iCAST

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

~ the obit ~

CMGI built iCAST the way it built everything in 1999, by buying parts. ZineZone Corporation, a network of amateur webzines, went in with Signature Networks, a music and celebrity licensing shop, and the result got a new name and a headquarters on Dragon Court in Woburn, Massachusetts. Neil Braun, a former NBC executive, was lined up to run it and left before the doors opened after falling out with CMGI chairman David Wetherell. Margaret Heffernan, who had been running another CMGI property, took the job instead.

It opened on 29 February 2000. The pitch was movie previews and music sitting alongside short films and whatever members uploaded themselves, with the meta description on the home page reading that iCAST placed the individual at the center of the online entertainment experience. iCAST Radio went live two days after the site did. The piece everybody wrote about was the iCASTER, a desktop player built on Windows Media that tuned two hundred-odd radio stations from CMGI's Magnitude Network and carried instant messaging licensed from Tribal Voice's PowWow, which at the time claimed something like fifty eight million users, on top of playing whatever MP3s you already had.

On 14 November 2000 CMGI said it was getting out of the entertainment portal business. iCAST would be sold by the end of January 2001 or closed. Around seventy people were let go that same week out of the offices outside Massachusetts; roughly fifty stayed in Woburn, and Signature Networks was carved out and kept. No buyer appeared. The home page was a full eleven and a half kilobytes on 9 November 2000 and a 1,135 byte notice by the first of February.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ sorry you missed us ~

The notice is the whole ending and it is short enough to quote. "Sorry you missed us! iCAST Corporation has closed down its Website and is in the process of winding down the business." Then a thank-you to users and partners, a mailto for [email protected], and a signature: Margaret Heffernan, CEO, iCAST Corporation. It stayed up on icast.com for most of the following year. It also stayed up on zinezone.com into January 2002, which means the old webzine network's own domain spent eighteen months serving a farewell from a company its writers had never published for.

~ the part that outlived the company ~

On 18 January 2000, six weeks before launch, CMGI bought a small internet radio outfit called Green Witch for undisclosed terms and folded it in. Green Witch's stations ran on Icecast, an open-source streaming server, which the trade press noted mainly because it meant skipping RealServer's licensing bill. Icecast had been written in 1998 by Jack Moffitt for his university's radio station, so it could reach the whole campus without a transmitter upgrade or an FCC filing.

By Moffitt's own account the order goes Icecast first, then the Greenwitch station network, then meeting Chris Montgomery and starting work on Ogg Vorbis, then co-founding the Xiph.Org Foundation. iCAST is the employer in the middle of that sentence and it does not get named in it. The portal is gone and the server it ran on is still carrying tens of thousands of streams.

~ watching this from a 56k line ~

February 2000 found me sixteen, in Ankara, on a modem that topped out somewhere under its rated speed on a good evening. A desktop application whose entire reason to exist was simultaneous audio streaming and chat was not a product I could have used if it had been translated and sold to me. Streaming in Turkey in 2000 meant waiting for a RealAudio clip to buffer and giving up on it. Broadband did not reach my house until around 2006. By then iCAST had been gone for five years.

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