Quokka Sports (1996 - 2001)

1996 - 2001

dead us

a company founded to cover a yacht race by sending home the instrument readings, which turned into the argument that any sports event is a data stream and that television only ever shows you one channel of it. it built nbc's sydney 2000 site, the first live coverage of an olympic games on the internet, and nearly six million people used it. producing that coverage cost almost exactly what the company earned in the same year. the losses for 2000 came to $280 million and the chapter 11 filing went in on 27 april 2001.

» see quokka.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

In september '00 i watched the Sydney olympics the way everyone in Turkey watched them, on television, at whatever hour the time difference handed us. There was a website doing something else entirely with the same event. it was sort of not built for me. It was built for an American audience on American bandwidth. back then. a 56k modem would have needed the length of a heat to finish loading one page of it.

this is mostly told from the outside. Quokka Sports was started in 1996 in San Francisco by Al Ramadan, with the sailor John Bertrand, who in '83 had become the first non-American to win the America's Cup. more or less. The first project was the 1997-98 Whitbread Round the World yacht race.

the idea inside it was the whole company. A boat in the Southern Ocean is covered in instruments. though, send the instrument readings home along with the photographs and the crew's email. let people follow a race as it happens rather than read a result published afterward.

i was not paying attention by then, but anyway, they called it digital sports entertainment. The publishing platform was built to take video and telemetry and athlete biometrics and weather and timing and put all of it on one page, at a moment when most sports coverage online was a box score somebody updated by hand. The company raised $193.5 mil altogether, $54.5 million of that in a july 1999 flotation priced at $12 a share.

this happened more in the english speaking internet than where i really was, the Olympics were the big one. Under a joint venture signed with NBC in '99, Quokka produced most of NBC's web coverage of Sydney '00, layering data into 35 different sports. It was the first live internet coverage of an Olympic Games and nearly six million people came to it (or whatever it was called).

~ the dossier ~

Born	1996 in San Francisco, built to cover a yacht race
Peak	nearly 6 million unique visitors to the Sydney 2000 site
Killed	27 april 2001, chapter 11 in San Francisco
Lifespan	five years
Made by	Al Ramadan with the America's Cup sailor John Bertrand
Killed by	production costs that ran at nearly the level of revenue

~ the origin ~

What Quokka was selling was the claim that television gives you one edited channel of an event and that everything else measured during it is being thrown away. During the Whitbread coverage you could follow a virtual version of the race run off global weather data. The Sydney site was dense and constantly moving, which was genuinely unfamiliar in 2000 to an audience that had mostly been online for about two years.

this part you had to be in the US for, and i was not. anyway. The partners lined up behind it (roughly). but still, NBC signed, and the International Olympic Committee signed behind them, with Major League Baseball on the list as well. Quokka was scheduled to do a substantial part of Salt Lake City in 2002.

~ the postmortem ~

this part i was not really around for. anyway, the arithmetic sat there in the accounts for fiscal '00. in fairness, revenue was $47.2 mil and production costs alone were nearly $around 40 million, most of it spent building the Sydney site. for some reason. Net losses for the year came to $280 million. Making the coverage cost roughly what selling it brought in. the advertising market that was supposed to close the gap collapsed over the following winter.

i wasnt close to this part of the story, still. The stock was trading at 23 cents when NASDAQ halted it in april 2001. The chapter 11 filing went in late on friday april 2001 in San Francisco. though, quokka dismissed most of a staff of around 150 that same month, keeping a handful of people on.

nBC and Quokka had already agreed to terminate the venture on 1 may unless new funding turned up. It did not. anyway. The assets went to auction, where the fittings of a dot-com office got the coverage the sports never had (close enough).

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