"First, we're going to expand their demographic by bringing in younger users on the Net," says Ryan. "We can do things like stream CBS health shows, slide shows, and other great information onto our site. Webcasting allows you to do some unique stuff that you can't do in a 15-second spot on television. And I think most importantly, the great thing about the Internet and traditional media in general, not just Medscape and CBS, is that it allows what used to be sound bites of information to be available to users in a more in-depth format. When it comes to health care, that's critically important. If you do a sound bite on a New Age treatment or a diabetes product or a new breakthrough in cancer, you can say for more information go to CBS HealthWatch.com, and they no longer have to struggle to find it or call the newsroom. We're not only going to pull in the article relevant to that spot, but we're going to say here are some other relevant stories. And our database is tremendous - you can get a thousand to thirty thousand articles on a topic. I think that's tremendous."

Tremendous it is. It erases the greatest criticism of modern television news - it's lack of depth. Now you can do a sound bite and it, well, isn't one. Like they say, there is no problem a good solution cannot cure...and the Net, in its still-youthful idealism, really can cure a lot of ills. As Meg Ryan says from the heart, "Ultimately now we're helping people. Although this is big business and the Internet is big business, when it comes to health care, I really do think it will help improve consumer education regarding managing their own health. I really believe that."

But back to marriage. How did it happen so fast? Was Medscape prepared for this? Not really, Ryan admits:

"We were at a point in our life cycle where we had been working on the consumer site and our public offering, so our entire strategy of multimedia and everything was really under formation. They caught us by surprise. We would have approached all of them under a broader strategy, but this gave us a tremendous opportunity."

When the honeymoon is over, there must be some basic changes in life, no? Did Medscape have to seriously rework their infrastructure? Actually, it put streaming on the front burner:

"Most of the stuff we had to do anyway," reflects Ryan. "The one area where it definitely enhanced our site is that we will now be providing real-time original news. That's accelerated as a result of the relationship. In addition, we will also have correspondents on staff, which we probably wouldn't have had without this relationship. It also make the whole broadband and streaming audio and video a much higher priority, because you have this great partner who can do all of that for you, clearly an enhancement to what we were going to do. We would have probably done it in time, but it really moved that forward. It pushed us towards streaming more quickly, it pushed us towards original news. We will not only be having feed information, but actually news writers and reporters to create health news for the site and for the organization - and for CBSNews.com, CBS.com, and all of their internet sites as well."

How does the couple thrive, financially? We're talking advertising - is there a consistent policy, a finalized model?