Blip.tv

» see blip.tv as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

blip was the kind of host i kept hearing about from the english-internet side of my reader feed without ever uploading to. by the late 2000s i was a graduate student in ankara watching most video through youtube and a vlc window full of half-downloaded mkv files. blip sat one rung up from that world, a place where independent web series writers and vodcasters tried to actually make money before youtube's partner program let everyone in.

mike hudack, dina kaplan, justin day, jared klett, and charles hope launched blip on may 5 2005 out of new york. their thesis was that the web video format had grown out of the personal vlog and into produced episodic shows that needed a different distribution model than youtube's amateur-clip default. the platform offered a creator dashboard with monetization, syndication to iTunes and rss readers, and the ability to push the same episode out to multiple destinations from one upload.

that pitch landed well with the early new-media class. shows like ask a ninja, tiki bar tv, scam school, and a long tail of nerd podcasts moved their hosting to blip and stayed there for years. the platform peaked around 2012 with roughly five hundred million monthly views and forty million unique monthly viewers. that was small next to youtube but real, and the audience skewed toward people who watched a whole episode rather than a six-second clip.

maker studios bought blip on august 21 2013 in a quiet acquisition. disney then bought maker studios in march 2014 for around five hundred million dollars. once disney was inside the building the strategy shifted from independent creators with their own brands to a consolidated digital network under the disney umbrella. blip stopped accepting new accounts in november 2014 and the entire site went dark on august 20 2015.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it actually was ~

blip's underrated feature was the cross-publish dashboard. you uploaded one h.264 file and it went out as a website embed, an itunes podcast feed, a youtube mirror, a roku channel entry, and a few smart-tv apps that existed for about two years. for a vodcaster trying to reach audiences across half a dozen platforms in 2010 that was a real labor saver. the creator share on ad revenue was also more generous than what youtube paid before the partner program opened up.

the catalog also leaned toward shows that had a beginning, middle, and end rather than channels that pumped out daily uploads forever. that gave it a different feel from youtube even at the peak, the same way archive.org now feels different from a streaming service.

~ how it ended ~

maker studios under disney made the cut decision in early 2015. only the top eight thousand or so blip channels were invited to migrate. the rest got an export notice and a deadline. by august the site was redirecting to maker's landing page and the embeds stopped resolving. anyone who had built a webpage around a blip embed lost their video the same week the dns flipped.

a lot of creators discovered, after the migration window, that maker had not actually pulled their archives into anything new. their old episodes lived on personal backups or not at all. the indie podcast feeds were the lucky ones, because the mp3 enclosures had been cached by listeners' apps for years.

~ what got buried with it ~

roughly a decade of small new-media shows that nobody preserved cleanly. ask a ninja's run, tiki bar tv's archive, the early days of penny arcade tv, a long list of game journalism shows that bridged the gap between television and twitch. some of them got mirrored to youtube before the cutoff, more of them did not. the archive team scraped what it could in 2015 and a chunk of that material now sits on archive.org under the blip rescue collection.

the founders went their separate ways. mike hudack ran product at facebook for a stretch, dina kaplan moved into mindfulness work. maker studios itself was shut down by disney in 2017, just two years after it killed blip. the consolidation logic that ended blip turned out to apply to maker as well.

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