Wild Brain has long been known for its artistic merging of traditional animation methods with state-of-the-art tools and has captured just about every top award out there in the worlds of advertising, CD Roms, traditional media broadcasting and feature productions. They're certainly not dropping the ball on these established relationships as they are currently in production on their first 2D animated, 26 half-hour television series entitled Poochini's Yard with Munich's EM-TV. Ulin mentioned they also pitched four additional series at last October's MIPCOM and he seems proud and amazed, really, to have had offers on all of them. He outlines, however, that within today's unique entertainment choices, the company's internal debates now include the web when deciding how best to proceed with new ideas. "It's becoming a world where you actually need to look into the mirror and say, `Does this development deal make sense or should I just produce it on the net?'" he states. "Because if you're just going into a development deal rather than production, there may be some benefits to going ahead on the net first." He is quick to point out, though, that that conundrum doesn't apply to every show for obvious demographic and/or style considerations.

Poochini's Yard. © Wild Brain Inc.

Discussing their Showcase category, which at launch had 11 shorts available for screening, Ulin explains Wild Brain's "charter was to find great animation wherever it existed, whether it was international or U.S." Led by John Hays, Wild Brain's President, Co-Founder and Creative Director, the company will continue to add licenses for student films, festival entries and independent films from other in and outside sources or people they know. Ulin believes the possibility of acquiring net rights to lengthier animated films will become more feasible when broad band reaches a higher plateau; but for now they don't look to program longer-format material with any prior exposure on traditional television or cable venues. He feels viewing on the Internet is "not currently substitutional for TV where someone will passively watch something for 30 minutes to an hour. So, as you can see from our site, we've tried to design it in a way that the vast majority of things you're seeing, you can't see (or haven't seen) elsewhere but are nevertheless just as entertaining."

Signing a significant broadcast services agreement with Yahoo! Inc. less than one month ago provided wildbrain.com with the necessary technical infrastructure to launch in a big way. Yahoo provides the "backbone" to encode their short films digitally for subsequent streaming either on Yahoo's site or their own. In some instances, mostly for promotional purposes, the audiences can stay within the Yahoo site to view the animation. Obviously, Ulin and company will prefer to have people come directly from Yahoo to their channel so that the audience can also sample all the other properties wildbrain.com will be presenting.

The Digital Drive-In area debuted with David Fremont's net original series Glue and plans are set for it to be updated regularly with new episodes. Here, the animation is built in Flash so even though Yahoo's technical assistance isn't required out of Dallas, Ulin explains, "They are still a partner for the front-end link where we will be featured when you go to their portal." Wild Brain's Glue, having been one of the Yahoo-Pick-Of-The-Week shows, proves the strength of this new double-duty relationship. Wild Brain will be getting the benefit and cross promotion of being exposed to Yahoo's viewership (now reaching into the tens of millions of people), and simultaneously have Yahoo's technical availability to digitize and stream their short film content.

The short answer Ulin gives to the question of expanding their original toons area is, "Yes...we hope to have several different serialized shows on this year. We wanted to launch with only one because we wanted a manageable site. I think our site for launch is pretty rich. We wanted to start at a base-line and build up from there." They are proceeding now with more grand-scale plans for incremental adding on of more shorts and original fare, as well as chat and interactivity, all in their desire to be a fully realized inclusive and successful online network. Ulin believes they've been right in focusing first on establishing a reputation for getting the best of animation going for their channel and that goal is evidenced by their contracting some of the top digital creators around today. Although they presently have an incredible amount of in house material for original shorts and site development, Ulin believes Wild Brain will set up a more formal system for submissions by independent creators a soon as it is necessary.