Geocast Network Systems

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

~ the last words ~

Geocast Network Systems was founded in 1999 in Menlo Park by Joseph Horowitz, who ran it as chairman and chief executive, and it was funded on a scale that is hard to credit for a company almost nobody remembers. Kleiner Perkins was in it, alongside Mayfield and Institutional Venture Partners. The total raised came to more than $200 million, and a late round added about $10 million from the broadcasters Belo and Hearst-Argyle, who were strategic investors rather than financial ones. With that money Geocast built a satellite uplink facility in California so it could beam its service across the United States itself.

The idea it was selling was datacasting. When American broadcasters converted to digital television they were handed more spectrum than they needed for the picture, and the surplus was real: a local station's digital channel could carry a fat one-way data stream alongside the programming with nobody at home noticing. Geocast's plan was to buy or barter that surplus from affiliates nationwide and use it as a national broadcast pipe into people's houses, pushing video and rich web content down it continuously.

The reason this seemed worth $200 million in 1999 is that almost nobody had broadband. Dial-up could not carry video and cable modems were barely deployed, so the fastest way to get a large file to a million homes was genuinely to broadcast it rather than to serve it a million times. YouTube was four years away. The thing Geocast had to beat was the 56k modem.

~ the record ~

~ the box ~

Thomson Multimedia designed the hardware, which was a set-top box holding a DTV receiver card and a hard disk, with its own CPU and a USB connector to reach your PC, plus an antenna to pull the signal in. The disk is the part that makes the concept click. Nothing was streamed on demand, because a broadcast cannot be on demand. The box sat there collecting whatever Geocast was sending, overnight and all day, and when you opened the application the content was already local. What you experienced as instant was a disk that had been filling itself for hours.

~ who signed on ~

The partner list was substantial for a company this young. EchoStar signed on to deliver services to PC users via satellite, an alignment the company was still leading with on its front page in February 2001. Allbritton Communications, which owned an ABC affiliate in Washington, was on board on the broadcast side. The February 2001 homepage also carried a section titled "INSIDE THE CAST: How We Really Look", which is a staffing-and-culture page, written in the voice of a company that expected to be hiring for years.

~ march 1, 2001 ~

It had already cut about a fifth of its staff when it stopped. On 1 March 2001 Geocast announced it was suspending business operations and preparing to sell its assets, with 190 people still employed. Horowitz's statement is the standard shape of that spring: "Geocast had a tremendous vision and the talent to build to that vision. But to reach the final stage of execution we needed additional funding in a market environment that was simply not conducive to our efforts."

Read "the final stage of execution" carefully, because it is doing a lot of work. The consumer product was not out. Geocast had spent more than $200 million on an uplink and a national affiliate strategy, and it died in the gap between a working system and a shipping one. The NASDAQ had fallen by more than half from its peak in the twelve months before that announcement, and a company whose next step was manufacturing and subsidizing set-top boxes for households was asking for exactly the sort of money that had stopped existing.

~ the idea that kept coming back ~

Datacasting over broadcast spectrum never died as an idea, it just stopped being a consumer business. The technique survives in emergency alerting and in public-television data services, and the DTV standards that followed kept provisions for it. What killed Geocast's version was not the engineering but the thing it was built to work around: broadband arrived, and once a household had a real downstream connection, nobody needed a hard disk that filled itself off an antenna.

None of this touched Turkey. Digital terrestrial television did not come to Turkish households on anything like the American schedule, and a service premised on buying surplus spectrum from US local affiliates had no version that could travel. In 2001 I was on dial-up in Ankara and the local answer to "files are bigger than the connection" was not a broadcast receiver, it was going to an internet cafe, where the pipe was somebody else's problem and you brought a CD home. Geocast was solving the same shortage from the opposite end, with two hundred million dollars and a satellite.

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