Broadcast.com made Mark Cuban a billionaire by streaming crackly audio to people on dial-up modems. It carried hundreds of radio stations, college and professional sports, press conferences, and live events. Fans could listen to hometown games from anywhere. In 1998 most people still reached the internet by dial-up, and streaming audio was unreliable. The Dallas company streamed it anyway. It went public in July 1998 and became one of the defining stocks of the early internet boom.

AudioNet Becomes Broadcast.com

The company began as AudioNet, started by Chris Jaeb in 1995. Todd Wagner and Mark Cuban joined soon after and turned it into Broadcast.com. The bet was that the internet would become a broadcast medium, like radio and television before it. Whoever controlled the content and the servers would win. Broadcast.com earned money from advertising and from companies that paid to stream their own events.

Yahoo's $5.7 Billion Purchase

Broadcast.com priced its offering at $18 a share in July 1998, and the stock rose about 250 percent on its first day. Less than a year later, Yahoo agreed to buy the company in a stock deal worth about $5.7 billion. The company was about four years old. The deal made Mark Cuban a billionaire. Yahoo struggled to make the business work, and within a few years the service had faded.

Cover: The Sower, Jean François Millet. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a sower (to broadcast seed).