Here comes two-way TV.

How a Culver City company is bringing interactive digital content into your living room

"Consumers do a lot of what they do because they have to."

That isn't some ranting from an ivory tower academic.

It's a statement about television viewing habits and new technologies, made by Mark Sonnenberg, a vice president at Culver City-based Intertainer, a company that bills itself as the world's first "Broadband Entertainment Network."

What that means is that Intertainer has been operating as a hybrid between a cable channel and a Web site. But the company's online content offerings -- an array of films, music videos, and television shows, all leavened with plenty of opportunities for online shopping -- could only be enjoyed by PC owners who had availed themselves of high-speed DSL or cable modem access.

Until now.

After a long beta phase, replete with trial runs across the country, Intertainer recently announced a partnership with Microsoft Corp., together with Texas-based companies Broadwing and uniView, to take "a pioneering step in moving digital media beyond the PC and into the living room," as the press release describes it.

In other words, Intertainer's service -- delivering a large library of material to viewers on demand, rather than at the mercy of a broadcast schedule -- is now available on TV screens.

Which is to say there exists a functioning system to deliver content to home televisions that could rival cable.

The partnership works like this: Microsoft -- which is also one of Intertainer's investors (along with NBC and Intel) -- provides the Windows Media technology to read the signals.

Austin-based telco Broadwing is providing its Cincinnati-area DSL provider, ZoomTown.com, as the equivalent of the local "cable provider" offering the service -- which will initially come to PCs, and at a stellar rate of speed: somewhere around one megabyte per second (more than three times as fast as the average 300 kilobytes per second of most in-home DSL services).

Films start to look pretty good at that rate of speed, even on your computer.

Ohioans who are so moved, though, can avail themselves of a free infrared device, with the future-retro name of "the X-l0," provided by ZoomTown and Intertainer, which takes that PC signal and beams it to the cathode altar in the living room.

Meaning, you don't have to watch "On Any Sunday" by yourself on your monitor -- you can share it with the clan.

That's where uniView Technologies enters the picture. The company is offering a set-top box to take the DSL signal directly into that living room tube. You won't need to have a PC at all.

So people who'd never surf online, and wouldn't be caught dead in a chat room, but like to watch TV, can now have high-speed DSL programming as an entertainment option in their house.

As sole content providers for all this gear, Intertainer attempts to mimic an array of different stations in a single offering. The company, founded by film producer Jonathan Taplin and music producer Richard Baskin, has struck deals with numerous studios and record labels, both for recent feature films, backlogs of television shows and music videos.

It makes its money on micro-commerce, charging, say $2.95 for the aforementioned Oliver Stone film, but perhaps only a quarter for a rerun of "The Famous Jet Jackson." There is free content -- especially the videos, which lead viewers to virtual places where they can purchase the tunes or memorabilia of their favorite song stylist. And there're a lot of unexpected offerings, like "homework programs" designed to help teens figure out math problems, foreign language conundrums, etc.

Sonnenberg notes that it's "harder and harder to get carriage" for new cable stations -- so they needn't worry about a "homework channel" popping up anytime soon. Furthermore, they figure that the more types of video on demand they can offer, the more compelling they'll be as a type of broadcast service.

There are even plans to offer software on demand.

But the question remains whether average viewers will find Intertainer different enough from other options already available: For example, the Replay and TiVo digital set-top boxes, which store programs and make them available whenever you want.

Still, those devices aren't really interactive -- they just allow people to create personal broadcast schedules, compiling episodes and films for later retrieval. Terrence Coles, Intertainer's senior vice president of content, insists "the interactive future is in IP" (i.e., "Internet protocol," and hence, Web-based).

But Intertainer's final mix of content, interactivity and audience acceptance is far from final. "I think," says ZoomTown's director of service development, Charles Carnegie, "that everybody is looking at this stuff and trying to understand it."

Starting with 1,500 people in the Cincinnati area, and soon, according to Sonnenberg, to reach 30,000.

He adds that other rollouts during 2001 are expected in parts of New Jersey and Maryland. The FCC has thus far declined to get involved from a regulatory standpoint. As Coles states, "they see this as a way to increase competition."

Time will tell whether local markets of cable viewers will see it the same way.