@Home Network was a high-speed
cable
Cable may refer to:
Mechanical
* Nautical cable, an assembly of three or more ropes woven against the weave of the ropes, rendering it virtually waterproof
* Wire rope, a type of rope that consists of several strands of metal wire laid into a hel ...
Internet service provider
An Internet service provider (ISP) is an organization that provides services for accessing, using, or participating in the Internet. ISPs can be organized in various forms, such as commercial, community-owned, non-profit, or otherwise privat ...
from 1996 to 2002. It was founded by Milo Medin, cable companies
Tele-Communications Inc.
Tele-Communications, Inc. (TCI) was a cable television provider in the United States, and for most of its history was controlled by Bob Magness and John Malone.
The company was started in 1958 in Bozeman, Montana as Western Microwave, Inc. and Co ...
(TCI),
Comcast, and
Cox Communications, and
William Randolph Hearst III
William Randolph Hearst III (born June 18, 1949) is an American heir, businessman, and philanthropist.
Biography
Early life
William Randolph Hearst III was born on June 18, 1949. His father was William Randolph Hearst Jr., and his paternal gra ...
, who was their first CEO, as a joint venture to produce high-speed cable Internet service through two-way television cable infrastructure. At the company's peak it provided high speed Internet service for 4.1 million subscribers in the United States, Canada, Japan, Australia, and the
Benelux
The Benelux Union ( nl, Benelux Unie; french: Union Benelux; lb, Benelux-Unioun), also known as simply Benelux, is a politico- economic union and formal international intergovernmental cooperation of three neighboring states in western Europe: ...
nations (Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg). The company operated as four joint ventures, three of which were international. In 1999, the company acquired
Excite. In 2008, @Home was merged into
Ziggo
Ziggo Holding B.V. () is the largest cable operator in the Netherlands, providing digital cable television, Internet, and telephone service to both residential and commercial customers.
History
The company is the result of the merger between ...
.
History
The passing of the
Telecommunications Act of 1996
The Telecommunications Act of 1996 is a United States federal law enacted by the 104th United States Congress on January 3, 1996, and signed into law on February 8, 1996, by President Bill Clinton. It primarily amended Chapter 5 of Title 47 of ...
enabled cable companies to start offering
Internet telephony
Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), also called IP telephony, is a method and group of technologies for the delivery of voice communications and multimedia sessions over Internet Protocol (IP) networks, such as the Internet. The terms Internet t ...
services to customers.
The company's first VP of Engineering and later
Chief Technology Officer was Milo Medin, and the company got its start from
venture capital firm
Venture capital (often abbreviated as VC) is a form of private equity financing that is provided by venture capital firms or funds to startups, early-stage, and emerging companies that have been deemed to have high growth potential or which hav ...
Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
Kleiner Perkins, formerly Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB), is an American venture capital firm which specializes in investing in incubation, early stage and growth companies. Since its founding in 1972, the firm has backed entrepreneur ...
.
In December 1998,
Excite was in merger negotiations with
Yahoo!
Yahoo! (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web services provider. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and operated by the namesake company Yahoo Inc., which is 90% owned by investment funds managed by Apollo Global Manage ...
inc in an agreement to purchase the Excite portal for a price between $5.5 billion and $6 billion. On December 19, at
Kleiner Perkins prompting, @Home Network's
Chairman and
Chief Executive Officer
A chief executive officer (CEO), also known as a central executive officer (CEO), chief administrator officer (CAO) or just chief executive (CE), is one of a number of corporate executives charged with the management of an organization especial ...
Thomas Jermoluk
Thomas may refer to:
People
* List of people with given name Thomas
* Thomas (name)
* Thomas (surname)
* Saint Thomas (disambiguation)
* Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) Italian Dominican friar, philosopher, and Doctor of the Church
* Thomas the ...
met with Excite's chairman and CEO George Bell, according to documents filed with the SEC, and a deal was hashed out for the purchase of Excite and its debt.
On January 19, 1999, @Home Networks acquired the Internet portal Excite. The $6.7 billion merger became one of the largest mergers of two Internet companies ever; the combined entity would marry the profitable high speed Internet network of @Home and expand its existing Home.com portal with Excite's money-losing search engine and Internet portal. The combined entity's external name became Excite@Home, however the stock symbol and regulatory filing records remained properly known as At Home Corporation (ATHM).
As a side effect of the deal, @Home's chairman and chief executive
George Tom Jermoluk
George may refer to:
People
* George (given name)
* George (surname)
* George (singer), American-Canadian singer George Nozuka, known by the mononym George
* George Washington, First President of the United States
* George W. Bush, 43rd Preside ...
