Quokka Sports put cameras and sensors on yachts racing around the world and streamed the story to the web. It covered the Whitbread and America's Cup sailing races, CART car racing, desert ultramarathons and mountain climbs. A small Australian software team had moved to San Francisco to build what it called digital sports entertainment. By July 1999 the dot-com market was ready to buy the dream that fans would follow sports live, online.

From Ozware to Quokka

Alan Ramadan ran an Australian software developer called Ozware Development from 1990. In August 1996 he adopted a new business model and incorporated in Delaware as Quokka Productions, renaming it Quokka Sports a month later. The company named itself after a small Australian marsupial. The bet was that sports full of data, like sailing and car racing, made better interactive shows than television could deliver.

Twelve Dollars and a Fast Fall

Quokka sold 5 million shares at $12 each in July 1999 and listed on the Nasdaq National Market under the symbol QKKA. It kept adding events and channels, and in 2000 it agreed to buy Golf.com for about 3.9 million Quokka shares. Then online advertising dried up as the dot-com bubble burst, and investors stopped funding money-losing media companies. Quokka filed for bankruptcy in April 2001, and its sites went dark.

Cover: Chelsea Regatta, Theodore Roussel. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for racing yachts (ocean sailing coverage).