Home › DMW Daily › July 16, 2007

Mark Cuban: What If We Would Have Called Ourselves a Social Network Back in 1999?

Authored by Mark Cuban on July 16, 2007 - 2:38am.
It was 8 years ago we went public with what was then the biggest first day jump in stock price in IPO history.... If you didn't know broadcast.com, or don't remember it, we were serving audio and video live and on demand to more than 1mm unique users per day in 1999. I don't 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)



Mark Cuban

Note: This piece was originally published on Mark's blog Blog Maverick and is posted on DMW with the author's permission. Mark's bio can be viewed here. The views expressed in this post are the author’s own, and do not represent the views of Digital Media Wire.

Flickr Photo Credit: jennyberg

Published in DMW Daily, July 16, 2007
tags: Internet | Video | Social Networking | Google | UGC | Broadcast.com |



Comments

Post new comment

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.