In the throws of leaving my job in Bulgaria I realised that I missed British and US TV shows, at the time there were only a few good channels in Bulgaria - and when I say good Channels I mean the best on offer was the Discovery channel. Anyways, I figured the internet could help with this dilemma and this was right around the time that ShoutCast by Winamp was taking off.

The idea was that Winamp wanted individuals to host and stream their own content from their computers, perhaps even setup a radio station or two - and to help the discovery of this streaming content you could browse the channels from within Winamp.

As you can imagine, this rapidly became a very popular way to distribute pr0n and other nefarious content, as well as those few individuals streaming legitimate content - it was all a bit sketchy, but very popular.

Enter me and my American friend Dustin, I had found Dustin via ShoutCast and offered to do some bespoke programming for him, for free to help automate his solution, I wasn't expecting anything in return except some free TV content to pass the time. We got talking and we arranged to meetup in Manchester, from there our plan was to go around the UK visiting some of the bigger contributers to Dustins company and maybe persuade them to join us in improving the service and taking it "to the next level". Honestly, I don't think we'd thought a single thing through properly.

When I met Dustin at Manchester airport, he wasn't what I was expecting at all - I was expecting some withdrawn scrawny Bill Gates lookalike - instead he was an Eric Balfour lookalike who was currently serving with the US Military in Germany, he'd recently just got divorced at the age of 21. Immediately I knew this guy was a bit of a handful. It was a largely an uneventful trip but it did involve a significant amount drinking and sharing some good stories.

When it was time for us both to sober up and go back to our day jobs, Dustin said he was looking for a cofounder and just immediately gave me half of the business - that suited me pretty fine.

A few weeks later I'd quit my job and I was due to move temporarily into has army barracks at Kitzingen, Germany.

As soon as I got there, my eyes were opened to army life - it really is another world - it was one thing going through Germany, but another thing stepping on US soil in Germany. The rules regarding visitors were pretty clear since 9/11 and I had to get a photo id as a visitor. Visitors were only allowed on base until 11pm - so I knew right away that me sleeping there as Dustin had planned was going to be problematic. In fact the base commander took a serious dislike to me and ended up raiding our barracks with 4 or 5 guys exploding into our room with dogs at 3AM. It was eventful. Dustin had to kiss some serious butt to keep the arrangement going.

So me and Dustin toyed with some ideas about how to make the service more popular, i.e: how to get more subscribers. It seemed to me that these listings in Winamp were the primary way to inform people of our service - and we could only really appeal to Winamp users since only they could play our content. So, how to get more exposure? Well the obvious route was to add more shoutcast servers, but each one would take up a significant amount of resources in hardware and bandwidth. So we couldn't do that without spending more money, which neither of us wanted to do. I decided to try and reverse-engineer the ShoutCast service and protocol to see if it could in some way be hacked, which was actually a major headache at the time because it was a very proprietary protocol with only some documentation written by community members.

Sure enough, with enough dilligence (and WireShark) I discovered some useful information about ShoutCast:

• It would send the first 1024 bytes of any streaming data to AOL's servers (AOL owned Winamp)
• Along with that would be some metadata (how many people, the title of the TV show, the company name, how many available slots on the server, etc...)
• It would do this every fifteen minutes with a smaller request (just metadata)

I captured it and spent the next few days forging requests to AOL's servers, the message was only very small, probably so that it didn't take up too much bandwidth to AOL. Which worked out fine because it meant that we didn't need any additional servers since the bandwidth taken up was so small.

I setup about 300 of these channels from my laptop and just flooded the ShoutCast listings with our content, whenever anyone tried to watch it, it would kick them off, but it did advertise our content well... really well.

Business tripled in four days.

We were on our way to Wurzburg Army Barracks for a celebratory Subway sandwich when Dustin was notified of something alarming on his sidekick - the streams had been shut off - Winamp were onto us. Panicked, we returned home and I pulled the plug on the laptop to stop the repeated failing requests, I'm not sure why I did this - it just seemed like the laziest way to stop the broadcast. Still stunned, and facing the prospect of having no way to advertise our business we were clueless what to do next. So I plugged the laptop back in and fired it up again to analyse the problem further, only there was no problem - we were back up to 300 streams immediately.

