Weather | Sports | Forums | Comics | Classifieds | Calendar | Movies
An entrepreneur hopes his cross-medium RAVE2000 is the next great entertainment boom.
By JAMES THORNER
© St. Petersburg Times, published October 9, 2000
HUDSON -- Call it a cross between MTV and Wayne's World.
That's how Jim Smith describes RAVE2000, his new live Internet television site headquartered in a warehouse on Tower Drive in Hudson.
Smith boasts of creating an entirely new medium. RAVE2000 is touted not merely as a radio program, TV station, or computer site, but as a interactive combination of all three.
"Cyber jockeys," or CJs, will spin hits in every music genre, from Britney Spears to be-bop, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
Live musical acts -- he said he's negotiating with Cher, REO Speedwagon and Neil Diamond -- would perform at his Hudson studio.
Internet viewers from around the world will watch the CJs and communicate instantaneously with them via typed comments flashed on a monitor in the studio. The audience also will get music, music videos and the occasional live musical act.
"I kind of feel like Alexander Graham Bell when he heard the other guy's name in the other room," said Smith, a cowboy-boot-wearing, 40-year-old Nashville-born entrepreneur.
RAVE2000 hits the World Wide Web at 6 p.m. on Oct. 30, starting with more than 200 CJs culled from help-wanted ads, beauty schools and night clubs.
After testing the unpaid CJs for 90 days, Smith will trim his talent pool to a group of financially-reimbursed regulars.
"The whole idea is to grow your own talent and salt and pepper it with name-brand talent," said Wayne Fogel, a local Internet specialist who has climbed aboard as Smith's partner.
RAVE2000 marks a change of career for Smith, who has made a living as an asset and liability investigator for corporations. The work has included breaking up credit card fraud rings and occasional repossessions. And the work has included many moves for Smith: In the past decade some of the places he has called home are Louisiana, Texas, New York City, Indiana and Tennessee. Smith said he tested his concept from a studio in Nashville in October 1998, tallying more than 300,000 visits to his Web site in three weeks.
Then he discovered Hudson, a community he calls "a garden of Eden," during a business trip. He set himself up last summer in a metal shell warehouse west of U.S. 19 at 6740 Tower Drive.
The building, across the street from an auto repair shop, is the former headquarters of Warriors Paintball Inc.
The decor of the television studio is garage sale chic: an old velvet sofa and love seat, a garish blue lava lamp, several inexpensive home video cameras on tripods, an end table scattered with guitar picks.
Down the hall, next to Smith's office, paintball splats from the former occupants stain a window.
"If I went to L.A. to do this or downtown Nashville my costs would be 10 or 15 times of what they would be now," Smith said, sitting on the sofa under the bright studio lights.
The humble decor, combined with the the unschooled spontaneity of the CJs, will lend a touch of realism to RAVE2000, Smith said. He hopes to appeal to Internet visitors craving authenticity after a steady diet of slickly packaged products like MTV.
Smith compares his operation to live television of the 1940s and 1950s, when bloopers were part of a show's charm.
"They want to see mistakes," Smith said of his potential audience. "It shows that the people here are human."
Music will span all the genres, including rock, jazz, country, classical, new age and rhythm & blues. The CJs will try to alter the selections to suit international tastes: heavy metal for Germany, classical for Russia and rave for England.
An ethics committee established by Smith will scrutinize RAVE2000 to ensure online content doesn't cross the obscenity boundary.
As for making money, Smith and his partners, who include his wife Cathy, plan to attract advertisers, sell CDs and T-shirts, and, if they can land a few stars, charge admission for online entertainment.
"We're going to put Hudson on the map," Smith said.