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| |_| \_\ |___| |_| |
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| . s o . |
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|__________________________|
/____________________________\
/______________________________\
» dig up a name « search the catacombs
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:: the digital graveyard ::
« back to all categories · 397 graves in this section, sorted newest first
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
Naver TV 📖 2012 - 2026 by march 2026 youtube was taking about half of all the time koreans spent in entertainment apps, 50 million of them, 44 hours each a month. naver tv had been the domestic answer to that since july 2012, first as naver tv cast and then under the shorter name, and it was where you went for the legal c |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
NetEase CC 📖 2009 - 2026 hangzhou, december 2009: netease's research institute shipped a voice client for gamers because yy and is had already proved the market would install one. it stayed plumbing until may 2016, when the company renamed it cc直播 and pointed it at cameras. netease owned the games and ran the official tourn |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2019-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
BET+ 📖 2019 - 2026 tyler perry owned a piece of this one, which is most of the reason it existed. bet+ launched on 19 september 2019 with his catalog as its spine and spent seven years making scripted series for an audience the large streamers kept treating as a genre rather than a market. paramount skydance bought hi |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2020-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
Trovo 📖 2020 - 2026 trovo was tencent's twitch competitor, launched july 2020 in the united states after a brief private beta under the name madcat. it opened with a reported $30 million creator partnership fund and tiered subscriptions similar to twitch's model. it never closed the gap to twitch or youtube gaming. ten |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
Kakao TV 📖 2015 - 2026 kakao tv launched in june 2015 as the video layer inside the messenger every korean phone already had. it carried my little television, it absorbed daum's live broadcasting service in 2017, and in 2020 it spent real money on vertical dramas made for a phone screen. none of it held. kakao removed the |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1989-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
Super! drama TV 📖 1989 - 2026 for seventeen years it was called super channel and star trek ran on it without a single gap. the rename to super! drama tv in 2006 came with a new strategy of chasing first-run american hits, which worked until the streaming services arrived with more money. j:com dropped the channel in september 2 |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2024-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
AnimeKai 📖 2024 - 2026 the largest pirate anime streaming site of early 2026. surfaced after hianime's march 2026 shutdown. died on may 10, 2026 after a fire at its data center power supply, reported around almere in the netherlands. picked up traffic that had nowhere left to go. |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
Showmax 📖 2015 - 2026 multichoice launched showmax in south africa on 19 august 2015 and by late 2023 it had more subscribers on the continent than netflix did. the rebuild on nbcuniversal's peacock platform in february 2024 was supposed to carry it to sixteen million. instead the operating loss went from 154 million dol |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
DLive 📖 2017 - 2026 dlive was the blockchain-livestreaming platform charles wayn and cole chen launched in december 2017 as a twitch alternative on the steemit chain. it ran on lemons, a tip currency credited inside the wallet rather than to creators in cash, and built a small big-name moment with the pewdiepie exclusi |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
WWE Network 📖 2014 - 2026 wwe put its entire pay-per-view catalog and every live event behind one $9.99 monthly subscription on february 24, 2014, at a moment when a single ppv night cost fifty or sixty dollars on cable. it was the first serious direct-to-consumer move by a company that owned both the content and the rights, |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2024-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
HiAnime 📖 2024 - 2026 hianime closed itself on 13 march 2026 with a goodbye message and no explanation, ending an operation that had already run under two other names. in its last full month it drew more visits than crunchyroll did. the alliance for creativity and entertainment had been working through its domains for ye |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
