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 !