Make Time For An Old Friend: NetworkTVOnline.info.

Presenting another installment of "Make Time For An Old Friend," which is our way of showing some of the best/worst/strangest things on the Internet that you may never have seen.

I'm pretty much positive you've never seen NetworkTVOnline.info, and that's part of the point. I stumbled across it via random Google search about a year ago, and I find myself coming back to it once in a while, trying to understand what the Hell it is.

Have you ever found yourself somewhere on the Internet and felt as though you were the only person who had ever been there? That's the feeling I get with this site. It feels as though it wasn't even made by human hands -- rather, that it was produced by a happenstance genetic mutation of code in the Internet primordial soup, and evolved into being of its own accord.

It's ... well, I guess it's supposed to be an online TV network. From the "About" page:

We plan on being the premier distribution company for online TV.

We are going head to head with cable and satellite companies, we are going to bring TV to the next level.

The site has the look of a site that was designed in 2002, though I found evidence that it was updated as recently as 2010. Most of the links, which purportedly link to channels such as "Comedy," "Drama," and "Movies," are broken.

The video on the front page works, however, and it serves as the locus of all the confusing strangeness put forth by this site. I ripped it and put it on YouTube, because I wanted to make sure you saw it:

It's a series of PowerPoint-lookin' commercials, each of which advertises a different TV channel or site hub. If any of these existed, Girard Media Group would be a massive media conglomerate. None of them do. A few highlights:

• 0:21 - Girard Casino. So these folks aim to run online gambling in addition to broadcasting TV channels and running a news agency. The music is amping me up to sit down at a table and let it ride, I have to admit.
• 2:00 - EasyCuisine.info. A bunch of animated clip art. Chefs doing chefs stuff. A walking gingerbread man. The animated word, "SPICEY" [sic]. All set to this haunting, morose piano melody. Watching this makes me feel like I've finally hit the floor of the Internet's oceans, five miles deep. A place without light, where no one has ever been.
• 3:30 - Business Services. Clip art of folks working at computers and doing general office stuff. It gives me the image of an office full of people, tucked away in some obscure suburb, toiling away at this NetworkTVOnline media company. Surely it doesn't make any money. Their presence is unexplained. It's weirding me out.
• 5:11 - International Musis [sic] Festival. This actually provides a location, date and contact number for said festival. This video is like the public access channel for an unnamed rock, drifting listlessly just outside Saturn's orbit.
• 5:30 - Gothic By Girard. Gothic what, though? Nobody knows. Just "gothic."

I'm stopping here, but this just goes on and on and on. I've never watched it all.

The best guess I can muster is that some person had to design a mock media site for his/her community college class or something. But if that's true, what's this site all about?

That right there is a link to the "Girard Media Group" corporate site, complete with site design portfolios and a rather pissy message on the "link exchange" page:

Fill out the contact form and let us know where you placed a link back to us and we will place

your link here. We check links and if ours is removed so shall yours.

hissssssss

So I'm out of guesses, really. I would guess "bored 12-year-old," except the Mr. Girard pictured has facial hair. On the Internet, as on the planet Earth, it is stranger and stranger to find one's self in a place where no one else has ever been. These moments are finite and rare, and they should be treasured, if not necessarily enjoyed.

Further speculation in the comments would certainly be welcome.