TALKING HEADS CEO OF SHERMAN OAKS FIRM CREATES A NICHE PUTTING INTERVIEWS WITH TOP EXECUTIVES ON THE INTERNET.

Byline: Jason Z. Cohen Staff Writer

SHERMAN OAKS - Marc Holland thinks of himself as a guy holding a snow globe, shaking it repeatedly to see where the flakes settle as they fall.

So far they have fallen on two companies he has formed.

As the chief executive officer of a small company transforming itself to take advantage of today's digital culture, Holland is growing accustomed to change.

He has made his mark in the sky, now he's aiming for the Internet.

Holland, chief executive officer of CEOLive.com, got his start generating talk programming for in-flight radio.

Now, in addition to overseeing the In-Flight Entertainment Network, parent company of Sky Radio, Holland is building an online collection of executive interviews.

So far, his stable of executive interviews includes Jim Kelly, CEO of United Parcel Service Inc., Stratton Sclavos of VeriSign Corp. and Michael Bloomberg of Bloomberg.com. He hasn't interviewed Michael Dell or Jack Welch yet, but he has requests in with both CEOs for interviews to be placed on CEOLive.

Holland said he finds it easier to persuade CEOs to give him an interview now that he also isn't asking them to pay him for the privilege.

The topics of the 5- to 20-minute interviews tend to follow Holland's own interests: The changing face of business and how business leaders are adapting to the new economy.

Adapting is something he has had to do. With CEOLive he has discarded the paid-interview revenue model of Sky Radio and gone toward a sponsorship-oriented format instead.

And anyone who has flown across country and plugged their headphones into the in-flight programming has likely heard Holland's voice interviewing executives of major corporations.

Sky Radio provides the interviews for every major airline. In exchange, the company receives a payment from the interview subject for its services.

Many of Holland's interview subjects were corporate chief executives, and his interest in their ability to manage change led him to his latest venture, CEOLive.

Now Holland has stopped conducting the paid interviews himself. ``I want to keep it pure,'' he said.

He's also set his sights on the digital communities built by large companies. Called extranets, they are a restricted-access network for selected people and firms outside the company.

He said one of his goals is to provide content for corporate extranets, giving employees, suppliers and customers access to information about the company, including interviews with the chief executive officer.

Eventually, Holland said he wants to focus CEOLive strictly on the extranet market.

``We want to be the AOL of the extranet,'' Holland said.

Focusing on extranets is a wise strategy for a company such as CEOLive, said Tom Taulli, columnist for Internet.com, who analyzes businesses related to the Internet.

``If this company is gunning more toward the corporate market, the extranet market, that's a fairly good strategy because they're more likely to have faster connections,'' Taulli said. ``It's a better strategy, I'd say, than going the consumer route.''

Holland said he has received some complaints from visitors who are unable to download the site's audio files. That's because CEOLive is designed to be accessed via a high-speed broadband Internet connection.

For the time being, Holland knows his product is out of the reach of most consumers, but they aren't his target market anyway.

``A lot of people are still not adopting broadband. If you go to broadband for consumers, you're missing out on a huge audience,'' Taulli said.

While broadband technologies are out of the reach of most consumers' budgets, corporations have the resources to invest in Digital Subscriber Lines, cable modems and fiber optics, he said.

``They can also see a better return on their dollar by adopting broadband,'' Taulli said.

CAPTION(S):

2 photos

Photo: (1 -- 2 -- color) Marc Holland, top, head of CEOLive.com, is putting interviews with corporate chief executives online. At right, Holland, standing, supervises engineer Pete Montoya and producer Elizabeth Montgomery as they edit an interview.

Michael Owen Baker/Staff Photographer