Airtime

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

~ the eulogy ~

Airtime launched on June 5, 2012 at a press conference in New York City. Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning, the two co-founders of Napster, were back together publicly for the first time in over a decade. The launch event featured Snoop Dogg, Olivia Munn, Martha Stewart, Jimmy Fallon, and Joel McHale as on-stage demos. The product was a video-chat web app that matched you with strangers, with the matching biased by your Facebook friend graph so that the strangers were friends-of-friends rather than fully random people.

The pitch was that Chatroulette had peaked and crashed because it was full of harassment, and that a Facebook-graph-mediated version would solve the social problem. The company had raised approximately $33 million from Andreessen Horowitz, Founders Fund, Greylock, SV Angel, and others. The launch coverage was wall-to-wall in tech press for about a week.

By October 2013 Airtime had almost no active users. The original product was effectively dormant through 2014. The company did not formally shut down. In April 2016 a different team relaunched the domain as a mobile-first group video chat app for iOS and Android, which is a separate product with the same brand and a much smaller cultural footprint. The 2012 Napster-founders-reunite launch is the cleanly-dead moment.

~ the dossier ~

~ the funny part ~

Airtime never reached turkey at any meaningful scale. it was a US tech-press story, not a product. the launch event was covered in turkish tech blogs the same way any sean parker story was covered, with a paragraph and a photo, but the actual web app required a US facebook account profile and was not something anyone in ankara was going to spend an evening on.

the cultural moment that died with Airtime was not the product. it was the idea that the Napster founders would do one more thing together that mattered. Sean Parker had been a Facebook executive, Shawn Fanning had founded a few other companies, and the Airtime launch was the moment the press got to write a "they're back" piece. they were not back. they had a video-chat app with celebrity friends.

~ what it actually was ~

the matching logic was the entire technical pitch. you signed in with facebook, the app picked a friend-of-a-friend at random, and you got connected with them by video. in theory you would have a small amount of social context, a name and a profile photo and maybe a shared interest tag, and that would make the random connection feel less hostile than chatroulette.

in practice nobody had time to chat with friends-of-friends by video on a desktop in 2012. video calling had already moved to the phone with skype and was about to move to facetime and snapchat for the next generation. desktop video chat with strangers was already an exhausted format. the friend graph did not change the math.

~ what it left ~

Airtime is the cleanest "the founders are famous, the product still failed" cautionary tale of the 2010s. the press at launch was enormous. the funding round was generous. the demo featured celebrities who would not show up to demo anyone else's app. and the product still went quiet in eighteen months because the underlying premise of random video chat had no audience left.

the 2016 relaunch as group video chat reused the brand but was a different product with a different team focus and a much smaller story arc. the napster-founders moment, the snoop dogg demo, the martha stewart cameo, all of that was the 2012 product, and that product was effectively dead by the end of 2014 with no formal announcement and very little press attention by the time it actually mattered to mark a death date.

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