What had happenned was that my laptop was on the Army barracks network assigned an IP address by DHCP, all Winamp had done was block our IP, and all I needed to do to stay ahead of Winamp was get a new IP address. So it became a game of cat-and-mouse between me and Winamp - whenever they blocked us, I'd just unplug... and plug it back in. Rinse and repeat.

I would later find out that the original ShoutCast protocol was devised in 1998 and no-one at AOL wanted to touch it to make it more foolproof.

This went on for two or three days until Dustin received a call on his sidekick - it went like this:

DUSTIN: Hi

WINAMP: Hello, is that the owner of ###?

DUSTIN: Yes, one of the owners, I have Matt right here

WINAMP: Hi guys, this is ### from the Winamp team at AOL. Are you aware that your currently flooding our ShoutCast service?

DUSTIN: Yes...

WINAMP: ... can you stop?

DUSTIN: We could if we wanted to

WINAMP: You know you're violating our terms of service

DUSTIN: No, are we? So what?

WINAMP: Guys, listen, you have to stop - if you don't stop we'll be forced to go down a legal route

DUSTIN: OK

WINAMP: OK!?

I don't think the Winamp team were very happy with what we were doing.

I soon automated the disconnecting and reconnecting process, we bought a server with a bunch of IP addresses and hosted it on there - every few months we might change hosting provider just to keep AOL guessing.

We had learnt a hard lesson by gaming Winamp and knew that one day they could improve their ShoutCast protocol to implement something that could totally block us, couple that with the fact that Winamp was losing popularity. So we began re-encoding our content for display on the web, offered an On Demand option, and changed our marketing strategy, our business had turned a corner and we were lowering the barrier to entry all the time. Which resulted in more subscribers.

By all accounts our website and our content was highly illegal, we had something like 300 TV shows with full seasons for each, and we could usually push freshly aired content out to our customers within ten minutes of it broadcasting live on TV - we also had HD variations for all our content.

My plan now was to legitimise the business, if we could work with an actual content provider, then we'd be willing to take a hit on the profits and it would open us up to VC funding to help us expand into other content providers.

I was also working with hardware manufacturers to spec out a set-top-box that could stream our content in HD to a consumers TV, this was 2005 and the H264 codec was still pretty new - it would require some expensive hardware to decode our content but we found some hardware providers and started working with some sample products, were looking at a pricepoint of around for $100 for the hardware and $150 to the consumer, maybe less. We thought it would put us in a really good position to VC's if we had this kind of equipment already thought out. We got a few sample boxes and I started hacking on them to turn them into basically a web-browser with a video decoder.

I was in negotiations with ICOA, a company which provided WiFi to some fairly major airports and they were very interested in having our content on their homepage when users logged onto their WiFi - of course it would be for a fee. This deal was worth millions and that was just for a trial run.

We were in talks with an executive at some large media company (a BIG content owner) where most of our content came from really, we were trying to reach an agreement on how much they'd want for each subscriber. Everytime I called he was pretty certain he wanted 100% of whatever we took. That was just an unworkable strategy, some weeks would pass, we'd call up again and get the same answer. We called up a few other smaller content providers, told them about everything we were doing and that we were trying to legitimise the business - "thanks but no thanks" was the typical response. To be honest, you could tell they were totally confused by the whole concept of watching TV on the internet.

Our big client, our customers and we (the owners) were just waiting for one of these content-owners to say "yeah ok" and we could've been in business. Instead what we got was a cease-and-desist letter from the MPAA, this was right around the time that the police raided the Pirate Bays servers on behalf of the MPAA, and there were some horror stories that the MPAA was sueing consumers for watching illegal content.

I was really panicked by this, we fought it for a short while, but when some of our business contacts caught wind of the MPAA's involvement they wouldn't go anywhere near us.

I was faced with a choice, shut it down or stay illegal.

In the end, I gave Dustin my half of the company back and just left. It was an exhilerating and fun time but it was time to move on - I often wonder if we could have been where Netflix is now - but I doubt it, we focused on TV shows whereas their focus was movies.

Most content owners and TV networks have been slow to move with the speed of the internet, with greedy strategies and the kind of attitude where they want to keep everything tightly under their control. I think only in the past few years have they started to realise that international airing of content at the same time and low barriers to entry are the proper way to stop piracy.

Despite all of this, I class this as a successful startup, there was no real exit but we did make money, we did learn valuable lessons and made some good friends along the way. Also, it's still running today.