Ecast

» see ecastinc.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Ecast sold a thing that only makes sense if the bar jukebox is already an institution where you live. In the United States it is one: a lit box against the wall, somebody's dollar in the slot and an argument about what plays next. The American bar jukebox has a hundred years of habit behind it, and a company could build a national business on top of that habit because the habit was already there.

The company started in San Francisco in 1999 and its idea was simply to put the box on a wire. A traditional digital jukebox held whatever the operator had loaded onto its drive, which meant the catalog was frozen at whatever the last service visit installed. Ecast connected the machine to a broadband link and a central library, so the catalog stopped being a physical fact about that particular machine.

At its largest the network carried roughly 10,000 venues, which meant bars and nightclubs, and past a certain size hotels and arenas as well. That number was already falling by the end, down to something between 6,000 and 7,000 units on the street. Its own site in 2008 called it the largest broadband touchscreen media network in the United States, and the pitch underneath was never really about music. The screen on the front was an advertising surface aimed at young men between 21 and 34, which is a demographic that does not sit still for television.

~ the record ~

~ the early days ~

The most interesting corporate fact about Ecast is who it merged with. In October 2002 it took in RioPort, a digital download service that had gotten there before Apple did and had signed digital distribution agreements with all five majors, which nobody else had managed. That deal history is why Ecast could serve a real catalog to a bar in Ohio rather than a licensed fragment of one.

Around that core the company kept building place-based media products with names that all began the same way. SmartSolution served ads and social media impressions on somebody else's touchscreen hardware. There was a shopping-mall version and a transit version. The hotel build showed off the amenities on a loop. The jukebox was the one people had actually heard of, and the rest was an attempt to sell the same network to rooms that did not have a jukebox in them.

~ the day it died ~

It ended without a wind-down. The board voted for an immediate shutdown after the company failed to raise enough capital to keep operating, and Ecast ceased business at the close of the last day of February 2012. The network went dark on 1 March. Fifty five people lost their jobs, and the phones and the email addresses were switched off shortly after, so operators calling to ask what had happened reached nothing.

The machines themselves did not die at the same speed as the company. A jukebox cut off from the network could still play whatever was already on its own hard drive, so for a while a room full of people got a frozen catalog and no downloads. At least one operator reported their boxes going fully inoperative by the end of March. AMI Entertainment and TouchTunes both put their hands up for the stranded customers, and TouchTunes was already sitting on something like 50,000 connections of its own.

~ what replaced it ~

What survived is the model rather than the company. The jukebox in an American bar is now a phone app pointed at a networked box, and the argument about what plays next happens through a queue you paid to skip. Ecast built the pipe for that and then could not stay solvent long enough to be the one collecting on it.

I have no memory attached to any of this, and it is worth saying why rather than pretending to distance I do not feel. Turkish bars and cafes did not have jukeboxes. The music in the room came from whoever owned the place, off a stack of CDs and later off a laptop behind the counter, and no coin ever entered the decision. A whole American institution died here in 2012 and there was never a Turkish version of it to miss.

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