Company president Weiss, who worked out of southern California, left the company.
Streamcast media software#
StreamCast tried again in June to buy the FastTrack software outright, the company asserts in its lawsuit, only to be rebuffed once more.
Morpheus and the FastTrack network quickly became the leaders in the race to succeed the newly crippled Napster. In April 2001, StreamCast released the Morpheus software, enabling users to connect to the nascent FastTrack network. That deal, the lawsuit claims, included a right of first refusal to buy any Kazaa technology or assets put up for sale. According to StreamCast’s lawsuit, StreamCast sought to buy the rights to FastTrack, but settled instead for a licensing deal with Zennstrom and Friis. Their company, Consumer Empowerment (later known as Kazaa BV), had developed (with the help of Estonian coders) a fledgling network called FastTrack, along with the Kazaa software to connect to it. That led the company to Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, a pair of file-sharing entrepreneurs in the Netherlands. But as Napster’s troubles mounted, StreamCast looked for an alternative approach. The company had initially operated an interconnected group of OpenNap servers, an alternative file-sharing network that relied on the original Napster’s software. StreamCast was founded in Nashville as MusicCity Networks, and it garnered little notice until a federal court ordered the original Napster to stop users from downloading copyrighted songs. Still, it continued to generate a healthy amount of revenue, thanks to the number of advertisements it showed users and the payments it collected from companies whose software was bundled with Morpheus (by ’s count, the Morpheus software has been downloaded more than 173 million times, enough to generate a mountain of cash from bundling alone). It lost many of them in early 2002, when Morpheus was suddenly cut off from the FastTrack network it shared with Kazaa and Grokster. At the height of its popularity, CEO Michael Weiss claimed in an interview, it had 24 million unique users. StreamCast’s staying power was a tribute to the popularity of file sharing, which explains why advertisers - and some venture capital firms - continued to finance it despite the entertainment industry’s lawsuits. To understand the latest chapter in this long-running saga, it helps to know the financial stakes and some of the history. That may or may not be true, but there’s no doubt that StreamCast’s attempt to take revenge against the extended Kazaa family proved its undoing. StreamCast executives had long grumbled that Kazaa had sabotaged their business just as it was taking off in 2002, enabling Kazaa to dominate the second generation of file-sharing networks (i.e., the one that succeeded the original Napster). Two of the defendants in that case counter-sued, won and locked StreamCast in a financial death-grip.
It proved to be a tactical blunder of the first order. Instead, StreamCast was felled by one of its own rocks: a lawsuit it filed in January 2006 against file-sharing rival Kazaa and a host of related companies. The file-sharing company filed a Chapter 7 bankruptcy petition last week, sending it down the road to liquidation.īut the company’s demise wasn’t triggered by Hollywood studios or the major record labels, as much as they would have liked to have done so. battled the biggest companies in the entertainment industry for nearly six and a half years before finally dropping the slingshot and hitting the dirt. Like David going 15 rounds with Goliath, StreamCast Networks Inc. This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links.
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