CastTV

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

~ the goodbye ~

There was a period, roughly 2006 to 2010, when watching a television episode on the internet meant knowing which site currently had it. Hulu covered some of it in America and nowhere else. Networks put a handful of recent episodes on their own sites behind their own players. Everything else was scattered across video hosts that appeared and vanished on a monthly cycle. The video existed in quantity. Nothing indexed it.

CastTV was built for that gap. Edwin Ong and Alex Vikati started it in early 2006 in San Francisco, and what they made was a search engine that crawled video across the web and worked out what each thing actually was: which show, which episode, whether the link still worked, whether it was the same file as three other results. Draper Fisher Jurvetson led a $3.1 million round in April 2007, with Ron Conway and Marc Andreessen among the angels behind it.

The unglamorous part was the whole product. Anybody can list video links. Filtering out the dead links and the duplicate uploads, so that a search for an episode returns the episode, is the thing that takes years, and it is the reason the company was worth buying.

Tribune Media Services bought CastTV in December 2010, taking the technology and the staff together, Ong and Vikati included. Within the following year Tribune had turned the crawler into a business product called Online Video Data, which quietly supplied video search results to Google and to set-top platforms including TiVo.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the five-day bracket ~

Every account of CastTV says the consumer site was closed shortly after the acquisition. The archive says otherwise. casttv.com was still serving its own homepage, with its own logo and its own search box, right through 2011 and 2012. The last capture of a live page is dated 14 December 2012. By 19 December the same address returns a redirect, and it never returns anything else.

The redirect went to tvlistings.zap2it.com, to a page called watch tv online, with a parameter on the end reading source=casttv. Zap2it was Tribune's own listings brand, so the address kept working and delivered you to a television grid where a search box used to be. Nobody announced it. There is no press release, no farewell page, no note to users, only a change in what the server said in the week before Christmas 2012.

~ what it was standing in front of ~

The rest of this category died around the same time and for the same reason. Blinkx and Truveo were answering the same question about where a given video lived, and that question stopped being interesting the moment the answer became Netflix or YouTube for almost everything. A search engine over a fragmented web is only valuable while the web stays fragmented.

I was not the audience. Video search for American television in 2008 was useless in Ankara, where the licensing meant the results would not play for me anyway, and where the relevant skill was knowing which forum thread had the subtitle file. CastTV never carried a Turkish index and would have had nothing to put in one.

~ what replaced it ~

The technology outlived the brand by a good margin. Tribune's Online Video Data business was built directly on the CastTV crawler, and for years afterwards the answer to where can I watch this, delivered inside a set-top box or a search result, had come through code written by two people for a website that no longer existed. casttv.com does not resolve today.

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