Case Study: Playboy Online

Christie Hefner was a pioneer in moving Playboy magazine to the internet.

Hefner:    Well, I think we benefited from our successful expansion into pay television.  We also were an early believer in the opportunity that cable represented in the early days to create real destinations under brands, and so we launched Playboy TV in 1982 and saw the ability to successfully extend the content and brand that way.  So I think that made us more curious about new media opportunities.  And then, we've done some new media stand-alone products with various partners.  I remember doing a Playboy interview CD-ROM with IBM that was searchable and included video and still and audio along with texts.  So, we were watching it from the beginning, I think, and then I had the good fortune of meeting Jim Clark who started Mosaic which became Netscape, and he was really excited also about the opportunity of Playboy online and helped kind of create the infrastructure that allowed us to not just go through a CompuServe or a [Prodigy] or an AOL but actually create our own destination site.

Hefner:    Well, I think we benefited from our successful expansion into pay television.  We also were an early believer in the opportunity that cable represented in the early days to create real destinations under brands, and so we launched Playboy TV in 1982 and saw the ability to successfully extend the content and brand that way.  So I think that made us more curious about new media opportunities.  And then, we've done some new media stand-alone products with various partners.  I remember doing a Playboy interview CD-ROM with IBM that was searchable and included video and still and audio along with texts.  So, we were watching it from the beginning, I think, and then I had the good fortune of meeting Jim Clark who started Mosaic which became Netscape, and he was really excited also about the opportunity of Playboy online and helped kind of create the infrastructure that allowed us to not just go through a CompuServe or a [Prodigy] or an AOL but actually create our own destination site.