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 all at once — global reach, at pennies on the dollar, with capabilities none of them had alone. He looked at me like I had four heads. The links below are what we had already been doing.
How I knew
I ran my junior high school's audio-visual department — that is what it was called then — in the mid-to-late 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 left college and 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. Encryption still consisted of brass plates, not software.
So when audio and video started moving onto the web, it was not a new idea to me. It was the work I had already been doing fifteen years earlier. It wasn't a prediction. I'd already seen it work.
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
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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 48 photographs from Cannes → -
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.
See the 22 images from the night → -
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 21 images from Santo Domingo → -
1997–2004
Before Pandora, before Spotify, there was LaMusica.com
We put SBS's radio stations onto the internet years before anyone called it streaming. Then I went after the harder problem: swapping a different commercial into the stream at the ad break, matched to listeners who had registered with us — unheard of in a business where every listener heard the same ad at the same instant. I designed it with the broadcast engineers of the day, using equipment SBS already owned. The equipment could do it. The project was unfinished when my tenure ended. Today it is how the industry works.
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circa 2000–2001
We offered the record labels the answer to piracy. They passed.
Microsoft paid us to promote Windows Media Player and its rights-management technology during the format wars that decided how audio would travel. I took that technology to several major labels and pitched them licensed digital distribution — paid, protected downloads. They turned me down, while complaining vocally about piracy and eventually litigating over it. 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.
After
From 2004 to now, property: an investor in Florida and New York, and a broker in New York — where I first earned my real estate license in 1988. The brokerage today is Ovation Properties.
Now
Today, I still build — or rearchitect — 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 over copper phone lines designed a century earlier to carry nothing but voice, delivered instantly anywhere in the world, the way the telegraph had done a century and a half before that. That is why I called it the radio station of the future. It has since come to pass, in every particular.
For forty years the limit was never the idea. It was implementation — other people's hands, other people's calendars, and whatever I could force through a room. That limit is gone, and AI is what removed it. It is the first genuinely new thing in my working life since the personal computer, which I watched arrive.
Today that means VentureMatic — venture, as in a business venture; matic, as in automatic. Operating systems built for one vertical and wrapped around a single company's own intellectual property, rather than a platform rented by a thousand others. The first is in build now for a health practice.
Operator roles. Advisory where the mandate is real.