Quokka Sports

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

~ the eulogy ~

In september 2000 i watched the Sydney olympics the way everyone in Turkey watched them, on television, at whatever hour the time difference handed us. There was a website doing something else entirely with the same event, and it was not built for me. It was built for an American audience on American bandwidth, and a 56k modem would have needed the length of a heat to finish loading one page of it.

Quokka Sports was started in 1996 in San Francisco by Al Ramadan, with the sailor John Bertrand, who in 1983 had become the first non-American to win the America's Cup. The first project was the 1997-98 Whitbread Round the World yacht race, and the idea inside it was the whole company. A boat in the Southern Ocean is covered in instruments, so send the instrument readings home along with the photographs and the crew's email, and let people follow a race as it happens rather than read a result published afterward.

They called it digital sports entertainment. The publishing platform was built to take video and telemetry and athlete biometrics and weather and timing and put all of it on one page, at a moment when most sports coverage online was a box score somebody updated by hand. The company raised $193.5 million altogether, $54.5 million of that in a july 1999 flotation priced at $12 a share.

The Olympics were the big one. Under a joint venture signed with NBC in 1999, Quokka produced most of NBC's web coverage of Sydney 2000, layering data into 35 different sports. It was the first live internet coverage of an Olympic Games and nearly six million people came to it.

~ the dossier ~

~ the origin ~

What Quokka was really selling was the claim that television gives you one edited channel of an event and that everything else measured during it is being thrown away. During the Whitbread coverage you could follow a virtual version of the race run off global weather data. The Sydney site was dense and constantly moving, which was genuinely unfamiliar in 2000 to an audience that had mostly been online for about two years.

The partners lined up behind it. NBC signed, and the International Olympic Committee signed behind them, with Major League Baseball on the list as well. Quokka was scheduled to do a substantial part of Salt Lake City in 2002.

~ the postmortem ~

The arithmetic sat there in the accounts for fiscal 2000. Revenue was $47.2 million and production costs alone were nearly $45 million, most of it spent building the Sydney site. Net losses for the year came to $280 million. Making the coverage cost roughly what selling it brought in, and the advertising market that was supposed to close the gap collapsed over the following winter.

The stock was trading at 23 cents when NASDAQ halted it in april 2001. Quokka dismissed most of a staff of around 150 that same month, keeping a handful of people on. The chapter 11 filing went in late on friday 27 april 2001 in San Francisco, and NBC and Quokka had already agreed to terminate the venture on 1 may unless new funding turned up. It did not. The assets went to auction, where the fittings of a dot-com office got the coverage the sports never had.

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