Then it hired a 33-year-old computer Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania with a streak of gray hair, Jon Moore, to develop a search engine to mine the database for relationships and other connections among celebrities. The emerging product: Fancast.com's Six Degrees.
The idea behind Six Degrees is that if you liked an actress in one movie, you might like the same actress in another movie, or TV show.
Or if you liked the actress in a movie, you might be interested to know she dated this actor, who starred in these movies. And so on.
"It's making sense of the complex mass of entertainment," said Fancast general manager Alix Cottrell, who described Fancast as an interactive Internet guide for Hollywood entertainment. "We're recommending what you should watch in an individualized way."
Industry experts see a day when a substantial number of TV shows and movies are consumed by Internet downloads or video streaming. Comcast, which says it offers high-speed Internet services to 48 million homes, is already a big Internet player with Comcast.net, one of the most-trafficked sites on the Web.
Web sites that catalog and search movies and actor biographies, such as the well-clicked Internet Movie Database, have been around for years. But Comcast thinks it can do better.
At Fancast offices on the 19th floor of 2000 Market St., the dress code is jeans-friendly. One brainstorming project room contains a couch, a lava lamp and a wall-size High Fidelity movie poster. Groceries are delivered weekly to a kitchen so employees can snack together and talk about Fancast.
"We're pretty casual. We try to be hip," said Cottrell, who joined Comcast in 2006 from AOL L.L.C. in New York, where she was creative director.