UniversCiné 📖 2007 - 2026 about fifty independent french producers and distributors owned this one between them, which made it the rarest thing in video on demand: a store run by the people whose films were in it. it opened on 18 april 2007, years before netflix reached france. thirteen of its nineteen years were spent selli |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2019-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Mola 📖 2019 - 2025 mola was a streaming service owned by a clove cigarette fortune. djarum took the indonesian rights to the english premier league away from bein sports in october 2018 and launched a platform the following august to carry them. the rights ran out in 2022 and nothing that came after was worth a subscr |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Anime Network 📖 2002 - 2025 anime network was a.d. vision's attempt to put anime on american cable, launched in late 2002 as a video on demand service and expanded into a 24 hour channel in 2004. the channel came off the air on 1 january 2008 and the online service was folded into hidive in june 2017, which left the video on d |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2018-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
InkyPen 📖 2018 - 2025 a small company in bergen put an all-you-can-read comics subscription on the nintendo switch on 17 december 2018, at $7.99 a month, and had the console to itself for seven years. it never got marvel or dc. in june 2025 nintendo's switch 2 compatibility list marked it unavailable, and the steam versi |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
ESPN3 📖 2005 - 2025 espn3 started as espn360.com in 2005 and spent twenty years being the sports service nobody could buy. there was no subscription. espn charged american internet providers a fee for every customer they had, and if your provider paid you were in for nothing, and if it refused you got a page telling yo |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2018-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Facebook Gaming Creator Program 📖 2018 - 2025 facebook gaming creator program launched in 2018 as meta's twitch-style partner tier for gaming livestreamers. it offered early feature access plus a direct support line, with monetization help on livestream donations and fan subscriptions. it briefly overtook youtube gaming in hours watched in q3 2 |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2020-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
NHK+ 📖 2020 - 2025 nhk+ put japan's public broadcaster on the internet in april 2020, live and with a week of catch-up, free to anyone whose household already paid the reception fee. it reached 6.68 million registered ids. on 1 october 2025 a change to the broadcast law turned internet distribution into an obligation |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2019-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
MIRAIL 📖 2019 - 2025 sixteen rights holders signed up in april 2019 to sell their films straight to japanese viewers, with no streaming service standing in between. the company that built the shop for them was video market, a streaming service. six years later mirail closed and its customers were moved onto video market |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2019-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Amazon Freevee 📖 2019 - 2025 amazon freevee was three brands and one service. it launched on january 11 2019 as imdb freedive, an ad-supported video tier that imdb tucked into its own website. five months later the brand was retired in favor of imdb tv. on april 28 2022 amazon rebranded again as freevee. the catalog included or |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
TVPlayer 📖 2013 - 2025 tvplayer did not own any television. it owned permission to carry other people's, inside one country, and it gave that away free in a browser at a time when watching live tv on a laptop still meant finding an aerial or a stolen stream. it launched as a phone app on 19 december 2013 and grew to milli |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Movies & TV 📖 2006 - 2025 microsoft stopped selling films on 18 july 2025, without a countdown and without refunds. the store had been running since 2006 under three different names and it closed in an afternoon. what you already bought still plays in the movies & tv app, which is a promise carrying no expiry date and no way |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Hungama Music 📖 2013 - 2025 hungama music was an indian music streaming service launched in 2013 under hungama digital media. in mid-2023 it cut its free tier and went subscription-only, mirroring bytedance's resso paid pivot. the user base never scaled to spotify or jiosaavn levels even at peak. on 15 april 2025 the consumer |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
BluTV 📖 2016 - 2025 blutv was the first turkish subscription streaming service, launched under doğan holding on 23 january 2016, and for a few years it was where the interesting turkish television was. discovery bought a third of it in 2021 and warner bros. discovery took the rest in december 2023. on 15 april 2025 the |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Viddler 📖 2006 - 2025 viddler was a video hosting site founded in november 2005 by robert sandie and three co-founders in bethlehem, pennsylvania, launched to the public in december 2006. it started as a community for video enthusiasts with an early feature that let you comment at a specific second inside a clip. it neve |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
İzlesene.com 📖 2006 - 2025 izlesene opened in 2006 as the first turkish video sharing site and nokta bought it the year after. its moment came when youtube was blocked in turkey from may 2008 to october 2010 and a whole country's video habit had to land somewhere else. by 2011 it was the 104th most visited site in turkey with |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
