FOLSOM, Calif. — Little in Kevin Corbett's schooling as an engineer or his career at Intel Corp. prepared him for his current gig: striking distribution deals for movies, television shows and broadcasts of sporting events.
Yet in the last year, the 42-year-old vice president of Intel's digital home group has jetted to Hong Kong, Shanghai, Mexico City, London, Cannes and Hollywood as he leads the chip maker's efforts to secure a starring role in the era of online entertainment.
Few initiatives illustrate Silicon Valley's key place in the fracturing media industry better than Corbett's efforts to broker deals to bring broadcasts of Malaysian soccer matches to Bahrain, Chinese variety shows to Britain or Indian movie musicals to the United States, depending on regional access agreements.
It may surprise some that Mexican soap operas, or \o7telenovelas\f7, have big audiences in South Korea, Russia, Israel and elsewhere. Corbett is working to satisfy that appetite online.
Intel's ultimate goal is to sell more personal computers built around its home entertainment technology, which it calls Viiv. Unveiled in January, computers with Viiv (rhymes with "five") components deliver enhanced video and sound for a more seamless user experience. To spur demand, Intel needed to ensure that buyers of Viiv machines -- made by Dell Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co. and others -- would have something to watch.
Corbett's job isn't so much to purchase distribution rights the way a television network might. Rather, he tries to persuade studios, networks and Internet portals like Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. to use Intel technology to pipe programs into homes around the globe.
"Our strategy is to go in and learn what the content guy needs and the network guy needs, go in and make it happen," Corbett said. "We just want to see people use the technology more and see people enjoy all kinds of new content."
It's hardly the expertise for which Santa Clara, Calif.-based Intel is best known. Corbett is an engineer who earned a bachelor's degree in computer science from the University of Texas in Dallas in 1988 and has primarily developed and sold chip hardware.
"Intel going into the content process and making that part of the value proposition of Viiv is about as far as I can get from planning the features and capabilities of microprocessors," Corbett said.
