NetAid

» see netaid.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

In October 1999 I was on a 56k modem sharing a line with the rest of the house, which is the correct frame for understanding what a record-breaking webcast meant that year. NetAid pushed 2,494,135 streams in a single day and that was the largest internet broadcast anyone had ever attempted. A stream in 1999 was a window roughly the size of a stamp that stopped every few seconds to think about itself.

The thing itself was a joint venture between the UN Development Programme and Cisco Systems, with the website going up in September 1999 and the concerts following on 9 October. Three stages ran at once. Wembley Stadium in London had David Bowie and George Michael on it while Giants Stadium in New Jersey had Bono and Sheryl Crow. The Palais des Nations in Geneva ran a quieter bill built around Bryan Ferry and Ladysmith Black Mambazo.

The pitch was Live Aid with the web bolted on. Fourteen years after Wembley had done this for Ethiopia with television, the argument was that the internet could now carry the same event to anybody with a connection and then take their donation directly on the same page. Both halves of that were technically true in 1999 and neither of them was ready.

The website took 2.4 million hits and raised 830,000 dollars from eighty countries. That is a real number for a website in 1999 and a very small number for a global stadium event with Bowie on the bill. Harry Belafonte, who had helped run the original, pulled out beforehand and said the thing had turned into a trade show for UN bureaucracy and corporate sponsorship.

~ the record ~

~ the record ~

Cisco's own press release put the figures out with the precision of a company that was really documenting a load test. 2,494,135 web streams. 99.69 percent of page downloads served successfully, 99.33 percent of stream connections completed. Those are not charity numbers, they are infrastructure numbers. They tell you what the sponsor was actually buying.

That is not a criticism so much as the whole reason the event exists. In 1999 nobody had proven that a live video feed could be handed to millions of people at once without the whole arrangement falling over, and the companies selling the pipes needed somebody to prove it on. A benefit concert was the ideal excuse. The demand arrives all at once, at an hour announced weeks in advance, and if the whole thing falls over it gets written up as a technical footnote rather than a business disaster. It worked, which is why the record matters more in the history of streaming than in the history of aid.

~ what got buried with it ~

One piece of NetAid genuinely worked and it was not the concert. In 2000 it launched an online volunteering service with the UN Volunteers programme, matching people who had skills to organizations in developing countries who needed them done remotely. UNV took the service over completely in 2001 and relaunched it in 2004 under its own domain, where it is still running twenty-plus years later. The most durable thing the record-setting webcast produced was a job board.

NetAid itself was spun out of Cisco into an independent nonprofit in New York in 2001, and by 2006 had narrowed to raising awareness of global poverty among American high school students. In 2007 it became part of Mercy Corps, which later stopped using the name at all. Type netaid.org today and you land on mercycorps.org with nothing to indicate that anything else was ever there.

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