Citing unexpected bandwidth costs, gay portal and content providers Badpuppy Enterprises announced they will close its month-old online radio station, BadpuppyRadio.com.
Badpuppy Enterprises Inc. co-owner Bill Pinyon said the eight-channel station succumbed to its online popularity. The station played a wide variety of music, from country to dance, and offered downloadable tracks for 85 cents per song.
"[This] is a very sad day for me personally and professionally," Pinyon told AVN Online. "Music has always played an integral role in my life and being able to provide music to people has been a long time dream of mine."
Shortly after launching Badpuppy Radio, Badpuppy Enterprises was contacted by a representative from Apple Computers' iTunes project.
"iTunes liked the quality of our feeds so much they wanted to include all eight of the Badpuppy Radio music streams in the 'recommended radio' list of the software. We had absolutely no clue just how popular iTunes would make us," added Pinyon, who noted that within 10 minutes of having the country station listed on iTunes, it had over 300 people listening, all at a bandwidth speed of 128k.
The company spent months building its new business by licensing with the recording industry groups and planning which software, hardware, music, and bandwidth to use, only to discover that they were not able to cover the bandwidth costs.
"Just to put it in perspective, 225 people can take up one-half of the bandwidth capacity that we have," Pinyon 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.
"It took us two months to reach the final decision to pull the plug, as we wanted to exhaust every possibility. We terminated the connection with iTunes in hopes that by them not sending us traffic we would get Badpuppy Radio back to a manageable level and save the project. Unfortunately, everyone that discovered us on iTunes came to the Website and obtained the new channels. We were back to square one within three weeks.
"So, after an initial investment of almost $20,000 into music, encoding time, programming time, software, computer and audio hardware, and a monthly investment of $10,000 to $15,000 for the last five months, we felt it was a good time to bow out gracefully," Pinyon continued." I have no regrets. The knowledge we gained was very beneficial and techniques we learned developing Badpuppy Radio will assist us in other projects that we currently have in the works and ones that will be developed in the future."
