IBEAM Broadcasting Corporation

iBEAM Broadcasting Corporation, (NASDAQ: IBEM) offered streaming media distribution, revenue-producing applications and interactive Webcasting services to major entertainment and enterprise customers. iBEAM's On-Target ad insertion technology and Activecast interactive Webcasting capabilities created value for companies who used streaming media. By January 2001, iBEAM was delivering 100 million streams per month across its network of high-performance servers located in more than 210 networks around the world, connected by satellite, and augmented with fiber optic cable. At that time, iBEAM's customer list included more than 460 companies, including media and entertainment leaders Disney, Paramount Pictures, MTVi, Sony Music Entertainment, IBM/Lotus, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Merrill Lynch and LAUNCH.com. iBEAM's technologies were founded in 1998 by Navin Chaddha and Nils Lahr while the business was incubated by CrossPoint Ventures.
As the first global streaming media network in existence, iBEAM was a pioneer and key inventor in dozens of new technologies. Second to none, Akamai offered to purchase iBEAM for 2 billion dollars in early 2000 and the board declined the offer. iBEAM had a successful IP on May 23, 2000, offering 11,000,000 shares of common stock at an offering price of $10 per share. However, due to the "bubble" bursting in late 2000, most of iBEAM's tier one customers pulled out of the streaming market. During 2000, iBEAM acquired five companies worth a total of 500 million, had offices in Hong Kong, London, New York, Los Angeles, Oklahoma City and Sunnyvale. The company's employee count was approximately 1,400. In mid-2001, Williams Communications purchased iBEAM.
RealNetworks
iBEAM wrote the first media reflector technologies by hacking the RealNetworks proprietary RTP implementation. Later during one of the largest deals ever made by RealNetworks, iBEAM purchased over 10 million licenses with an upfront payment of over 4 million in cash. The technologies written to enable re-broadcasting of video became one of the core components of the G2 server enabling a server to forward a live video feed to another server via unicast or multicast.
Microsoft Windows Media
iBEAM wrote the first multicast distribution services based on the Windows Media technologies. According to Microsoft, by the end of 2000, the firm's products was responsible for streaming over 90% of all windows media on the Internet from the corporate and entertainment markets.
Satellite Distribution
iBEAM was the first company to broadcast live streaming events via satellite, convert the downlink multicast traffic back into unicast and serve via bi-directional connectivity to end users. The firm had a major global role in shaping the technologies surrounding TCP/IP encapsulation and timeslicing of transponders in the satellite industry, working with Hughes, PanAmSat, AsiaSat and SES,.
1 Billion Streams
By the June 2001, the firm's intelligent streaming media network had distributed over one billion streams for the world's largest media companies.

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