July 16th, 2007
It was 8 years ago, Broadcast.com taught the Internet to play... media files
The fact that I am using a cultural reference that dates back to a now 40-year-old Beatles album should tell you that I am no spring chicken.
But in reading Mark Cuban’s Blog Maverick blog, his post entitled Remembering Broadcast.com takes me back to the early days of Internet streaming.
These were pioneer times- before Flash, before widespread broadband availability, beforeiTunes, before Podcasts. We’re talking an era when Internet multimedia either meant streaming encoded music or video files from large servers, or downloading them in their entirety.
Mark’s Broadcast.com was the first Internet broadcaster of broad content and reach. As he writes:
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.
In that same time frame, I was writing a streaming media program book for RealNetworks. It was at that point that I realized the imprint of Broadcast.com on the then-nascent Internet media landscape.
Mark was a pioneer, and still is. Sold Broadcast.com for $4.5 billion, bought the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks, and wants to acquire Major League Baseball’s Chicago Cubs. I for one, would like to see him succeed.
Russell Shaw is an enterprise computing journalist, analyst and author based in Portland, Oregon. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
