Acetrax

» see acetrax.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Acetrax is the sort of product you only ever met by buying a particular television in a particular year. There was no storefront anyone visited on purpose. It arrived as an icon on a smart TV menu, sitting among the other icons on the smart TV menu, and if the set in your living room was not one of the ones it shipped inside, the name simply never came up.

The company was incorporated in Zürich in 2006, with founding roots in Britain as well, and it sold video on demand over the internet to connected televisions. That was a strange bet to make in 2006, when the television in most houses could not do anything of the sort. Acetrax spent its years building the software that manufacturers would install at the factory, so by 2013 it was inside sets from LG and Samsung and later from Panasonic and Toshiba, plus WD TV boxes and a run of handsets.

By 2011 the company was claiming its content sat on televisions in 282 million households across 48 countries. That is a number describing installed software rather than anybody paying for a film, and it is the number a company quotes when the second figure is less impressive. Sky bought Acetrax on 3 may 2012.

Sky wanted the plumbing. It had launched Now TV that same year and already had Sky Go running, so a second video on demand brand under its own roof was not something it needed. It said so more or less directly: having integrated the Acetrax technology and capability into the business, it was managing down the small service still operating under the Acetrax name. That service stopped on 21 june 2013.

~ the record ~

~ what it became ~

The technology did not die with the brand. It went into Sky's own on demand stack, and Sky Store, which opened later in 2013 for renting and buying films, ran on top of what Sky had just paid for. Anyone in Britain who has rented something through a Sky box in the years since has been using the descendant of a Swiss startup they never heard of.

~ what got buried with it ~

The customers had a worse time of it. People who had bought films outright rather than renting them were told the copies they owned would stop playing, and that keeping them meant downloading every purchase again and then playing each one for at least five minutes so a fresh license could be written onto it.

The refreshed files were tied to the exact machine that first played them and could not be moved to another platform. A factory reset removed the license with no way to recover it. Windows users could re-download standard definition copies after the closing date. Mac users could not download at all and were pointed instead at a refund form that paid out to PayPal or ClickandBuy. It is the plainest demonstration anyone has staged that a bought file with a license server behind it was always a rental with a longer notice period.

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