Franklin Lewis hopes his high-tech start-up company will one day be as vital to its target audience as ESPN is to sports fans, providing a "digital community" that ties together broadcast and cable television, radio, satellites and the Internet.

      But the fast-growing Millennial Star Network Lewis leads has a bit of a twist: It is owned by Deseret Management Corp., a holding company for businesses affiliated with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

      "We're working with church-owned entities to colonize an electronic global community of members and friends of the church, and we're doing that by offering integrated content that's values-laden and will be in multiple languages," said Lewis, president and chief executive of Millennial Star.

      "We're organizing and delivering that across multiple platforms, the Internet and radio. We're working on cable and satellite. And we're working on the issues of safe and secure communication. That's where we started, and that's what we're still working on."

      Church members may not know much about Millennial Star, or its Internet service at MStar.net, because it was created just over four months ago as part of a reorganization after Deseret Management's purchase of Bookcraft Inc.

      Since then, Lewis said, he has spent hours in meetings with Millennial Star's "partners" — including the church, Bonneville International Corp., Deseret Book, Brigham Young University, the Deseret News and others — in an attempt to better define the company's mission.

      "The heart of the company is the filtering, searching and what we call the sense-making navigation tools that make the (Internet) content provided by our information partners more navigable, more usable," Lewis said. "We'll have an Internet service that we've filtered. We'll offer e-mail and Internet discussions."

      He said Millennial Star will launch its Internet service at the end of October, although it has already started offering the service at church-owned BYU and Ricks College in Rexburg, Idaho, to meet student needs.

      MStar.net operates the popular church-related Web site LDSWorld.com. This weekend, the company is offering live audio broadcasts of LDS General Conference on its site. And late next summer, it will offer a CD-ROM that brings together the two largest electronic LDS libraries — Deseret Book's GospeLink and Bookcraft's InfoBase.

      To manage all of these projects, the company has grown from 17 employees a few months ago to about 30 now and has relocated its headquarters to the old WordPerfect campus in North Orem.

      "We have the challenges that you would expect with a tech start-up, but we have the advantages in that our information partners are very well-established and have not only great recognition but tremendous content," Lewis said.

      "I think we're about on schedule. Working with so many information partners, . . . you have to respect many varied interests, and it's important to do it the right way. The key will be when members and friends of the church think we're doing a good job of delivering the information they'd like to see."