Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Internet broadcasting would replace TV
Mark Cuban laid it out in steps. PCs would connect to the internet, a giant web linking hundreds of millions of computers. Before long, people would listen to things on it the way they listen to the radio, and not long after that they would watch things on it the way they watch TV. Back then he called it internet broadcasting.
He went on to build broadcast.com, the largest streaming company in the world at the time. It took a lot of work, and most of it ran on ready, fire, aim: go, go, go, go, go.
When Yahoo bought the company, people told him he had just gotten lucky. The sale opened a lot of doors for him, and he has had a lot of fun since.
How did broadcast.com get started?
It began as AudioNet in Dallas, started by Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner, and streamed radio stations and sporting events over the internet. The company took the name broadcast.com in 1998 and went public that July, with its shares more than tripling on the first day of trading. Yahoo bought it the next year in a stock deal valued at about 5.7 billion dollars.
Why was early internet video so grainy?
In the mid-1990s most home users connected through dial-up modems running at 14.4 or 28.8 kilobits per second. Audio could be squeezed to fit those lines, which is why RealAudio, released by Progressive Networks in 1995, worked at all. Video had to be shrunk into a small, jerky window. Broadband cable and DSL spread widely in the early 2000s, and YouTube launched in 2005.
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