Bad
Puppy Radio Closes Its Doors.
COCOA, Fla. – Badpuppy.com,
the oldest and largest gay adult site on the Internet, closed its month-old
badpuppyradio.com online radio station Thursday, citing unanticipated
bandwidth costs.
Bad
Puppy Enterprises Inc. co-owner Bill Pinyon said the eight-channel
station succumbed to its online popularity. The stations played music which
ranged from country to urban dance to club music that included music of the
likes such as Peaches, Lexy & K-Paul and DJ Encore.
It also offered downloadable tracks for 85 cents a song.
“Shortly after launching Badpuppy
Radio, and I mean within two weeks, we were contacted by a representative
from Apple Computers’ iTunes project,” Pinyan said. “ITunes liked the
quality of our feeds so much they wanted to include all eight of the Bad
Puppy Radio music streams in the ‘recommended radio’ list of the
software.
“We had absolutely no clue just how popular iTunes would make us,” said
Pinyan, who noted that within 10 minutes of having the country station
listed on iTunes it had over 300 people listening at 128k bandwidth speed
each.
Under wrap for several months, the company spent time building its new
business by licensing with the recording industry groups and planning which
software, hardware, music and bandwidth to use.
But Badpuppy
had anticipated that music downloads and advertising would cover the cost of
the bandwidth, Pinyan said. It didn’t.
“Just to put it in perspective, 225 people can take up one-half of the
bandwidth capacity that we have,” Pinyan said. “In reality, for us to
replace the amount of bandwidth that has been used would cost in the
neighborhood of $8,000 per month and that is only for one channel.”
Flagship portal Bad
Puppy.com reaches the gay, bisexual, lesbian and transgender community.
The company, which recently acquired search engine GayWhosWho.com, got its
start as a BBS homepage operated out of co-owner Pinyon’s bedroom in 1995.
Pinyan said the closing of the music portal is “bittersweet.”
“At this time we’ve decided to forgo this avenue and refocus our
energies on other projects,” Pinyan said. “Music has always played a
very important part of my life; not just listening but playing and creating
it as well.”
For more information or to visit their main site please visit http://www.badpuppy.com.
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