Spreecast

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

~ the eulogy ~

spreecast sat in the part of internet history i can read about but cannot personally remember. it opened in public beta on 10 november 2011 with jeff fluhr, the former stubhub ceo, running it out of san francisco. the product was a video room where up to four people could share screen tiles, an audience of any size could watch, and any audience member could raise a hand to be pulled into the call. it was group video chat plus broadcast, with chat alongside, designed for the kind of show where the host wants to interview three guests and take live questions. ustream did broadcast. skype did calls. spreecast tried to be the middle thing.

the early money was real. four million dollars in seed in december 2011 from frank biondi, gordon crawford, and edward w. scott. another seven million in september 2012. gary vaynerchuk joined as an advisor in february of the same year. by october 2012 viacom signed a video deal that put spreecast shows on vh1 and logo. celebrities did q&a panels on it: reese witherspoon, britney spears, miley cyrus, anderson cooper, neil patrick harris. the platform hosted over a hundred thousand events across its life. and then on 14 july 2016 fluhr posted a short note that the company was shutting down and the team was moving on to other things.

i was on the wrong side of the language and time-zone gap for spreecast. its peak years overlap with my late phd window, when i was on skype for personal calls and not on any video-broadcast product because there was no audience in turkey to broadcast to. the celebrity-q&a format the platform leaned into was a us-entertainment-press thing. the technology underneath, four-way browser video plus raise-hand-to-join, was solid for its era, but the audience habit it depended on never materialized outside of the celebrities-and-fans hour.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it was ~

browser video in 2011 was hard. webrtc was still a draft spec. spreecast was running its own infrastructure on top of flash and getting four-way live tiles to actually work in a chrome tab. the engineering of the moment was the demo. you could load a url, click a button, end up in a four-person panel with the audience chat scrolling beside the video. the celebrity-panel format was a way to show off the technology without needing a real prosumer market for the product underneath.

fluhr had the brand connections to make the celebrity-bookings side go. anderson cooper hosted a session in 2012 about the us election. miley cyrus did one to promote a single. britney spears did one to promote a perfume launch. the format was good for one-off press moments and bad for daily-active-users. spreecast's metric was events hosted, which is the metric you report when the metric you would rather report is not moving.

~ what got buried with it ~

facebook live launched to all users in april 2016. youtube live had been there since 2008 but it became serious in the same window. periscope had been bought by twitter in march 2015 and was the mobile broadcast tool of the moment. the slice spreecast had owned, multi-person panel broadcast with audience pull-in, was suddenly inside facebook's product roadmap with a free tier and a billion-user distribution attached. three months later spreecast was gone.

the july 2016 shutdown post did not pretend the product had been acquired or merged. fluhr wrote that the team had built something they were proud of, that it had not scaled into the business they wanted, and that the platform would be turned off. the code base did not get open-sourced. the celebrity-panel archive went down with the rest of the site. the technical idea, multi-tile browser video with audience promotion, kept showing up later inside twitter spaces and clubhouse and instagram live in audio-only forms.

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