OS ANGELES -- IT'S early in the morning when a set that looks like a head-on collision of a computer repair shop with a retro-funky college dorm room flickers to life on a bank of control room monitors. Two hours later Cory Rouse, a standup comedian and the host of a half-hour review show, leaps before cameras and a potential audience of six million households that receive G4, a new cable network. Like every offering on the network, round the clock, his program has a single theme: video games.

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A short drive away, in a suite of offices as austere as a factory floor, Damon Lee begins another day's work as a top executive for Urban Entertainment, which produces short animated films for the Internet with the goal of spinning the most commercially promising into movies and television series. One of his latest projects is "The Shonuffs," a kind of African-American "Beverly Hillbillies," a catfish-out-of-water comedy.

And in their headquarters beneath a spacious Mediterranean-style home in the Hollywood Hills, Evette Vargas and Carlos Arriaga, transplanted New Yorkers and founders of a Web development studio called Digital-Reign, talk about their growing roster of clients like the Recording Academy and Madonna and polish a digital pitch for a new television series.

All three companies, formed in the late 1990's, have merged computer know-how and ingenuity with entertainment, the biggest business in town. And so, even in the aftermath of the dot-com implosion, they are contributing to a long-standing dream of planners, politicians and business leaders here to make Los Angeles a multimedia crossroads.

The commingling of geeks and moguls is producing results far beyond the marriage of computers with traditional television and film production, economists and executives here say. It is creating fresh types of entertainment and novel approaches to developing, distributing and promoting it.

"There is something happening here," said Ross DeVol, director of regional and demographic studies at the Milken Institute, an economic research group in Santa Monica, Calif. "I think there are early signs of a critical-mass happening that is helping to make Greater Los Angeles the center of two overlapping sections - entertainment and technology."

The integration of digital technologies to transmit copies of a day's filming over the Web to a production team is creating a "highly collaborative model" for filmmakers as well as technologists, he said. In other instances, new revenue is being generated from adaptive uses of Hollywood, like basing video games on characters and stories from films and television.

"There is no substitute for proximity," said Bobby Kotick, co-chairman and chief executive of Activision, a major game developer that moved here in 1992 from Silicon Valley. Noting that Activision was, for example, Columbia Pictures' choice to produce the video game based on "Spider-Man," he added, "Being here puts us in a very good competitive position."

Jack Kyser, chief economist for the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation, a nonprofit business association, noted increases in the demand for film, television and advertising rooted in digital technology. "We are seeing all kinds of intersections between technology and entertainment," he said, although the economic impact is difficult to gauge accurately because of outdated statistical categories that, for example, lump computer software jobs with business services.

"You look at the numbers," he said, "but then you have to talk to lots of people. The anecdotal information tells you more."

Video Games Meet Cable TV

G4 began operations only last April - with a $150 million commitment by its owner, the cable giant Comcast - but its offices and cubicles on the 11th floor of an industrial office complex look remarkably lived in. Most reflect the sort of whimsy and open-collar ease typical of technology businesses, where workers with spiked hair and body piercing outnumber those wearing Rolexes and business suits. After all, said Scot Rubin, a G4 vice president and the host of one of its weekly shows, "it's a game channel."

Video arcade games are in the hallway near the glass office of Charles Hirschhorn, the network's founder and chief executive. His office television plays a live feed of the network's programming, which has been compared, admiringly or otherwise, to the heady early days of MTV.

Now, said Mr. Hirschhorn, a soft-spoken 45-year-old former movie producer and recent president for television and television animation at Walt Disney, it is the video-gaming generation's turn to innovate television.