Broadcast.com Boosts Its Signal

A taxi speeds down Fifth Avenue. Todd Wagner, 37, cofounder and CEO of broadcast.com, a Web company based in Dallas, sits in the back seat. Wagner looks harried, exhausted - and buzzed on entrepreneurial adrenaline.

Today's schedule is typical. He got up early to place a call to a company with which he has been negotiating. Then he spent two hours interviewing job candidates at his company's New York City office, located just above Radio City Music Hall. Then came a conference call with headquarters, followed by a high-stakes meeting with people from Arbitron, the media-ratings service.

Now Wagner is rushing to make a session with executives from Procter & Gamble. Dinner will be with investment bankers. And if tonight ends the way last night did, he'll return to the New York office at about 10:30 and spend two hours answering email and touching base (electronically, of course) with some of his strategic investors - which include Intel, Motorola, Yahoo! "This is not about business hours," Wagner explains. "It's about waking hours. You try to do as much as you can for as long as you can stay awake."

There are Web years. There are New York minutes. And then there is "the broadcast.com sprint."

"It's nonstop," says Mark Cuban, 40, cofounder and president of the company. "Early on, Todd and I asked ourselves a question: What price do you have to pay to win? That price is the 'sprint.' "

The "sprint" has already covered lots of ground. Wagner and Cuban founded their company (originally called AudioNet) in September 1995. Their vision was ambitious: to broadcast live programming (radio talk shows, football games, rock concerts) over the Net. Their headquarters was a spare bedroom in Cuban's apartment.

Less than three years later, broadcast.com is the leading source of streaming-media programming on the Web, with more than 400,000 unique users per day. By its own reckoning, it operates the second-largest satellite-downlink facility in Texas (only NASA's is bigger). In that facility, located at the company's 28,000-square-foot headquarters in the Deep Ellum section of Dallas, 22 satellite dishes receive content for more than 400 live events per day. About 580 multimedia servers digitize the content and distribute it to the Web. The network is capable of serving hundreds of thousands of simultaneous users. A staff of more than 80 engineers and technicians works to keep the operation running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

"You have to build your business faster than anyone else," Cuban says. "The 'sprint' doesn't have a finish line. There's never a point where you can say, 'We've made it.' You have to acquire as much content as you can, and to build as many barriers to entry by others as you can, as fast as possible."

It's easier to move fast when you know where you're going. The content distributed by broadcast.com is ever-evolving. But the company's business model has remained unchanged from its earliest days. Three aspects of that model stand out.

First, broadcast.com is not in the business of producing content. It's in the business of aggregating content. And content of a particular kind - programs, events, and information that listeners are passionate about. "We play to people's passions," Cuban says. "We want to aggregate content for which a strong demand exists. And we want content that's replenishable. That's why sports are so important. There's always another game to play, another play to debate."

Wagner and Cuban derived the idea for their company from a shared passion - Hoosier basketball. The two had been friends since their days at the University of Indiana. After graduation, Cuban moved to Dallas and started MicroSolutions Inc., a systems-integration company. By 1990, when he sold it to CompuServe, MicroSolutions had 85 employees and revenues of $30 million.

Wagner made his mark in Dallas as well. He became a hotshot securities lawyer with Hopkins & Sutter. He made partner at age 32. He had a big salary and a bright future. But for Wagner, as for his future business partner, something was missing.

"We said, there's got to be a way that we can listen to Indiana basketball even if we're in Dallas," Wagner explains. "And we figured that other displaced fans felt the same passion about their teams."

Thus was born AudioNet (which became broadcast.com in May). Today Wagner and Cuban control the rights to play-by-play Internet broadcasts for more than 350 college and professional sports teams. SportsWorld.com, a member site created by broadcast.com, offers the views of armchair quarterbacks from around the country. It broadcasts content from a Grateful Dead-only radio station and from a Jimmy Buffett-only radio station. It runs PoliceScanner.com, which does what the name suggests: It allows Los Angeles natives living in Atlanta to follow hostage situations in L.A. to their heart's content.