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I was asked in another message ({LINK}14364) about Talkspot … a company I started after selling Sierra.
Here’s some info on it:
I founded a company called WorldStream Communications, in 1998. Even though our corporate name was WorldStream, we were better known as Talkspot – which was the website for our internet broadcasting.
After Sierra, I was kind of burnt out on games, and wanted to do something completely different, and perhaps more mainstream. I’m always thinking of ways to redefine entertainment – and started thinking about how the internet might change conventional tv and radio. I built Talkspot to experiment with the convergence of broadcasting and interactivity. A ton of my money, as well as venture capital, went into Talkspot.
Talkspot consisted of several channels of live radio (with television planned) broadcast on the net. There was kind of a “chat program on steroids” that accompanied the broadcast. The chat program allowed the audience to interact with the host, and each other. There were some cool toys, like crayons, that could be “passed” around the audience. Programming ranged from political debate, to Howard Stern type shows, to cooking shows. We wanted to have something for everybody.
The shows were great! And we didn’t even have much trouble attracting an audience. But, we did have a lot of technical problems, and much worse – we had business model problems. We were spending about 15 cents per hour to broadcast audio into homes, and selling ads for only a few cents per user per hour. That’s the kind of problem you can’t “make up with volume”. What we needed was “multicasting” … it’s a long story, but if you listen to a stream on the internet today, most of the time, the stream is being fed just to you. It’s different than how normal television works. The transmission cost in normal television doesn’t vary whether 5 or 500,000 people watch the broadcast.
We decided to refocus the company on assisting other companies with their internet broadcast needs. That meant shutting down everything “entertainment related” and hiring a business to business sales team. I was a fish out of water. I understand how to choose, and motivate, creative people. I understand how to drive customers into retail stores. I understand how to build great product. But, I don’t understand how to sell $50,000 products to Hewlett Packard. The whole process is different. Within a few weeks of shutting down Talkspot, I asked the board to bring in a new CEO – which they did. There’s a lot of finger-pointing about what went wrong after that, but one thing is for sure: The business to business idea didn’t work out so well, and the whole thing tanked about nine months after I left.
-Ken W
PS Somewhere, floating around the Internet, is the recording of a Talkspot show we did that talked about Sierra. For anyone interested in Sierra’s history, it’s well worth listening to. -
(re: Talkspot – or, life after Sierra) Wow! Thanks for the info. I guess it might be that you were a little too ahead of time. The whole Internet broadcast idea is still viable, and I know there’s lots of research being done on new protocols etc. that would allow real-time data streams to be received by multiple users, so that the sender won’t need loads of bandwidth to broadcast a thing like TalkSpot even if there are thousands of receivers. Maybe just a regular PC would do. Also, it’s now becoming more and more viable to broadcast live video as people get better and better connections. Surely someone with the right strategy (and luck) could quickly build a fortune out of these things…
Concerning the live Sierra show, “The Sierra Reunion” as it was called, it surely is a great show! I got it stored away somewhere. Also, I remember TalkSpot was used for promotion of some Sierra games. Unfortunately I haven’t found all of these things archived. For instance, there was a long 3-part live interview series with Roberta and Mark Seibert about the history of Sierra and King’s Quest: Mask of Eternity. Unfortunately I could only find the first two of those… -
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(re: re: Talkspot – or life after ‘Sierra Reunion’) Hi Jess, Guys,
After a long time searching for it, I finally found a ‘Sierra Reunion’ audio file. I downloaded the one in your Virtual Broomcloset’s Download section, but it seems as though the .ram file is corrupted or something like that… at exactly minute 28:00 of play, any audio stops but it keeps playing until the end of file (after 1 hour and 16 minutes).
Have anyone else experienced this behavior in the file or is it just my Real Audio player? (I’m using RealOne Player ver 2.0)
If the file is somewhat corrupted, Can you fix it? Anybody know where else can I find the file?
Thanx in advance.
Vicc. -
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(re: re: Talkspot – or, life after Sierra) “…Ken, how many listeners did those Talkspot shows have, if there was a way to count them? …”
Talkspot did very well at collecting an audience – by internet standards at the time, but very low by any other measure. The highest rated shows might have 300-500 people in the audience, but audience sizes closer to 50-100 were much more typical. This is concurrent viewers – in a given day, 10,000 or more people might view our shows.
Our problem wasn’t audience size, it was our inability to sell ads, and that our economics didn’t make sense. It was costing us more in bandwidth costs, than we could make back selling ads. When you lose 10 cents per hour per viewer, you can’t make it up with volume.
The shows were awesome, but the business didn’t work.
-Ken W -
(re: re: re: Talkspot – or, life after Sierra)
You can download the “Sierra Reunion” Talkspot segment from Al Lowe’s sight here:
http://www.thedierks.com/allowe/audio/SierraReunion.mp3 – Murray Lorden
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