The claim
“I'm selling you the radio station of the future.”
What I said to SBS's chairman in 1999, pitching the acquisition. I meant a multimedia company that could compete with television, print and terrestrial radio at once — global reach, at pennies on the dollar, with capabilities none of them had. He looked at me like I had four heads. The links below are what I was already doing while I said it.
How I knew
I ran my junior high school's radio and television studios in the early 1970s, when New York's cable operators were first being required to open public access. I studied radio and television communications at NYU. In 1982 I enlisted as a 72G — telecommunications center operator, held a top-secret clearance, and spent three years in Germany moving classified traffic between military communication centers, on the networks that came before the public internet. I trained on mainframes and keypunch machines, and watched the personal computer arrive.
So when audio and video started moving onto the web, it was not a new idea to me. It was the thing I had already been doing for fifteen years, showing up somewhere new. The prediction wasn't a guess. I had been inside the infrastructure since I was fourteen.
The record
Public, permanent, and hosted by the SEC — but filed before EDGAR's full-text index began in 2001, so a search of my name will not return it. This page is the link.
SBS's chief financial officer confirmed the same facts in writing on April 25, 2004, recording the April 26 1999 purchase of the controlling interest and my employment with Spanish Broadcasting System and JuJu Media through that date. Copy on request.
The work — archived, and open to anyone
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January 1999 · Cannes
Daily webcasts from MIDEM
We filed reports from the international music market in Cannes across the run of the show — Friday, Saturday, Saturday evening, Sunday evening, Monday — with eight streamed segments alongside them. In 1999.
See the archived MIDEM 99 section → -
May 2000 · with America Online
A two-year agreement with AOL, when AOL was the front door to the internet
A co-branded site with a guaranteed minimum number of impressions, and a programming plan to create content across several AOL brands. SBS described the agreement to the Securities and Exchange Commission in its annual report for that year.
Read it in the SEC filing → -
September 2000 · Los Angeles
Webcasting the first Latin Grammy Awards, with AOL
The inaugural Latin Grammys went out live on CBS from the Staples Center. We ran the webcast and the coverage around it — red carpet, twenty-four nominee features, filed reports, interviews and video — in partnership with AOL, whose music navigation is still visible in the archived page.
See the archived webcast page → -
2000 · Dominican Republic
A live baseball broadcast from Santo Domingo to New York
We simulcast the Manny Mota Baseball Classic — the former Dodgers coach's foundation event — to both SBS radio stations in New York and to the web. The rig was two mini PC towers with encoding cards, carried onto a commercial flight and run off a local telecom's broadband line. That is what "pennies on the dollar" looked like in practice.
See the archived event page → -
1997–2004
Radio, streamed, before streaming was an industry
SBS's station group went onto the internet years before anyone called it streaming. I built it. I also worked at the front edge of in-stream advertising — designing, with the broadcast engineers of the day, a way to swap a different commercial to the internet audience at the break, matched to listeners who had registered with us. The equipment could do it. We never finished it, and I am not going to claim we did. Roughly three decades later it is how the industry works.
Station streams and audio assets from the period are preserved in the Internet Archive's captures of the site.
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circa 2000–2001
I offered the record labels the answer to piracy. They passed.
Microsoft paid us to promote Windows Media Player during the format wars that decided how audio would travel. I took its rights-management technology to several major labels and pitched them licensed digital distribution — paid, protected downloads. They turned me down, while complaining to anyone who would listen about piracy. Apple opened the iTunes Store in April 2003; by Steve Jobs's own account the labels required DRM as a condition of signing. Same model I had brought them. Different company. Three years later.
Now
I still build the infrastructure before the category has a name. In 1997 that meant putting an entire new media operation onto the internet at once — audio, video, images and words moving together, delivered anywhere in the world. I called it the radio station of the future when I sold it, and I was early enough that the man I said it to looked at me like I had four heads. It has since come to pass, in every particular.
Today it means the operating systems businesses will run their work on. That work is VentureMatic.
I take operator roles, not advisory ones.