AOL Video

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

~ the obituary ~

The last working capture of the AOL Video homepage is dated 27 December 2011 at 09:57 UTC. The first capture showing a permanent redirect is from the same day at 14:09. Somewhere in those four hours a switch was thrown, and a video service that had been running for five and a half years turned into a forwarding address for aol.com/top-video.

It was assembled rather than built. AOL had bought Singingfish in October 2003, which gave it a crawler that could find media files instead of prose. In January 2006 it bought Truveo, a video search startup that had launched its first commercial service four months earlier and was better at the same job. That summer AOL put a free destination on top of both, stocked it with roughly twenty thousand licensed clips out of the Time Warner cupboard: Warner Brothers trailers, CNN and MSNBC news, HBO material, music video from Sony BMG.

The pitch was that you would not have to be an AOL subscriber to watch. That sounds unremarkable now. In 2006 it was the whole strategy, because AOL was in the middle of admitting that the walled garden was over and that its future, if it had one, was as an advertising business with an open front door.

By 2006 I had TTNet broadband at home in Ankara and video on the web meant one site. Not AOL's, and not because AOL's was worse. It was that a portal video service asked you to accept somebody's programming decisions, and the thing everyone actually wanted was the search box that returned whatever a stranger had uploaded.

~ the case file ~

~ the machinery underneath ~

Truveo was the interesting part. It crawled other people's video sites and indexed what it found, which meant AOL Video could show you clips it did not host and had no rights to, sitting next to clips it had paid for. In August 2007 Truveo got its own consumer destination, so for a while AOL was running two video front ends powered by the same index.

In2TV came in from the other side. Warner's free classic-television service launched in 2006 with named channels and a full catalog of old shows, and in December of that year it was folded into AOL Video, the channels replaced with generic genre buckets. That is the shape of the whole product in one move. Things with identities kept arriving and kept being flattened into categories.

~ the uploads go first ~

AOL had also opened a user-upload side, at uncutvideo.aol.com, which is where anybody with an account could put their own clips. On 15 November 2008 AOL announced it was leaving that business. Users were told to move their videos before 18 December 2008, after which the upload service closed.

The reasoning was public and honest: AOL said the change did not affect AOL Video, which would carry on with professional content from Hulu, CBS and its other partners. Three years of licensed video followed. The part that had needed no license was the part that got switched off first.

~ what the parts became ~

When the redirect went up in December 2011, AOL kept a video strip on its homepage and dropped the separate destination. By then the company had spent a year buying editorial businesses instead of video ones, and the Huffington Post purchase in February 2011 had already reset what AOL thought it was for.

Truveo lasted a little longer inside the building and then stopped being mentioned. Singingfish had been gone since 2007, when its domain became a redirect to this same service, which means AOL Video was the destination of one 301 and the origin of another. A whole category of company got resolved into a header.

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