@LARGE
Sink or swim time

By Scott Kirsner
Globe correspondent, 2/14/2000

In high-concept Hollywood pitch-speak, iCast is like GeoCities-meets-Broadcast.com-meets-ICQ. iCast, which debuts next week, is about community and audio and video and instant messaging.

If you compare iCast to a movie premiere, it would be "Titanic." James Cameron's massive melodrama was expensive, ambitious, and insanely behind schedule, and in late 1997 most of the motion picture industry was eager to see it fail. Instead, it set box-office records.

iCast is expensive. David Wetherell, CEO of its parent firm, CMGI, plans to spend $100 million on the launch. It's ambitious: iCast will showcase the work of undiscovered musicians and filmmakers, plus provide software so users can converse and swap things like MP3 music files. It's behind schedule: A July 1999 launch slipped to September, then January, and finally late February. And plenty of people in Boston's Internet community are itching to see a high-profile CMGI flop.

They could get their wish. The Woburn-based firm is built around the core of ZineZone, which itself was built around an earlier CMGI company, The Password. Neither was a blockbuster. Both were run by Margaret Heffernan, a voluble former BBC radio and television producer, now the president, COO, and acting chief executive of iCast. She follows former NBC president Neil Braun, who abandoned ship with former MTV executive Mark Farber last November after a falling out with Wetherell.

Heffernan no doubt is feeling pressure to perform. While consumer companies that CMGI has funded through its @ventures arm - like GeoCities and Lycos - have had big success, CMGI has yet to score a consumer hit from its stable of wholly owned operating companies.

"The Web is an iterative experience," Heffernan says, explaining the morphing of The Password into ZineZone into iCast, and the reason that Version 1.0 of iCast won't contain all of the features she and Wetherell brainstormed. "The challenge is to get to market and keep improving. We always have more ideas than we have time to execute."

But many think iCast needs to be the final iteration for the company that started as The Password.

"This is it," says Risa Edelstein, iCast's marketing vice president, less than two weeks before the launch. "This has to work."

At a 9:30 a.m. launch management meeting in the Hiphop conference room (all the conference rooms at iCast are

named after musical or cine-

matic genres), the atmosphere is anxious and intense. Today is code freeze. iCast's developers are going to stop writing software code, move all of the code they've written over to an entirely new set of servers, stitch all of the different pieces together, and then start testing for bugs.

"The bug list is our bible from now on," says Johnny Scarborough, iCast's director of quality assurance. "Everyone in the company is now a QA-er."

iCast has two components. One is the Web site itself, which will serve as a vast catalog of known and unknown musicians and movie directors, along with pointers to samples of their work. (The next two content areas Heffernan plans to add to iCast are comedy and live events.) The other is the iCaster, a downloadable application that plays streaming media, MP3s, and CDs, enables instant messaging, and can provide contextual pointers, based on what you're watching or listening to, into the iCast site or another relevant site.

Jeff Teicher, one of the first developers to start work on iCast, offers to show a conceptual demo of the product that he helped build early last year. In it, a user is doing boring work on a spreadsheet when an alert pops up. A concert by Icelandic diva Bjork is about to start in Manhattan. The concert begins playing inside the iCaster, and the user has the option to link to Web sites about electronica; join chats about Iceland, music in New York City, or this particular concert; buy any of Bjork's albums; or use a map interface to find music in Iceland.

The demo "set the bar really high," says Teicher, who wears a chestnut-colored goatee and a silver hoop in each ear. But he insists: "We are delivering this product."

Perhaps they will eventually, but after comparing Teicher's prototype with the initial release of the iCast site and the iCaster, I wasn't left spellbound. Notification was an important part of the concept. Users were supposed to be able to tell iCast about artists or genres they were interested in, and receive notices about live events as they happened, but that won't be part of the first version of the iCaster.

For reasons beyond iCast's control, the iCaster can only play music and video that's compatible with the Windows Media Player standard, which means no RealAudio or RealVideo, both popular formats. And because no single standard has yet emerged for instant messaging, users of the iCaster won't be able to communicate with users of ICQ or AOL's Instant Messenger, the most widespread messaging apps.

One of the niftiest features of the iCaster is the ability to click on an animated globe to find live music streams produced by radio stations - real or Net-based - anywhere in the world. But since many radio stations have exclusive deals with Broadcast.com (now Yahoo Broadcast), the iCaster offers no way to find them. So the iCaster acknowledges the existence of WBOS in Boston, but not WFNX, which is a Yahoo Broadcast partner.

Unless a director decides to recut a movie after its release, the final cinematic product is just that: final. In contrast, iCast will have the opportunity to continuously add features and adjust its offering.

"You never know completely what it is that users most value," says Heffernan. "But once [you launch], you start learning, and you can build features they care about. We'll change things, we'll fix things, we'll throw things away. We'll continue to move at breakneck speed. "

iCast won't start its online marketing campaign until March; offline marketing begins in May. By that time, I'm betting iCast will be a jaw-droppingly good product. iCast has already covered an amazing amount of ground in the 21/2 months since Heffernan took over. Her team is obsessed with building cool things. Even their business cards encourage playful construction: The cards have two notches on all four sides that allow you to slot multiple cards together in various 3-D configurations. And the most celebrated business card creation so far? Marketing analyst Weni Wang's interpretation of the Titanic.

Scott Kirsner is a Boston writer and a contributing editor at Wired, Fast Company, and Boston Magazine.