Alluc

» see alluc.ee as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Alluc's peak years line up almost exactly with my own broadband years, and I still cannot honestly tell you I was a user. What I remember from that decade is the category rather than the brand. Before anything was legally streamable in Turkey, watching something meant finding which anonymous video host currently had a working copy, and there was a whole layer of the web devoted to answering that. Alluc was the biggest and best-organized piece of that layer, and I mostly knew it the way you know a road you have driven past.

It began in Germany around 2005 as a user-submitted directory of links to video on YouTube, Dailymotion and whatever else would host a full film without asking questions. Sebastian Fink and two partners ran it. In 2014 it was rebuilt as an automatic crawler instead of a directory, which is when the numbers got serious: by the end it was pointing at roughly 100 million video and download links spread across more than 700 hosts.

The important legal detail is that Alluc stored nothing. It was a search engine over other people's infrastructure, which is a genuinely awkward thing to prosecute, and it is why a site openly indexing pirated film survived thirteen years while the hosts it pointed at died in batches.

~ the record ~

~ how it landed ~

By January 2018 it was the 1,297th most visited site on the web by Alexa's count, having peaked at rank 1,957 for the year. The operators claimed a billion unique visitors over the previous decade. Those are portal numbers, reached by a German search box with no content of its own.

It also had an API, which is the part that made it structural rather than merely popular. Third-party media-center add-ons and streaming apps called Alluc to resolve what to play, so a large amount of software that never mentioned the name was quietly built on top of it. The film industry noticed. Alluc turned up on the blatant pirate site lists and in an Australian site-blocking application, though it was never taken down by a court.

~ the day it died ~

On 8 March 2018 the search box was replaced with a short note. After thirteen years of alluc, it said, they had decided to take a break and focus on other projects. Fink stated plainly that the decision was not driven by money and that it was time to move on. The API stayed up until the end of the month so the software depending on it would not break instantly, which is more warning than most sites in that business ever gave.

The odd part is the timing. Alluc closed at the exact moment its problem was being solved legitimately, when Netflix and its imitators were spending real money to become the thing you check first. A search engine for where is this playing does not have much of a future once the answer is an app you already pay for. Fink said he hoped shutting down would create the vacuum needed for something new. What actually filled the vacuum was a subscription.

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