(also called T.J. for short) stepped down as chief executive officer, but remained chairman of the board, and Excite's former chairman and chief executive George Bell, who was the president of the Excite division of @Home, moved over as chief executive of the new Excite@Home entity.
The new Excite division took the existing @home.com web portal that was provided to subscribers of the service and merged it with the Excite portal. Along with this was the movement toward personalized web portal content, a concept now commonplace in all Internet portals today.
In just months following the merger, Excite@Home's Excite division purchased
iMall for about $425 million in stock. Most significant of these was the purchase of the online greeting card company
Blue Mountain Arts
Susan Polis Schutz (née Polis; born May 23, 1944) is an American poet, film-maker, and businesswoman who co-founded the greeting card and book publisher Blue Mountain Arts. She is the mother of Colorado Governor Jared Polis.
Early life and educ ...
, Excite@Home issued 11.2 million shares, worth close to $430 million, and paid $350 million in cash. In addition Excite paid for sponsorship of
Infiniti
is the luxury vehicle division of the Japanese automaker Nissan. Infiniti officially started selling vehicles on November 8, 1989, in North America. The marketing network for Infiniti-branded vehicles included dealers in over 50 countries in ...
IndyCar driver
Eddie Cheever, Jr., through the 2000 and 2001 Indy racing seasons for an undisclosed amount.
On June 10, 1999, the @Home cable division announced a joint venture with Australia with
Cable & Wireless Optus to form a new company,
AtHome Network Australia. The projected homes passed for the deal was 2.2 million.
The merger between Excite and @Home fell disastrously short of expectations. The stock which once soared at $128.34 a share in the first quarter of 1999 and had a market cap of $35 billion had fallen to $1 a share by the third quarter of 2001 when the company formally filed for
Chapter 11
Chapter 11 of the United States Bankruptcy Code (Title 11 of the United States Code) permits reorganization under the bankruptcy laws of the United States. Such reorganization, known as Chapter 11 bankruptcy, is available to every business, wheth ...
bankruptcy protection. The new Chief Executive George Bell worked from his home in
Massachusetts
Massachusetts (Massachusett: ''Muhsachuweesut Massachusett_writing_systems.html" ;"title="nowiki/> məhswatʃəwiːsət.html" ;"title="Massachusett writing systems">məhswatʃəwiːsət">Massachusett writing systems">məhswatʃəwiːsət'' En ...
and the Chief Financial Officer
Mark McEachen lived in
LA, flying in only once per week to the
Bay Area to conduct business. Both executives were part of the former Excite executive team. More significantly, expenses ran far ahead of revenues. The burst of the
dot-com bubble
The dot-com bubble (dot-com boom, tech bubble, or the Internet bubble) was a stock market bubble in the late 1990s, a period of massive growth in the use and adoption of the Internet.
Between 1995 and its peak in March 2000, the Nasdaq Compo ...
in March 2000 and the subsequent collapse of the
Internet advertising
Online advertising, also known as online marketing, Internet advertising, digital advertising or web advertising, is a form of marketing and advertising which uses the Internet to promote products and services to audiences and platform users. ...
market further limited the company's prospects by making it harder to raise investor money to keep the company afloat in the absence of retained earnings. By 2001, the company was running out of cash.
On September 21, 2000, George Bell stepped down as chief executive officer and reprised his role as president of the Excite division. The stock was trading at $15.38 a share, a drop of 90% of the company's evaluation during his leadership. On April 23, 2001,
Patti S. Hart, the former chief executive officer of
Telocity joined Excite@Home as its third CEO and @Home's fourth. In the same announcement, the outgoing chairman George Bell resigned and left the company completely. The news was not good, as the company also reported a first-quarter net loss of $61.6 million, or 15 cents per share, on revenue of $142.8 million compared with a loss of $4.6 million, or 1 cent, on revenue of $138 million in the same period the prior year.
![Excite@Home headquarters for sale](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4c/Excite%40Home_headquarters_for_sale.jpg)
On June 11, 2001, Excite@Home announced what it had raised $100 million in fresh financing from
Promethean Capital Management and
Angelo Gordon & Co. Part of the deal not widely disclosed was that the loan was repayable immediately if Excite@Home stock was delisted by
Nasdaq. The loan, structured as a note convertible into shares of Excite, had an interest rate of zero. The key aspect of the deal was that Promethean gained first dibs on Excite's assets.
By August 20, 2001, @Home fired their auditor firm
Ernst & Young
Ernst & Young Global Limited, trade name EY, is a multinational professional services partnership headquartered in London, England. EY is one of the largest professional services networks in the world. Along with Deloitte, KPMG and Pricewat ...
, replacing them with
PricewaterhouseCoopers
PricewaterhouseCoopers is an international professional services brand of firms, operating as partnerships under the PwC brand. It is the second-largest professional services network in the world and is considered one of the Big Four accounti ...
