X-Stream Network

» see x-stream.co.uk as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

In 1998 my modem dialed a metered number and the turkish phone company charged me for every minute of it. Britain ran on the same arrangement, and somebody there noticed the arrangement could be turned inside out. X-Stream was britain-only at the billing layer, which is the layer that actually decided who could copy it, so it could never have reached me even if i had heard the name.

The company came from two canadian brothers, Christopher and Gregory Sukornyk, working with Paul Myers, who later started Wippit. On 8 march 1998 they switched on internet access with no signup fee and no monthly bill. You still paid BT for the call at local rates, and X-Stream took a share of that call revenue back from the telco. That was the whole model. It worked because british local calls were charged by the minute, so a subscriber who stayed online was worth money to whoever owned the access number.

Freeserve usually gets the credit for free internet in britain, because Dixons put it on the counter of every high street store in september 1998 and turned it into news. X-Stream was six months earlier. The Centre for Computing History holds one of its cover CDs, dated march 1999, and the front of the disc reads 100% Free Internet Access, 100% free POP3 email, 20Mb free web space, 56K V.90 compliant. Internet Explorer 4.01 and Navigator 4.5 were both on the same disc, because in 1999 you could not assume a home machine had either one.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the banner ~

Free was not free, it was rented. X-Stream made you install its own dialer, which ran outside the browser and held an advertising banner above the windows start menu for the entire session. You could not close it. It stayed visible over maximized windows, which was the point of putting it there. When the banner crashed, and it did crash, the connection stayed up and the advertising went away, so the bug was the closest thing the service had to a premium tier.

Every free ISP of that generation did some version of this. The industry later moved the same trade into browser toolbars and bundled installers, where the user gave up screen space or default settings instead of money. X-Stream just did it early and did it honestly, in the sense that the thing taking the payment was visible on screen at all times.

~ what really happened ~

LibertySurf, the french free provider, took ten percent of X-Stream in january 2000 and bought the remaining ninety percent in march for about 39.9 million pounds, a figure reported at the time as 75.3 million dollars. X-Stream had spread into five other european countries and japan by then, so the buyer was purchasing a footprint rather than a technology.

The name did not last the year. The homepage at x-stream.co.uk is still titled X-Stream in the archived capture from 10 november 2000. The next capture, on 3 december, is titled LibertySurf.co.uk. The layout underneath is identical, down to the news column running through the middle, and only the word at the top has changed. Twenty-three days is the whole window in which britain's first free ISP lost its name. By april 2002 that address answers as Tiscali, which had bought LibertySurf, and the second rebrand did not bother with a redesign either.

~ what remains ~

The logo on the site by mid-2000 no longer says X-Stream Network. It says x-streamcentral, because the access company had already decided it was a portal. That was the standard move of the period: sell the connection at zero and hope the money is waiting on the front page. LibertySurf made the same bet and was inside Tiscali within a year of buying the people who made it first.

The banner is gone and the model is not. Something free at the point of use, funded by an advertisement you have no button to dismiss, is now most of the consumer internet. X-Stream got there in march 1998 with a dialer and a strip of animated gif, and the only reason nobody remembers is that a shop on the high street said it louder six months later.

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