It was 9 years ago we went public with what was then the biggest first day jump in stock price in IPO history....
If you didnt know broadcast.com, or dont remember it, we were serving audio and video live and on demand to more than 1mm unique users per day in 1999. I dont even remember how many audio and video files we served per day, without 100mb or 10min limits, encoded up to 700k.
We had full length audio books, full length CDs, full length movies, TV shows. You name it. And unlike today, we actually got licenses for them before they were on our site.
We had preroll commercials. We had inserted commercials. We even inserted video commercials into audio files and streams.
And user generated content ? Yep. Mostly corporate, since back then thats who could afford the tools to edit video. Companies or individuals could upload full videos with synchronized slideshows and we even allows hot spots in the videos. And of course we gave you realitime statistics of how many people were watching your video, and if you required registration, which we offered, you knew exactly who was watching. We had companies that had ongoing "shows", like Breakfast with Dell and we have individuals who did their own thing and we hosted it.
Just think if we had put up a discussion forum and called ourself a Social Network. Its deja vu all over again.
If you want to take a trip down memory lane, here is our video , courtesy of bandwidth subsidy from Google Video (which i have no problem doing given how often our content is pirated on their websites and how much money we have to spend to policing their sites and sending and processsing the legal back and forth of takedown notices)
UPDATE: I decided to go back and dig up our PPT from our IPO roadshow. This was what we presented to potential investors. It is from July of 1998 and gives some more details of who Broadcast.com was and how we saw our business and opportunity. Enjoy !
Remembering Broadcast.com
Recent Posts
- Beating Google ? (5/14/2008)
Reader Comments
(Page 1)2. Mr. Cuban,
Happy 8 year anniversary since broadcast.com went public!
Cory
Posted at 11:05PM on Jul 15th 2007 by Cory
3. Mark: What was it like seeing the stock jump? How long did it take to sink in?
Posted at 11:15PM on Jul 15th 2007 by Phil Nelson
4. Wow...that is old school now! Love the Bloomington reference, amazing how many of us are out there. We have three IU grads at www.livebooks.com and it is great to be around so many smart people :)
Congrats on everything Mark!
Posted at 11:27PM on Jul 15th 2007 by J Sandifer
5. M,
I a trying to take a company I own public. How were you able to raise funds that built your infrastructure, prior to going public? Our company is only worth $230 million according to brokers but like broadcast.com, we will be our only national competitor. It may not be much but to a kid who grew up in a shack out in the county hills of Montana, it’s not too bad! I will give you 30% if you help me!! All I ask for is a few minutes of your time.
Jerry R. Reynolds
Posted at 11:58PM on Jul 15th 2007 by Jerry R. Reynolds
6. love the porn music when someone nobody is talking, great touch.
mark, you got out while the getting was good and i commend you for that. you were clearly on the vanguard but you were likely a few (several) years early. if yahoo hadn't bailed you out, i wonder if you guys could have held on long enough to bridge the gap into the broadband era. the 14.4k archives really brought that part home.
you're still my favorite owner and as sox fan, please dont buy the cubs.
Posted at 1:16AM on Jul 16th 2007 by Omar
7. 249%? Very nice.
Posted at 3:58AM on Jul 16th 2007 by Tyler Wilson
8. All that, and Yahoo turned it into the most expensive 301 redirect in the history of the web.
It sucks when you have to keep reminding people of your own history, but you don't, no body will.
On the other hand, maybe Mark still has an itch that needs scratching? Broadcast.com part 2? The comeback? As bad as Yahoo's cash flow is right now, they'd probably sell the domain back to you for a song.
Posted at 7:00AM on Jul 16th 2007 by Brett Tabke
9. Congratulatons, Mark!! The promise of Broadcast.com looked huge back in 1999. Why couldn't Yahoo capitalize on it? Why didn't another company come in and fill he void?
Isn't there a market for sports re-broadcast over the Internet? Don't companies want to put their sharholder meetings and earings calls on the Internet? Or, did technolgy just advance so quickly that sports teams and companies can do all of this themelves from their own web sites?
