Bud.TV

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

~ the last words ~

Most products that never reached Turkey were blocked by a licensing deal or a shipping map. Bud.TV was blocked at the identity layer. Before it would play you anything, the site asked for the details printed on a government issued photo ID, which in practice meant an American driver's license number. A brewer worried about serving video to minors built a front door that only a specific country's paperwork could open, and then wondered why nobody came in.

Anheuser-Busch launched it on Monday 5 February 2007, the day after Super Bowl XLI, with most of the programming available the moment the game ended. The idea belonged to Jim Schumacker, an executive inside the company, and the money behind it was real: roughly $15 million to get it running, with the first year's total reported at more than $30 million. The brief was an entertainment network rather than an ad showcase, so the hiring reflected that. Writers came off Saturday Night Live and the Howard Stern show. Kevin Spacey's production company supplied content. Vince Vaughn, Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, Joe Buck and Dale Earnhardt Jr. all had something on the slate.

The traffic numbers arrived almost immediately and never recovered. 253,000 visitors in the first month, then 152,000 in the second, against an internal target of three million a month. A beer brand with one of the largest advertising budgets in the United States could not get a tenth of the audience it needed for its own channel, in the year YouTube was bought for $1.65 billion.

~ the record ~

~ how it landed ~

The programming was not the embarrassment people remember. There was a sitcom called Replaced by a Chimp, an animated thing called Ice Vision and Chef, a superhero series called Future Man, and a live dating game. Tim Meadows, Chris Parnell and Kevin Farley were all on it. For 2007 that was a reasonable slate, and much of it would pass without comment on a streaming service today.

The one genuine hit was an accident. A Bud Light commercial called Swear Jar had been cut from the Super Bowl broadcast as too rude, so Anheuser-Busch put it on Bud.TV instead, where it reportedly lifted traffic by half. The site's best-performing asset was a television ad that television had refused, which tells you what people actually wanted from the address.

~ the age gate ~

The verification wall existed for a defensible reason. A brewer running an entertainment destination has a legal and reputational problem if teenagers are the audience, and the beer industry's self-regulatory code was explicit about it. So the registration form asked for name, address and the identifying numbers off a driver's license, and checked them against a third party database.

What it produced was a sign-up flow longer than most banks were using in 2007, attached to free comedy shorts. It also made the content impossible to share, because a link to a video behind a registration wall is a link to a registration wall. Every contemporary postmortem puts this first among the causes, ahead of the writing. The network was engineered so that nothing on it could spread, in the exact period when spreading was the only distribution that mattered.

~ what it cost ~

InBev completed its purchase of Anheuser-Busch in November 2008 and arrived with a reputation for cutting. Bud.TV went dark on Wednesday 18 February 2009, barely three months later. Keith Levy, the vice president of marketing, did not disown the attempt: the company was proud of having tried it, he said, and also smart enough to say it was time to move on. In the same breath he described where the budget was going instead, which was social networks and mobile applications.

That reallocation was the correct call and it also ended the idea the site was built on. Brands stopped constructing their own destinations and went to rent space on everyone else's, which is where they have stayed.

The address did not go to a squatter straight away. Through 2010 and 2011 the crawler finds bud.tv serving an ASP.NET Budweiser brand site, session tokens sixty characters long in every path, with sections for downloading commercials and one headed our legacy. The entertainment network had been scraped off and the domain put back to work as marketing, which is what it had always been underneath. Only later did it fall to the 114 byte JavaScript stub it answers today, the same parking fingerprint left on three other dead domains from the same era.

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