Who built Broadcast.com, and what did it stream?
AudioNet began carrying live radio signals over the internet from Dallas in September 1995, built on a company Cameron Christopher Jaeb had set up in 1989. Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner, two Indiana University graduates living in Texas, put money in and took over the day to day running of it that year.
What it sold was simple and, in 1995, close to unheard of: a link in a browser that played live audio. AudioNet carried radio stations, college and professional sports, press conferences and political speeches, then added video.
A second line of business paid better than advertising. Companies wanted their earnings calls, product launches and training sessions streamed, and almost none of them had the staff or the encoders to do it. The company took the name Broadcast.com in 1998 and sold that service to corporate clients.
The quality was poor by any later standard. Most listeners were on 28.8k or 56k modems, and video, when a stream carried it, ran in a window the size of a postage stamp. Few people minded, because the alternative was nothing at all. Most of the decoding was handled by RealPlayer, the software nearly every streaming site depended on at the time.
Why was the 1998 IPO a record?
Broadcast.com priced its shares at $18 and started trading on Nasdaq under the symbol BCST in July 1998. CNNfn's end of day report that Friday had the stock up 44 3/4 at 62 3/4, a first day gain of about 249 percent and the largest any US offering had posted to that point.
The record did not survive the year. theglobe.com took it in November 1998, and within a year a triple-digit first day had stopped being news at all.
The business under the stock price was much smaller than the trading implied. Broadcast.com finished 1998 with $22.4 million in revenue and a net loss of $16.4 million, the figures CNNfn cited when Yahoo announced its offer nine months later.
Investors were not buying the revenue. They were buying the premise that live audio and video would move onto the internet, and that whoever carried the most of it in 1998 would still be carrying the most of it in 2005.
Why did Yahoo pay $5.7 billion for $22.4 million in sales?
Yahoo announced the deal on April 1, 1999 and completed it on July 20, 1999, issuing 0.7722 of a Yahoo share for every Broadcast.com share. "Broadcast.com's tremendous first-to-market advantage has made it the leading destination on the Web for audio and video broadcasts," Tim Koogle, Yahoo's chairman and chief executive, said in the announcement, which called the purchase "a natural extension of our strategy".
The reasoning was about inventory. Yahoo was the front door of the web in 1999, with directory, mail and news traffic it could not sell video advertising against, because it had no video. Broadcast.com had the streams, the encoding staff and the contracts with radio stations and sports teams.
The price worked out to roughly 250 times the previous year's revenue, for a company that had never made a profit. Yahoo paid in stock, which in 1999 felt close to free: the shares were climbing faster than cash could have been spent.
What it bought was a service rather than a technology lead. Live streaming became the biggest thing on the internet within a decade, and almost none of it ran on anything that changed hands in 1999.
What killed the service after the deal closed?
Bandwidth did most of the damage. Every listener cost money in server capacity and transit, and a free stream with a banner ad beside it did not cover the bill. The advertising market that was supposed to grow into that cost shrank instead when the dot-com crash arrived in 2000 and 2001.
Yahoo folded the operation into Yahoo! Broadcast Services and started cutting. Corporate webcasting was pared back, consumer programming was thinned out, and in 2002, three years after the purchase, the service was discontinued.
The technology was not the problem. Live video became ordinary within a decade, on YouTube from 2005 and on services built for broadband rather than dial-up. Broadcast.com was early enough to prove the demand and too early to serve it at a profit.
It is the clearest example of what the 1999 market rewarded. The price has appeared on every list of the worst internet acquisitions since the crash, and it is the deal most often cited when people argue that Yahoo spent the bubble buying traffic instead of building products.
Is Broadcast.com still online in 2026?
No. There has been no Broadcast.com service since 2002, and Yahoo has held the domain since 1999 without putting anything back on it. The address is a dead end: when the subject came up on X in May 2025, what started the thread was a reader pointing out that broadcast.com led to a blank page.
Cuban answered that thread himself. Posting a list of patents his lawyers had drafted for Broadcast.com in January 1999 and never filed, he wrote: "I tried to buy it back," and added, "Still willing to if anyone there cares!" Benzinga reported the exchange on May 12, 2025. Nothing has been announced since.
Yahoo is also no longer the company that made the purchase. It was sold to Verizon, then to funds managed by Apollo Global Management, which has run it as a standalone business since 2021. The full chain of owners is in our piece on who owns Yahoo now.
So the answer people search for is an unglamorous one. The company is gone, the service is gone, and the name sits unused in the domain portfolio of a private-equity-owned internet company that has announced no plans for it.
What did the $5.7 billion leave behind?
It left several hundred people in Dallas with money that changed their lives. Cuban has said that the great majority of the staff came out of the sale as millionaires, because employees held stock and the stock was sold at the top of the market.
It left Cuban with Yahoo shares he was careful not to simply hold. He hedged the position with puts and calls, which is why his fortune survived Yahoo's slide after 2000, and in January 2000 he bought the Dallas Mavericks.
It left Wagner running 2929 Entertainment and Landmark Theatres alongside him, both of them funded by a sale that closed at the top of the market and was paid in a currency that fell by more than 90 percent in the two years after.
And it left Yahoo with a reputation for overpaying that followed the company into every deal it did afterward, and into the ones it walked away from.
Frequently Asked Questions
What happened to Broadcast.com?
Broadcast.com, the Dallas streaming company that began as AudioNet in 1995, was bought by Yahoo in an all-stock deal completed on July 20, 1999 and valued at $5.7 billion. Yahoo folded it into Yahoo! Broadcast Services and discontinued the service in 2002.
How much did Yahoo pay for Broadcast.com?
Yahoo paid $5.7 billion in stock for Broadcast.com in 1999, against the $22.4 million in revenue and the $16.4 million net loss Broadcast.com reported for 1998. It is still named among the most expensive acquisitions of the dot-com era.
Does Broadcast.com still work in 2026?
No. There has been no Broadcast.com service since Yahoo discontinued it in 2002, and Yahoo has kept the domain without running anything on it. Mark Cuban, who ran Broadcast.com before the 1999 sale, said in May 2025 that he had tried to buy the name back and was still willing to.