YouTube is not really a competitort Broadcast.com... but who is? Did any company fll he void? BrightCove is looking to make an alternatve market for professional video. Are the the moden day Broadcast.com?
Don Dodge
10. Don Dodge: follow the billionaires...I think Apple/Steve Jobs is the thing that most closely replaced broadcast, even though its via downloads not streaming. The wide availability of podcasts is progress over where we were 8 or 9 years ago. I can download complete shows, in their entirity, commercial free...for free!
Some things are no longer free, but directly offered at reasonable prices (audio for every MLB game offered directly via MLB for example). Things seem to have progressed for the better, but I still can't buy episodes of Entourage from HBO via the Internet...yet.
Posted at 11:11AM on Jul 16th 2007 by Robert Seidman
11. Mark,
I actually have the original Audionet.com presentation still. It is amazing how good of a read it is even today.
What amazes me is how Yahoo had MySpace (GeoCities) and YouTube (Broadcast.com) well before their time and just flushed them away. Now they are spending more money trying to basically buy back what they once owned.
Posted at 11:23AM on Jul 16th 2007 by Robert Davidman
12. That 56K maximum download speed really made things difficult on those days. Yahoo was big enough to push high-speed internet back then and really could have had a monopoly. What they decided to do is just astonishing. Good thing they hired an old fart like Terry Semel to run things afterward...
13. In looking at the slide show, it looks like the idea was to have the computer be at the center of the home entertainment experience (audio and video feeds, etc). In some of your somewhat recent posts, I got the impression that you were making the case that TVs should be the new center of the entertainment experience-- basically doing everything broadcast.com was doing but with a nicer screen. Am I right in thinking that you still have the same basic vision (a single entertainment portal), only now you think the platform should be the TV, or is there some other difference between the two visions that I'm missing?
Posted at 12:37PM on Jul 16th 2007 by Sam Cohen
14. Mark, I know you're saying YouTube who? You guys were way ahead of the ballgame with Broadcast.com. Thanks for sharing the video beacause all these years I've wondered what Broadcast.com was really all about. Now I know. Congrats on all your success.
Posted at 2:15PM on Jul 16th 2007 by Mark Williamson
15. Great stuff! I spent a lot of time down there and took the guys to far more then one good Mexican Meal on the corner. To bad Yahoo did not have a clue how to really use what they bought!
Broadcast was great and the team that built it were a bunch of great folks as well.
Posted at 2:20PM on Jul 16th 2007 by Jack Spirko
17. Hey Mark,
Congrats! I remember back in the day when Broadcast.com was just coming online, I was 18 or 19 back then, and I could see the potential for online video, though it seemed nobody else could.
It is unfortunate that your site did not blow up ala YouTube and start the online video revolution, because you had the plan and you had the advertising model (Which it looks like they are going to go back to!). I admire what you have done professionally in the industry, you are one of those people that I would just love to sit down with and chat over coffee!! Keep up the great work!
Kray
Posted at 3:47PM on Jul 16th 2007 by Kray
18. Who would have imagined that the vision of broadcast and geocities (user gen) would one day rock the world? Oh yeah we both did. Too bad the y! boys spent more time reading their own press than building on the properties they paid $10B for. I still think i have the geocities roadshow pitch somewhere.
Steve Hansen
COO GeoCities.. retired
Posted at 5:14PM on Jul 16th 2007 by Stephen Hansen
20. Mark - congratulations on your past and present successes! You were way ahead of the game with broadcast.com, and you're way ahead of the game as an NBA team owner. Seeing some of these other company owner's seeking your advice brought an interesting question to my mind: which would be more enjoyable for you - stepping into the company worth $230 million or stepping into a company worth $0 starting fresh (assuming that both ventures were of interest to you)? Just curious.
Posted at 6:43PM on Jul 16th 2007 by Jared Bieberich
1. I remember the good old days working @ 2929 Elm St... and eating Mexican food at lunch @ the corner restaurant… and occasionally hanging out on the roof w/ the sat. dishes.
Rob
Posted at 11:03PM on Jul 15th 2007 by Rob Sherrard