G-cluster 📖 2000 - 2025 founded in finland in 2000, before anybody had a phrase for it. the game ran in a datacenter and the picture came down the same cable as the television, with the controller input going back the other way. cyta in cyprus took the first commercial version in 2005 and sfr in france took the big one in |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Livestream 📖 2007 - 2025 livestream started life as mogulus and paid around a hundred thousand dollars at auction for the word it renamed itself to, back when that word was still a brand and not a verb. what it actually sold was the boring half of live video: a hardware encoder you clipped to a camera and an event page you |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
BlogTalkRadio 📖 2006 - 2025 alan levy set up a phone bridge in 2006 so his family could hear updates about his sick father, and then turned the same plumbing into a service where anybody could run a live radio show with callers and no station. up to five callers on the line, unlimited listeners, and the recording came out the |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Himado 📖 2009 - 2025 the last working days were the end of january 2025, and no announcement followed, because there was nobody whose job it was to make one. himado opened in june 2009 as a nicovideo lookalike and carried unlicensed tv anime for fifteen years, inside fc2 from 2011 to 2020 and under a company registered |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
YouTube Leanback 📖 2010 - 2025 youtube leanback was google's bet that the path to the television was the browser, not a hardware app. it launched in july 2010 at techcrunch disrupt as youtube.com/leanback, a fullscreen remote-controllable youtube for htpc setups and early smart tvs. the web version went dark in october 2019. the |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2022-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Netverse 📖 2022 - 2025 netverse was a television station trying to keep the audience it already had instead of renting it back from youtube. net tv owned the shows and the faces, so the app was mostly a place to put them behind a login of its own. it launched on 20 may 2022 into an indonesian market that had already burie |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Wynk Music 📖 2014 - 2024 wynk music was bharti airtel's india-only music streaming app, launched on 1 september 2014 and bundled free for airtel mobile subscribers. it carried hindi film, regional indian language and english catalogues from t-series, saregama, sony music india and the majors. airtel announced shutdown on 27 |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Veoh 📖 2005 - 2024 veoh was the second-tier video sharing site of the 2006-2010 era. it was bigger than blip.tv and revver, smaller than youtube, and the differentiator was that it allowed full-length uploads at a time when youtube capped clips at ten minutes. it raised around $70 million from time warner and intel am |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2019-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Hakuna Live 📖 2019 - 2024 match group bought hyperconnect in 2021 for the video technology and the dating-app roadmap, and hakuna live came along in the box. it was a korean live streaming app where up to four people shared one broadcast and the room paid them in virtual gifts, and it did most of its business in korea and ja |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Boomerang (streaming) 📖 2017 - 2024 boomerang streaming was the classic-cartoon app warner ran alongside the linear boomerang cable channel. it launched on 13 april 2017 at $4.99 a month, the catalog was scooby-doo, looney tunes, tom and jerry, courage the cowardly dog, the flintstones. warner bros discovery announced the shutdown on |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
TVerプラス 📖 2006 - 2024 a cartoon bean became far more famous than the website it was invented to advertise, and it is the part of this story anyone in japan can still name. dogatch opened on 1 june 2006 as a free video portal whose actual job was to hand you off to the five tokyo broadcasters' own on-demand services. it w |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2019-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Mildom 📖 2019 - 2024 douyu japan launched mildom in september 2019 and paid people an hourly rate to stream on it, which no japanese platform had tried at that scale. the money pulled broadcasters over from niconico and openrec. then cygames barred its titles in 2020 and nintendo declined to license playthroughs, and fi |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Fmovies 📖 2016 - 2024 fmovies ran out of hanoi from 2016 to august 2024 and became the biggest movie piracy operation on the internet. 374 million monthly visits at peak, 11th most popular streaming site by simplyweb rank. hanoi police walked into the operation in august 2024 with backing from ACE, charged two men with c |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
