasite is a Sunset Boulevard National Tour section, which takes users on a "film noir" journey into the musical with photos from the classic Billy Wilder film and RealAudio tracks of the great Divas from Patti LuPone to Glenn Close who've played Norma Desmond.
The Tony Awards Online is a salute to what's best on Broadway--and it's updated regularly, not just for the annual award show. The site's relational database of all past Tony winners and nominees is a valuable resource in its own right.
During the 50th Anniversary broadcast of the Tonys in 1996, T3 produced a groundbreaking live cybercast, featuring chats with the stars and a RealAudio broadcast of the after-awards ball accompanied by a low-bandwidth video feed.
T3's new site for Les Misérables was launched on March 3. A site for the theatrical program publisher, Stagebill, will be launched on March 10 and will feature a national performing arts database.
This database will contain five genre categories: classical music, opera, jazz, theater, and dance. It will allow users to obtain a list of all the featured performers in a show and the numbers to be performed as well as information about tickets and dates. You could search for, say, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, and obtain a listing of every performance during a specified time or in a specified location.
The high degree of "granularity" in the database allows users to search it quickly to a finer level of detail than any other performing arts database.
As part of the Stagebill database project they created a Web form that allows the database to be updated from the venues themselves, thus enabling it to include last-minute changes that would never appear in a centrally updated database.
The creation of this database may motivate Stagebill to first publish its schedules electronically from the database, leaving the print versions as a secondary output. At the very least, it will motivate them to move their current system from a FileMaker Pro flat file system to a relational database system. Is electronic publishing beginning to cast a long shadow on this type of print publishing? I think so.
T3 chose to use a Microsoft SQL relational database rather than a more powerful one from Oracle or Informix because it's well integrated into the Microsoft suite of products. More importantly, since it runs under Windows, it's easier for nonspecialists to learn and use. No expensive Oracle experts are needed, and the software is cheaper to begin with.
NT and the MS Internet Information Server have become T3's OS and Web server of choice. They converted from the church of Unix to the church of NT because the cost of management--i.e., the cost of programming talent--is so much lower for NT, and the performance gap has narrowed dramatically. Faster chips have made up for the loss that the NT GUI gives to the Unix command line interface. NT is easier to use--no Unix programmers needed--and it's not so much slower that anyone complains. (Egad, Bill Gates is winning this war, too!)
Speaking of Microsoft, another noteworthy T3 site was created for the Microsoft Handheld PC. The Handheld PC is a new category of handheld devices featuring Microsoft's newest operating system, Windows CE, a portable version of Windows 95.
The Handheld PC site contains a magazine called The Mobile Worker, conceived and created by T3 Media to address concerns directly relevant to the handheld PC customer.
The site contains an impressive Shockwave demo of the Windows CE OS running on a handheld PC. It is also the first site to be optimized for Pocket Internet Exporer, the Web browser for the handheld PCs 480x240 screen and 2-bit grayscale. Browser recognition automatically sends handheld PC users to this unique Pocket Internet Explorer site.
Because of their wide experience creating commercial sites for the entertainment industry, Bryant and Diamant have built up a fat rolodex (or should I say, database) of talent. Making good use of it, they recently pitched "On Broadway" an original content piece to MSN.
T3 put together a "package" of stars and production talent and presented it to MSN, the potential distributor, much as an independent film or TV company would put together a project and pitch it to a major studio or TV network. As in TV, the next step will be to make a pilot. If it's picked up they'll do 12 weekly episodes and face the prospect of being cancelled or renewed every 13 weeks.
Chris Bryant thinks there will be more narrative programming on the Web, that it's rapidly moving from a promotional medium to an entertainment medium. "Bandwidth is a constraint," Bryant says, "but that's not the reason content is so poor. The creative people have not yet really come to the Web, but they are coming." If they aren't I suspect Bryant and Diamant will bring them.
