Surfline
| Private | |
| Founded | Southern California - 1985 |
| Founder | Sean Collins |
| Headquarters | Huntington Beach, California |
|
Area served
|
Worldwide |
|
Key people
|
Jeff Berg (CEO) |
| Website | surfline.com |
Surfline is a company and website based in Huntington Beach, California that specializes in surf forecasting and surf reports, live webcasting, photography, videography, as well as editorial coverage of the sport of surfing. Surfline.com is now ranked 1,180 in the US and 5,784 in the world in terms of popularity compared to other websites and is now the largest provider of streaming HD coastal cams. Since 2003 it has taken on Buoyweather.com and fishtrack.com (2012), on average the family of websites receives 175,000 visitors per day. The site includes streaming video, surf reports and forecasts. Surfline.com offers streaming cameras at 150 surf breaks, and is one of the larger surf cam websites. Surfline currently has approximately 50 employees.
Surfline was founded in 1985 as a pay-per-call telephone surf report by Southern California surfer Jerry Arnold in partnership with David Wilk and Craig Masuoka, who had founded the Pro Beach Volleyball Tour. Over 50 surfers were employed to relay dawn surf conditions from their local surf breaks to a central office in Huntington Beach, California, where a special phone system made the reports available to callers for 50 cents each. The telephone number, 976-SURF, became well known in the surfing world. The company received 6,000 calls per day in its first month and grew from there. Surfline's offerings expanded throughout Southern California to Northern California and then into Florida and Texas.
A key feature of Surfline's offerings was a daily surf forecast prepared by Sean Collins, a young surfer and sailor who pioneered the art of surf forecasting. Collins' ability to correctly predict the arrival of new swells made a significant impact on surfing. In 1991 Collins bought out Wilk and Masuoka to become a full partner in Surfline and two years later he bought out Arnold to own it outright.
Collins interest in surf forecasting developed out of his own desire for more accurate long-range surf forecasts for Southern California and the Baja California peninsula. The company started as a call-in service, which provided verbal condition reports for various surf breaks around Southern California. In 1995 Surfline became an online service, offering live video streams of surf breaks in addition to written surf reports. Surfline.com was bought up by Swell, Hardcloud and Bluetorch with the hopes of being a “category killer.” They went to Surfer and Surfing magazines to seek out editors, designers, photographers and management. More surfers were becoming more comfortable with going online and Surfline.com was taking advantage of their success by gaining large amounts of money from venture capitalist. The company used that money to improve their data gathering and processing along with surf cams.
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