A new alliance between Universal Pictures and custom browser developer NeoPlanet Inc. will deliver Fred, Barney and the rest of their caveman crew to the desktops of a new, Web-savvy generation of "Flintstones" fans.
"A prehistoric browser, where you push rocks instead of buttons, that's kind of a natural fit," said NeoPlanet CEO Drew Cohen. The Web browser, for Windows-based PCs only, is available for free download.
Both parties declined to disclose specifics of the deal, other than to say NeoPlanet would produce more than a dozen Web browsers tied to Universal film and DVD releases. All will feature Flash 4-enabled movie sounds and images, built-in search and e-mail, plus channels tied to Universal content sites.
From a movie's theatrical release through its pay-per-view, video and DVD releases, a browser "gives us the flexibility to have our brand live on," said Kevin Campbell, vice president of new-media marketing at Universal.
NeoPlanet is already developing browsers for Universal's "Rocky and Bullwinkle," "The Nutty Professor II" and the DVD release of "Jaws," Cohen said.
Enormously popular among MP3 fans, custom interfaces, or "skins," allow users to personalize their digital music players and, more recently in the Netscape 6 preview release, their browsers. Analysts say they may also be wave of the future among online advertisers.
Banner ads are so over, said Rob Enderle, a desktop software analyst at Giga Information Group.
"Advertisers don't believe they work -- they're not providing the returns they wanted," Enderle said. "Branded browsers provide a much more direct -- and more pervasive -- presence."
At the same time, "An advertiser never really knows any more about NeoPlanet users than that they fit a profile," he said.
"This is quintessentially permission-based marketing," said Lydia Loizodes, who follows Web technologies for Jupiter Communications. By downloading branded browsers, users are opting-in to ads about a specific product or service.
"There's also value in being able to use smaller browsers," she said.
The "Flintstones" browser, built on a Microsoft Internet Explorer foundation, is roughly 2MB, according to NeoPlanet. The current Netscape 6 release is somewhere between 4MB and 5MB. Netscape's Navigator 4 series weighed in at a hefty 20MB or more, as did comparable versions of IE.
NeoPlanet's first media deal was a series of "Austin Powers"-themed browsers for New Line Productions Inc. ("You know downloads make me randy, baby.") The company has also developed "Xena" browsers for fans of the warrior princess, and there is an archive of 585 browser skins -- from sci-fi to sports to gothic -- on its Web site.
Although graphic unique identifiers, or GUIDs, are built in to NeoPlanet browsers, Cohen said the data are only used in the aggregate to count unique users.
The software does not and cannot track the habits of individuals, he said. For that reason, Cohen said, NeoPlanet browsers provide more protection for users than anywhere else on the Internet.
"User data is handled separately from usage data," he said. "It's like Humpty Dumpty: You can't put those pieces back together."
