PointCast (dotcom)

PointCast was a dot-com company founded in 1992 by Christopher R. Hassett in Sunnyvale, California.

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 hot concept at the time, and received enormous press coverage when it launched in beta form on February 13, 1996. The product did not perform as well as expected, often mistakenly believed to be because its traffic burdened corporate networks with excessive bandwidth use, and was banned in many places. 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. Pointcast offered corporations a proxy server that would dramatically reduce the bandwidth used. But even this didn't help save PointCast. A more likely reason than bandwidth was the increasing popularity of "portal websites". 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 customizable 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 However, the offer was withdrawn in March. While there were rumors that it was withdrawn due to issues with the price and revenue projections, James Murdoch said it was due to PointCast's inaction.

Shortly after not accepting the purchase offer, the board of directors decided to replace Christopher Hassett as the CEO. Some reasons included turning down the recent purchase offer, software performance problems (using too much corporate bandwidth) and declining market share (lost to the then-emerging Web portal sites.) After five months, David Dorman was chosen as the new CEO. In an effort to raise more capital, Dorman planned to take the company public. A filing was made in May 1998 with a valuation of $250 million. This plan was abandoned after two months in favor of looking for a company with whom to partner or be acquired.

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