. In addition, they received a demand for the immediate repayment of $50 million in debt by bondholders Promethean Capital Management and Angelo Gordon & Co. At the same time, both Cox Cable and Comcast announced that they would separate from the broadband Internet service by Q1 of 2002.
On September 13, 2001, Excite@Home sold
Blue Mountain Arts
Susan Polis Schutz (née Polis; born May 23, 1944) is an American poet, film-maker, and businesswoman who co-founded the greeting card and book publisher Blue Mountain Arts. She is the mother of Colorado Governor Jared Polis.
Early life and educ ...
for $35 million to
American Greetings
American Greetings Corporation is a privately owned American company and is the world's second largest greeting card producer behind Hallmark Cards. Based in Westlake, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland, the company sells paper greeting cards, electr ...
, less than 5% of what they had paid less than two years earlier.
On October 1, 2001, the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of California. The company's remaining 1,350 employees would be
laid off
A layoff or downsizing is the temporary suspension or permanent termination of employment of an employee or, more commonly, a group of employees (collective layoff) for business reasons, such as personnel management or downsizing (reducing the ...
over the following months into the first quarter of 2002. As part of the agreement @Home's national high-speed fiber network access would be sold back to AT&T for $307 million in cash. At Home Liquidating Trust became the successor company to Excite@Home charged with the sale of all assets of the former company.
After the company's demise, the four Excite@Home headquarters buildings at 450 Broadway Street in
Redwood City, California
Redwood City is a city on the San Francisco Peninsula in Northern California's Bay Area, approximately south of San Francisco, and northwest of San Jose. Redwood City's history spans its earliest inhabitation by the Ohlone people to being a ...
, were purchased by Stanford University Medical Center, greatly remodeled, and reopened as the new home of the Stanford Medicine Outpatient Clinics in 2009. The shells were largely preserved, but the interiors are completely new, providing facilities that had been unavailable in the
Palo Alto
Palo Alto (; Spanish for "tall stick") is a charter city in the northwestern corner of Santa Clara County, California, United States, in the San Francisco Bay Area, named after a coastal redwood tree known as El Palo Alto.
The city was es ...
location. The buildings, plainly labeled ''Stanford Medicine,'' are easily visible from the freeway, U.S. 101, where the buildings labeled ''Excite@Home'' had previously been.
Features
Features of the @Home network were fairly standardized from cable provider to cable provider. All users of the service were granted email addresses which were ''(username)''@home.net. Users were also given a special content-rich start-page on the Internet, which was specifically created for broadband speeds at a time when very few websites on the Internet were geared towards broadband users. Users were also granted access to other Excite websites such as Blue Mountain and their greeting-card by email service. Also as part of the @Home experience, users were provided with a special Excite@Home
web browser
A web browser is application software for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's screen. Browsers are used o ...
which was essentially an @Home re-branded version of
Internet Explorer
Internet Explorer (formerly Microsoft Internet Explorer and Windows Internet Explorer, commonly abbreviated IE or MSIE) is a series of graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft which was used in the Windows line of operating systems ( ...
with Excite@Home enabled features built within the browser. Additionally, besides the web browser users could also download the Excite@Home powered Instant Messenger, and @Home Assistant desktop widget, which had features like Excite's Search and current
wire service
A news agency is an organization that gathers news reports and sells them to subscribing news organizations, such as newspapers, magazines and radio and television broadcasters. A news agency may also be referred to as a wire service, newswire, ...
news, along with an
Internet radio
Online radio (also web radio, net radio, streaming radio, e-radio, IP radio, Internet radio) is a digital audio service transmitted via the Internet. Broadcasting on the Internet is usually referred to as webcasting since it is not transmitted ...
portal known as "TuneIn" (which has no connection or relation to the
current-day streaming provider of the same name).
Cobranded @Home services
*AT&T@Home (formerly TCI@Home before the purchase of TCI by AT&T)
*Charter@Home
*Cogeco@Home
*Comcast@Home
*Cox@Home
*Optimum@Home
*Intermedia@Home
*Rogers@Home
*Shaw@Home
*SusCom@Home
*Optus@Home
*Videon@Home
In total Excite@Home offered services to a total of 16 affiliates across the United States and Canada. This included:
Cablevision Systems
Altice USA, Inc., commonly known as Altice, is an American cable television provider with headquarters in New York City. It delivers pay television, Internet access, telephone services, and original television content to approximately 4.9 milli ...
,
Century Communications ,
Charter Communications
Charter Communications, Inc., is an American telecommunications and mass media company with services branded as Spectrum. With over 32 million customers in 41 states, it is the second-largest cable operator in the United States by subscribe ...
