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What really set Pixelon apart, though, was what it did with the money it raised. Fenne blew more than half of the take on one of the largest parties Las Vegas had ever seen, hiring performers such as the Dixie Chicks, Tony Bennett, and the Who to play. The concert was recorded, theoretically to be made available to Internet viewers for a fee. Instead, it became a good-bye party. The expenditure prompted a board inquiry that led to Fenne’s ouster, eventual exposure, and arrest.

Another Internet video firm that qualifies as a paragon of the times was a Santa Monica firm called Digital Entertainment Network. DEN made it as far as an IPO filing on the strength of venture money from Microsoft, Intel, and Dell Computer. The plan was to offer series of videos for niche teen audiences unserved even by obscure cable television channels. There were a number of fairly serious problems with the idea, including the fact that studio production is exorbitantly expensive and the reality that Internet consumers weren’t ready to spend money for anything besides pornography and stock trading. The idea of supporting such costly programming with advertising money was likewise ludicrous. Beyond those issues, DEN had a rather delicate management problem that a cursory check by the directors should have flagged. The founder and chairman of the firm, Marc Collins-Rector, was living with two of the company’s top officers. One had been his sexual partner since both had worked at early Internet service provider Concentric Network Corp., when the partner was sixteen. The other, a good-looking ex-Disney child actor named Brock Pierce, moved into the house at age seventeen and was paid a $250,000 salary for unspecified duties at DEN. Even after a former Concentric employee filed suit alleging that Collins-Rector had molested him at age fourteen, DEN survived. “I knew it was the ultimate Internet scam, but I figured I could flip the stock in six months,” one executive explained, neatly summing up the era’s prevailing work ethic. Only after the Los Angeles Times reported that Collins-Rector had been living with Pierce since before Pierce reached the age of consent and that other young DEN employees had been pressured to take social trips with the trio did the company collapse, filing for bankruptcy as the three men fled the country. Collins-Rector was arrested in Spain in the spring of 2002, and the United States began extradition proceedings over federal sex charges.

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