__Broadcast.com (1999)—__In one of the frothiest moments of the first dot-com bubble, Yahoo bought a financially unsuccessful internet radio startup for a reported $5.7 billion in stock and made Mark Cuban very rich. The service was rebranded Launchcast and has cycled through multiple cor...
Eventually, the technology and big idea was sold to Yahoo YHOO for $5.7 billion in April 1999, making its founder Mark Cuban a very wealthy man to the tune of a couple of billion dollars. In January 2000, he bought a basketball team for $200 million and oh, yes, half a stadium for...
In 2001, Yahoo bought a startup called Launchcast and turned it into the basis of its own streaming music service. Before there was a Spotify or a Pandora, it pursued a freemium model: Listen to up to 1,000 songs a month for free, or pay $4 a month for CD quality, no ads, and...
The second was the famous $5.7 billion deal for Broadcast.com, an online television site that was founded by Mark Cuban. Perhaps way ahead of its time, internet connections were too slow in 1999 to run this type of video content off the web. Yahoo also bought Tumblr for $1.1 billion in...