CORRALLING NICHES FOR WWW SURFERS A NORFOLK COMPANY COLLECTS PROGRAMS THAT INTERNET USERS CAN TUNE IN TO FROM CATEGORIZED INDEXES.(BUSINESS)

Byline: AKWELI PARKER, STAFF WRITER

NORFOLK -- In an unassuming, one-story brick building, Steve Sanford and his associates at ChannelSpace Entertainment Inc. have been working feverishly at making net surfing more like channel surfing.

Co-workers as far away as Atlanta and the U.S. Virgin Islands and distant corporate partners are toiling as well.

``We work very virtually,'' says Sanford, scrolling through a ``buddy list'' of business contacts on his computer screen. Chief Executive Sanford and his ChannelSpace co-founder and President Barry Friedman use the buddy list - it allows users to send quick text messages via America Online - to stay in constant, immediate contact with one another even though Friedman's office is in the Caribbean.

Their goal is to corral the wildly eclectic offerings of the World Wide Web into more manageable niche categories, or ``channels.'' These channels will call the ChannelSpace web site ``home,'' and it is hoped, bring millions of enthusiasts through its electronic portals.

In the process, the company wants to usher in the era of cable-like programming through the Internet. Using the computer servers of Web multi-media phenom broadcast.com, ChannelSpace says it will let Internet surfers tune in to indexed, stored programs at their leisure.

The programming could be anything from a show on bass fishing to Diff'rent Strokes re-runs.

``People are nostalgic,'' says Sanford. ``It doesn't matter how old the content.''

Today the company plans to unveil its first channel, a site geared to collectors, called (Collecting Channel.com).

Sanford jumps to the defense of collecting, reminding that it is an $80 billion-a-year industry. The theme also holds special significance for Sanford, an avid philatelist and accumulator of movie memorabilia.

Sanford, a one-time system engineer for Ford Motor Co., and Friedman, a big-time license negotiatior for computer games and Web sites, got the idea for a collecting Web site months ago. They figured the basic infrastructure of that Web site - the model, computer coding and such - could then be applied to nearly any topic.

The site will use a variant of Agent Technologies' ``Copernic'' search engine to fetch only the most relevant information for visitors. Copernic is a popular Web-browser add-on that saves time by scouring the major search sites simultaneously. The customized software will filter Internet junk by searching only certain databases, not the entire Web.

ChannelSpace will ``aggregate,'' or lump together, volumes of data and programming on its site and links to related sites. At some point, says Sanford, the site will act as a personal cyber-gofer - bringing back search results for individual users and electronically sniffing behind the scenes for the best prices at auction Web sites.

In addition, the new company will exploit the multimedia talents of its subsidiary Blink Productions, a digital production studio in Norfolk founded by Sanford in 1993.

Sanford admits that it won't be easy or profitable, at least not at first.

``Certainly our business model will be to have more people paying us than we pay them,'' he says vaguely, but that could take years.

Meanwhile, several private, long-term investors have made a ``multimillion dollar'' investment in ChannelSpace, not to mention the resources poured in by partners such as broadcast.com and numerous content providers. Among them is Landmark Communications Inc., a large player in the collecting publications industry and parent company of The Virginian-Pilot.

Much of the technological challenge is beyond the control of ChannelSpace programmers. Piping broadcast-quality video over the Internet requires lots of bandwidth - high-speed channels for information to flow through the Internet and into people's homes. Although a number of companies, including Cox Interactive Media in Hampton Roads, offer high-speed Internet access, its availability is limited. And it costs about twice as much as a traditional phone-line connection.

For the foreseeable future, the masses will have to settle for 56-kilobit-per-second modems at home.

About 310,000 households, or 1.3 percent of those online, have access to high-bandwidth technologies like cable modems and asymmetric digital subscriber lines, according to Forrester, a high-tech research firm based in Massachusetts.

But the firm predicts that by 2002, 30 percent of the online population will get its Net feed from so-called broadband technology.

Ken Clemmer, a Forrester analyst, says the ChannelSpace model has promise if it can overcome the technology hurdle and people's attitudes. Consumers, for the most part, aren't ready to use a PC to watch TV or vice versa.

``Being on the Internet is a very active, alert, in-charge thing,'' says Clemmer. ``Television is passive: I want you - the device - to do the work.'' But the diehard enthusiasts the company is aiming for might not care, according to Clemmer: ``Where there's a niche market, the Internet is a good place for those kinds of things.''

CAPTION(S):

Color photo

MARK P. MITCHELL, The Virginian-Pilot

Steve Sanford is chief executive officer of Norfolk's ChannelSpace Entertainment Inc.