In 1999, Brazil's largest television network — Rede Globo — chose a tiny independent hosting company in Dallas to run the chat infrastructure for one of its flagship programs.
The program
Malhação was, and remains, one of the most-watched teen soap operas in Brazilian television history. Fans wanted to talk to each other about episodes in real time. Globo wanted to give that to them. What Globo didn't want was to build and operate the chat servers themselves.
They called RogerLe.
Why us
We were a Portuguese-speaking hosting company with a reputation for reliability and a founder who understood both the technology and the language. We'd already been running IRC and web chat for three years. We didn't pitch — we just answered questions and showed them the logs.
The outcome
Malhação became the first Globo program with its own official chat room. The service ran on our infrastructure for the duration of the partnership. No downtime, no drama, no press release — just television history quietly flowing through servers in Texas.
If you were a teenager in Brazil in 1999 and you chatted about last night's episode, there's a good chance your packets passed through one of our racks.