Worldwide Broadcasting Network (WBN) was a mid‑1990s media company built to bring broadcast‑quality video and audio to desktops over the public internet and private intranets. Founded in 1996 and based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the company produced and acquired programming aimed at corporate and financial audiences, packaging industry‑specific news, information, and training for distribution inside enterprises. WBN established a New York news bureau and production studio to originate content and manage live and recorded segments.
Technically, WBN is notable for being an early adopter of IP Multicast and RSVP‑based “bandwidth on demand” networking. In 1996 it partnered with BBN—then one of the United States’ largest internet service providers—to demonstrate ProVision, a pilot network that prioritized packet delivery so streaming video and audio could be delivered at near‑broadcast quality to many recipients simultaneously. Cisco and Intel publicly supported the pilot, which was showcased at Fall Internet World ’96 in New York. This work placed WBN among a small group of firms exploring what would later become commonplace streaming media on enterprise networks.
The company filed several U.S. trademark applications for its services in 1996 under the name Worldwide Broadcasting Network, Inc., reflecting a focus on internet‑delivered programming and schedule management. These filings, later abandoned, anchor WBN’s brief but illustrative role in the early history of online broadcasting—connecting media production with the networking technologies needed to distribute it at scale.