,
Cogeco Cable,
Comcast,
Cox Communications,
Garden State Cable
Comcast Corporation (formerly known as American Cable Systems and Comcast Holdings),Before the AT&T merger in 2001, the parent company was Comcast Holdings Corporation. Comcast Holdings Corporation now refers to a subsidiary of Comcast Corpora ...
,
Insight Communications
Time Warner Cable, Inc. (TWC) was an American cable television company. Before it was acquired by Charter Communications on May 18, 2016, it was ranked the second largest cable company in the United States by revenue behind only Comcast, operat ...
,
InterMedia Partners
InterMedia Advisors, LLC (a..k.a. InterMedia Partners), is a private equity investment firm focused on leveraged buyout and growth capital investments in the media sector.
The firm, which was founded in 2005 by notable private equity investor L ...
,
Jones Intercable
Jones Intercable was a cable television company founded by Glenn R. Jones in 1970. Jones, already a cable television veteran, had bought his first cable system in Georgetown, Colorado after taking a $400 loan on his Volkswagen. The company expand ...
,
Midcontinent Cable, Prime Cable,
Rogers Cablesystems,
Shaw Communications,
Suburban Cable
Comcast Corporation (formerly known as American Cable Systems and Comcast Holdings),Before the AT&T merger in 2001, the parent company was Comcast Holdings Corporation. Comcast Holdings Corporation now refers to a subsidiary of Comcast Corpora ...
,
Susquehanna Communications, and
Videon Cablesystems with access to over 60 million households.
@Home Benelux BV
In 1999, @Home Network founded @Home Benelux BV, together with Intel Corporation and the (now former) Dutch companies EDON NV & Palet Kabelcom BV. @Home Benelux BV was based in Amsterdam. Later, N.V. Energie-Distributiebedrijf Oost- en Noord-Nederland (EDON) (then called
Essent
Essent N.V. is a Dutch energy company based in 's-Hertogenbosch, Netherlands. It is a subsidiary of E.ON. It is a public limited liability corporation. Essent is the largest energy company in the country. Belgium is their second home market. Es ...
) got full ownership of @Home Benelux BV, and the company was called Essent Kabelcom. In February 2007, Essent sold Essent Kabelcom to private equity firms
Warburg Pincus
Warburg Pincus LLC is a global private equity firm, headquartered in New York, with offices in the United States, Europe, Brazil, China, Southeast Asia and India. Warburg has been a private equity investor since 1966. The firm currently has over ...
and
Cinven
Cinven is a global private equity firm founded in 1977, with offices in nine international locations in Guernsey, London, New York, Paris, Frankfurt, Milan, Luxembourg, Madrid, and Hong Kong that acquires Europe and United States based corporat ...
, and the company was once again called @Home (now without the 'Benelux'-part).
On May 16, 2008, @Home merged with cable providers
Casema
Casema (Centrale Antenne Systemen Exploitatie Maatschappij) was a major Dutch provider of cable television, internet and telephone services until the merger with Multikabel and @Home to Ziggo on 16 May 2008. The company was mainly active in and ...
and Multikabel into
Ziggo
Ziggo Holding B.V. () is the largest cable operator in the Netherlands, providing digital cable television, Internet, and telephone service to both residential and commercial customers.
History
The company is the result of the merger between ...
, thus becoming the largest cable provider of
The Netherlands
)
, anthem = ( en, "William of Nassau")
, image_map =
, map_caption =
, subdivision_type = Sovereign state
, subdivision_name = Kingdom of the Netherlands
, established_title = Before independence
, established_date = Spanish Netherl ...
.
Chief executive officers
*
William Randolph Hearst III
William Randolph Hearst III (born June 18, 1949) is an American heir, businessman, and philanthropist.
Biography
Early life
William Randolph Hearst III was born on June 18, 1949. His father was William Randolph Hearst Jr., and his paternal gra ...
19961997
*Thomas Jermoluk 19972000
*George Bell 2000
*
Patti S. Hart 20012002
Joint ventures
*
Cable & Wireless Optus
*
ChelloExcite Chello*
@Work
*
@Home Solutions
Further reading
* Frank Rose
"The $7 Billion Delusion,"''Wired Magazine,'' Jan 2002.
External links
www.home.comFormer Official site
@NetHome JapanReview: Excite@Home – The Joy Of Broadband Access*
ttp://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/jan2000/sw00119.htm All Shook Up over Excite@Home
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Athome Network
American companies established in 1996
Telecommunications companies established in 1996
Internet properties established in 1996
Companies disestablished in 2001
Companies that filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2001
Defunct Internet service providers
Private equity portfolio companies
Dot-com bubble