PointCast Network

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

~ the obituary ~

PointCast launched its push-technology product in February 1996, in the brief stretch when the word "push" sounded like the next "search." The pitch was simple. Instead of you going to find the news, the news would come find you. A screensaver would unfurl across your monitor between meetings, scrolling stock prices and headline news streamed live from PointCast's servers. The press loved it. By 1997 PointCast was the hottest startup in the valley.

That same year News Corporation offered $450 million to acquire it. PointCast turned it down. The company believed it would be worth $750 million on the public market. By the time the IPO was filed in 1998 the figure was half of what News Corp had offered, the disclosures admitted that customers were leaving because of performance issues, and the offering was withdrawn. In May 1999 a small company called Launchpad Technologies bought what remained, and the PointCast Network was switched off the following year.

i was online by 1998 in turkey on a 33.6k modem. pointcast was a product that did not fit that wire. it was built for office LANs in the united states, and it was infamous for melting corporate t1 lines because it kept downloading bigger and bigger ad-loaded payloads in the background. nothing about it was meant for me. i learned about pointcast years later, ives that used it as the warning shot of the dot-com era.

~ the case file ~

~ how it actually worked ~

You installed a small client on a windows machine and let it run. When the screen idled, instead of going to a blank screen or a flying-toaster animation, the PointCast client took over. Headlines panned across the monitor like a stock ticker on television. You could click into a story and the client would open the full article. Companies branded their own channels inside it, and the company that owned your office sometimes pinned the corporate intranet feed at the top.

The thing was a heavy client. It pulled news, ads, market data, and graphics constantly, and it pulled them whether anyone was looking at the screen or not. IT departments started blocking it. That was not what was supposed to happen.

~ what killed it ~

Two things, in roughly this order. The bandwidth problem first. PointCast worked in offices because offices had real connections, and even there it was hated by network administrators. It could not work at home over a dial-up modem at any speed people actually had. Then the portal era arrived. Yahoo and similar sites let you build a customized homepage with the same news in a browser, with no client install and no LAN warfare. Underneath all of that sat the slow-motion business failure: the company turned down the $450M offer from News Corp in 1997 and never got an offer that good again.

By 1999 the press had stopped covering push technology as the future and started covering it as the cautionary tale. The screensaver became a punchline. The screensaver had been the product.

~ where this fits ~

PointCast is the artifact at the front of the dot-com era's rise-and-fall section. It was not a fraud and it was not stupid. It just chose the wrong delivery mechanism for the connection people had at home and the wrong negotiation stance for the moment it had leverage. The product idea, push notifications of news to a glanceable surface, was correct. It is what your phone does today, on your terms, over wifi, with a battery budget. PointCast was that idea in 1996, on a corporate LAN, killing the mail server.

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