Ampya

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

~ the goodbye ~

music streaming in 2013 was drawn as a map of licensing territories, and germany was a country you could not enter from ankara. Ampya was german at the rights layer, not just in its language, which meant the honest version of my experience with it is a page telling me the service was not available where i was sitting. That was routine for the period. You learned which sites to stop clicking.

It launched on 10 june 2013, built by ProSiebenSat.1, the largest commercial broadcaster in germany, and run operationally under its MyVideo arm. The catalog was around twenty million tracks and 57,000 music videos. There were also something over 100,000 internet radio stations bolted on, which was the kind of number every service in that market quoted at each other. You could use it free with advertising or pay to lose the ads.

The strategy underneath was the only genuinely interesting part. A broadcaster owns airtime, so it can put a product in front of millions of people at a cost its competitors have to pay cash for. Spotify was already the default by 2013 and the german market also had Simfy and Napster in it, all of them buying attention. ProSiebenSat.1 had the attention and needed a product to point it at.

The answer arrived almost exactly a year later. On 10 june 2014 ProSiebenSat.1 took a stake in Deezer instead and merged Ampya's streaming business into it. Owning the megaphone had not been enough.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it was ~

What survived the Deezer merger was the half nobody had come for. Ampya carried on as a music video platform, roughly 130,000 clips with charts and interviews around them, and it worked on a television through HbbTV rather than only in a browser. In may 2015 ProSiebenSat.1 bought Putpat TV and folded that in as well, which put two music video services under one roof and one brand.

This was a reasonable product in a category that had already been decided. YouTube had the music videos, for free, with the entire audience already standing in front of it. Ampya's version was better organized and nobody needed it to be.

~ how it actually ended ~

By the end it sat inside TVRL GmbH at Studio71 in Berlin, another ProSiebenSat.1 subsidiary, which is the corporate address a product gets when it has stopped being anybody's priority. The announcement came in february 2017 and the service went off on 1 march 2017.

The thing worth taking from it is how little the distribution advantage mattered. ProSiebenSat.1 could reach more german households in one evening than Spotify's german marketing budget reached in a year, and it still lost, because people do not choose a music service the way they choose a channel. Deezer is still running. Studio71 outlived the music entirely and went into online video, where the broadcaster's instincts actually fit.

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