Once upon a dot.bomb time, companies like Pop, Pseudo and Icebox promised a future when original shows produced for the Internet would replace traditional TV viewing. The dot-com bust deflated those grand ambitions, but the Associated Press's Gary Gentile finds out that the vision of creating unique, interactive multimedia programming for a generation weaned on video games is very much alive at Yahoo Inc.

Yahoo chairman and chief executive Terry Semel was reported as saying that 75 percent of users access the portal using high-speed connections, making it possible to stream video of all sorts, including content by individual users.

"Our great attributes are interactive," said Semel, the former co-CEO of Warner Bros. "We have huge audiences who themselves are the programmer."

It all speaks to Yahoo executives' excitement about "micropublishing" -- letting the portal's users create content attractive to fellow users that will encourage people to hang around in Yahoo's virtual world. It's a vision shared by others who see a future where people aren't just passive viewers of content but participate in creating the "TV shows" of tomorrow.

One company built on the concept is Brightcove, a startup that envisions a day when "Internet Television" offers thousands of channels of content, some produced by traditional TV companies and much produced by individuals as the cost of digital cameras and editing tools drops. The current 2005 financial market with its upsurge of available venture capital also means that investment conditions are now the best it has been in years for promising start-ups. The Economist magazine reports that a huge amount of new money has been raised by investors who feel they have missed out on the terrific returns of the 1990s. In addition, much of the money already raised in the 1990s remain uninvested and hungry investors are looking to high growth stocks, such as those in media and technology, for returns now that more traditional sectors like property are deemed to have peaked.     

It is way too early to tell exactly what direction companies like Yahoo and rivals AOL, MSN and Real Networks will take. The opinion is that whether Yahoo transforms into an online TV network or produces its own content, its strategy will boil down to the sole purpose of keeping visitors within Yahoo's virtual walls as much as possible. For the young start-ups who lack Yahoo's billions to burn but share their dream of providing a more democratic entertainment alternative for the mass market, the biggest challenge they have is one of timing. Premature market entry has been one of the leading causes of start-up demise during the technology bust, and companies have bankrupted jumping in on trends that were a decade before its time. Nobody is quibbling if the dream will happen, the billion dollar question is when.