What did PointCast put on a 1996 office screen?
PointCast Network was free Windows and Mac software that sat in the background of a work PC and took the screen over when the machine went idle. Instead of flying toasters, the screensaver showed headlines, stock quotes, weather and sports scores pulled from news wires and newspapers, wrapped around full-screen advertisements.
The company started in 1992 as PED Software, founded by Christopher Hassett, and spent its first years building personalized news tools for Prodigy and CompuServe. It renamed itself PointCast and launched the internet version in beta on February 13, 1996.
The technique was called push. A browser in 1996 pulled: the user typed an address and waited for a page to crawl down a 28.8k modem. PointCast reversed the direction. Its client checked in with the company servers on a schedule, downloaded fresh content in the background, and displayed it without the user asking for anything.
By the end of 1996 roughly 1.5 million people were running it, most of them in offices where keeping up with the news was part of the job. For free software distributed over dial-up, that was a serious number, and the technology press treated it as the shape of things to come.
Why did the $450 million News Corporation deal collapse?
In January 1997 News Corporation offered about $450 million for a company with almost no revenue. The month before, Microsoft had announced a deal to carry PointCast on the Internet Explorer 4 Active Desktop, which read at the time as the biggest software company in the world endorsing the model.
PointCast wanted more. The two sides kept talking into the new year, and in March 1997 News Corporation withdrew the offer and walked away. No comparable bid ever came back.
March 1997 was also when Wired ran its Push! cover, a tombstone for the web with PointCast as the lead example. "The Web browser itself is about to croak. And good riddance," Kevin Kelly and Gary Wolf wrote in that issue. The company was at the exact peak of its cultural standing in the same weeks it lost the only large exit it would ever be offered.
PointCast filed to go public in May 1998 at a valuation near $250 million, roughly half what it had refused 16 months earlier. The filing was pulled within two months. The public market had already stopped believing the story, and this was still 1998, when the market was buying almost anything with a modem attached.
How did PointCast break the office network?
Every copy of the software woke on a schedule and pulled down text, graphics and advertisements. One user was nothing. Fifty users behind a single 1.5 Mbps T1 line, all updating when they logged in at nine in the morning, was a different situation.
By 1997 network administrators were watching PointCast consume capacity their employers had bought for email and file transfer. The response was blunt. Large companies banned the software outright, which locked out the exact population PointCast was selling to advertisers: office workers on fast connections who read news all day.
The company shipped a proxy server that cached one copy of an update for a whole building instead of fetching it per desk. It cut the traffic and did not reverse the bans, because by then the decision had been made at the policy level rather than the engineering level.
The revenue model made the engineering trap worse. Money came from advertisements inside the screensaver, so fewer updates meant fewer impressions and less income. Sending less data fixed the network complaint and broke the business at the same time.
Who owns PointCast today?
Nobody operates PointCast, and no product carries the name. The trail ends inside AOL.
Launchpad Technologies, an Idealab company in San Diego, bought PointCast in May 1999 for about $7 million, roughly 98 percent below what News Corporation had put on the table 28 months earlier. Weeks before that sale, Christopher Hassett, by then the former chief executive of the company he founded, tried to buy it back. "With the right capital and right management team, PointCast has a bright future," he told Bloomberg in April 1999. The bid went nowhere.
The buyer folded the technology into a toolbar called EntryPoint. In 2000 EntryPoint emailed users that the original service was finished: "we have decided to completely phase out the PointCast service in favor of this new product." The PointCast network sent its last push at the end of March 2000.
EntryPoint then merged with Internet Financial Network to form Infogate, which sold co-branded news tickers with outlets including USA Today and CNN. AOL bought Infogate in March 2003, largely for the screensaver patents, which it wanted for pushing Time Warner magazine content at its email subscribers. AOL still exists in 2026 as a subscription and advertising business, which makes it the last address for anything PointCast built.
What replaced push technology after 1999?
The word push became unusable in technology marketing for about a decade. The idea behind it never stopped working.
RSS did the same job with the weight moved to the other side: a small file the reader collected on its own schedule rather than a heavy client the publisher fed. Google Reader took that to a mass audience until Google closed it in 2013. Then the feed moved to the phone, where Facebook, Twitter and eventually TikTok delivered personalized content with no request from the user at all.
Smartphone notifications are literally push, and the industry stopped using the word to describe them to consumers. The infrastructure that killed PointCast is the reason: broadband and mobile data absorbed the bandwidth cost that a 1997 office network could not.
The other push companies of 1996 and 1997 did not outlive the category under their own names. BackWeb, Marimba and NewsEdge either repositioned as enterprise software vendors or disappeared. Microsoft shipped the Active Channels feature in Internet Explorer 4, users ignored it, and later versions of the browser dropped it without much comment.
What the screensaver bet got wrong
PointCast claimed the one piece of desktop real estate nobody else had taken. That was the clever half. The self-defeating half is that a screensaver runs precisely when the user is not looking at the screen, so the surface was available because it had no attention on it, not because nobody had thought of it.
Screensavers themselves stopped being a technical necessity once LCD panels replaced the phosphor monitors that could burn an image in. Every successor to PointCast moved the other way, toward where people were actually looking: the browser tab, then the phone home screen, then the lock screen.
The bandwidth story keeps repeating too. Streaming video strained corporate networks in the late 2000s, and generative AI tools are doing something similar to enterprise bandwidth budgets in 2026. A useful product that consumes more network than the infrastructure was sized for gets blocked by administrators long before users decide they are tired of it.
PointCast was right that pulling every piece of information by hand was a bad way to stay informed. It was wrong about the client, the surface and the year, and those three mistakes cost it about $443 million in two years.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does PointCast still exist?
PointCast does not still exist. The PointCast Network stopped broadcasting at the end of March 2000, the successor company Infogate was sold to AOL in March 2003, and no product has carried the PointCast name since. The original 1996 client does not run on current versions of Windows or macOS.
Why did PointCast fail?
PointCast failed because its software pulled enough data into corporate networks that employers banned it during 1997 and 1998, and its advertising revenue depended on exactly the frequent updates causing the problem. The collapse of the News Corporation deal in March 1997 and the withdrawn 1998 stock offering removed the money that might have funded a rebuild, and PointCast sold for about $7 million in May 1999.
How much did PointCast sell for?
PointCast sold for about $7 million in May 1999, to Launchpad Technologies, an Idealab company based in San Diego. News Corporation had offered about $450 million for PointCast in January 1997 and withdrew that offer in March 1997 after the two sides failed to agree on a price.