Beverly Hills e-commerce company CheckOut.com may be one of the best connected start-ups in Hollywood, but its chief executive claims that the company doesn’t want to capitalize too heavily on those ties.
CheckOut.com is the brainchild of former Disney Online President Richard Wolpert, and is backed by Michael Ovitz and supermarket mogul Ron Burkle. To be launched this summer, the Internet company will sell movies, music and games online, as well as offer entertainment news and celebrity Web pages.
“We are absolutely agnostic in technology formats (like MP3) and in who we’re working with,” said Wolpert. “It will be to our advantage not to form exclusive relationships with a certain studio, or talent management agency, or record label. We intend to keep good relationships with all.”
Wolpert knows Ovitz through his Creative Artists Agency and Disney days but said Burkle was primarily responsible for getting Ovitz involved in the new venture. Ovitz and Burkle shared various business ventures well before their current attempt to own an NFL expansion team in Los Angeles.
Online ticket agency Tickets.com is further gearing up to give Ticketmaster’s Internet operation a serious run for the money.
Tickets.com, based in Marina del Rey, recently received $30 million in private funding and already is looking for new financing opportunities.
Jim Caccavo, executive vice president, said the firm is “looking at both private and public market choices right now.”
The company has not officially filed documents with the Securities and Exchange Commission but did adopt an unofficial quiet period policy regarding plans for an initial stock offering.
Tickets.com also finalized its merger with Newport Beach-based Advantix Inc. this month. Neither company’s current offices can accommodate the combined 280-plus employees, so executives are looking for new space in Orange or L.A. county.
It’s getting to the point where people don’t have to physically attend ceremonies any more.
Instead of a traditional red-carpet movie premier, Columbia TriStar opted for what it called the world’s first virtual premier for a new sci-fi thriller “The Thirteenth Floor.”
Columbia TriStar Interactive and Centropolis Interactive, both based in Culver City, teamed up to create a Web site that used 3-D animation to simulate a red-carpet ceremony. Several hundred fans tuned into the Web event and chose virtual figures to represent themselves sitting in bleachers while images of stars walked and waved their way into the theater.
Journalists had to station their images behind velvet ropes in order to fire questions at the stars and director via e-mail.
Similarly, Pepperdine University broadcast one of its graduation ceremonies on the Web. The school offers an online masters program, and the Web-casted ceremony was designed to reach the far-flung students. Unfortunately, the event played on the Web in real time, so no one could skip the long speeches.
Sara Fisher can be reached via email at [email protected].
