The company's initial product amounted to a screensaver that displayed news and other information, delivered live over the Internet. The PointCast Net

PointCast - Wikipedia

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2024-11-05 10:00:04

The company's initial product amounted to a screensaver that displayed news and other information, delivered live over the Internet. The PointCast Network used push technology, which was a new concept at the time, and received enormous press coverage when it launched in beta form on February 13, 1996.[ 1] The product did not perform as well as expected, often believed to be because its traffic burdened corporate networks with excessive bandwidth use,[ 2] and was banned in many places.[ 3] It demanded more bandwidth than the home dial-up Internet connections of the day could provide, and people objected to the large number of advertisements that were pushed over the service as well.[ 4] PointCast offered corporations a proxy server that would dramatically reduce the bandwidth used, but even this didn't help save the company. The increasing popularity of "portal websites" also accelerated the demise of PointCast. When PointCast first started, Yahoo offered little more than a hierarchical structure on the Internet (broken down by subject much like DMOZ), but was soon to introduce the portal which was customizable and offered a much more convenient way to read the news.

At its height in January 1997, News Corporation made an offer of $450 million to purchase the company. However, the offer was withdrawn in March. While there were rumors that it was withdrawn due to issues with the price and revenue projections, James Murdoch said it was due to PointCast's inaction.[ 5] [ 6]

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