Bulking Up for Battle

Call it video Napster. The elusive goal of film and television producers has long been a marriage between the Internet and video programming, a single pipeline that would allow consumers to order up entertainment and information from a buffet of sources. So when German media giant Bertelsmann last week took control of RTL, Europe's biggest TV company, interactive programming suddenly looked a lot closer. "We are significantly pushing ahead on the interactive TV front," says Thomas Hesse, ceo of the newly formed RTL NEWMEDIA group. The firm hopes to roll out its interactive service in Germany by...