AniWave (9anime) 📖 2016 - 2024 aniwave was the last name of the site most anime fans first knew as 9anime. it ran from 2016 to august 2024, rebranded in early 2023 after ACE served a DMCA subpoena on the 9anime brand, and finally went dark on 27 august 2024 during the same hanoi raid that killed fmovies and vidsrc.to. peak traffi |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2021-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Star+ 📖 2021 - 2024 disney had two things in latin america that would not fit inside a family-branded app, live espn and the fx library. from 31 august 2021 the answer was a second subscription with its own name and its own monthly price. everywhere else in the world the same content just sat in a tab inside disney+. o |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Crackle 📖 2007 - 2024 crackle was the avod that existed before avod was a category. sony's free ad-supported library, born from grouper networks in 2006, rebranded crackle in july 2007. it produced "comedians in cars getting coffee" and a few other originals before sony lost interest and offloaded the majority stake to c |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
KazTube 📖 2009 - 2024 kazakhstan's presidential broadcasting corporation launched a national video portal in february 2009, to host domestic film and to put the kazakh language on screen in a place where russian dominated the internet. it ran for fifteen years. the kazakh wikipedia records it as closed for unknown reason |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2018-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Caffeine 📖 2018 - 2024 caffeine launched in 2018 as the would-be twitch competitor with the prettier interface and the better latency, founded by two ex-apple-tv designers and eventually funded to around three hundred million dollars. it never built an audience that mattered. the platform pivoted from gaming to music to s |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2018-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Google Podcasts 📖 2018 - 2024 google podcasts was the simplest podcast app google had ever shipped. it played podcasts. that was it. then youtube music wanted the podcast slot in the dock and google podcasts was deprecated as a separate product. the us shutdown happened on april 2 2024, the rest of the world followed in june. |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Qubit.tv 📖 2011 - 2024 buenos aires had a subscription movie service in 2011, the same year netflix crossed into latin america, and qubit.tv spent the next thirteen years carrying the films the american catalog would not. more than 150,000 subscribers across five countries, with the platform quietly rented out to telcos a |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2019-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
BritBox UK 📖 2019 - 2024 britain is the one market where britbox no longer exists, which is the opposite of what it was built for. the bbc and itv put it up in november 2019 so that british television could sit behind a british subscription instead of drifting into netflix. itv bought out the bbc's ten percent in march 2022 |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Funimation 📖 1994 - 2024 funimation started on may 9 1994 in decatur texas. gen fukunaga and his wife cindy founded the company with funding from his uncle in tokyo, the goal was the english dub license to dragon ball. by the 2000s funimation was one of the two main english-language anime licensors alongside viz media, with |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Vudu 📖 2004 - 2024 vudu started in 2004 in santa clara as a digital-media-player startup with a black settop box that shipped in 2007. walmart acquired the company on february 22 2010 and migrated the product into a streaming-rental service that ran on every smart tv and console. nbcuniversal's fandango media bought v |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Twitch Korea 📖 2015 - 2024 twitch put a korean server up in 2015 and spent nine years taking the market away from afreecatv, reaching about 52 percent of korean livestream viewing by late 2023. it still could not make the numbers work, because korean isps bill content companies for the traffic their own subscribers request, a |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2020-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Resso 📖 2020 - 2024 resso was bytedance's music streaming app for india, with brazil and indonesia following at launch. it went live on 4 march 2020 with major-label catalog through universal music group and warner music, with sony music joining shortly after. the differentiator was a social comment-on-lyrics layer tha |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2022-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Tumblr Live 📖 2022 - 2024 tumblr live was never really tumblr. it was a livestream tab grafted onto a 2008-coded blogging site by an owner trying to keep the lights on. the streams came from the meet group's livebox white-label. the audience was pushed toward meetme at the end. it lasted about as long as a small product memo |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Google Play Movies & TV 📖 2011 - 2024 google play movies and tv was the film rental and purchase store google shipped on android for over a decade. it launched as google movies in may 2011, picked up the play name in the march 2012 rebrand, sold movies in 120 countries and tv episodes in nine. the wind-down came in pieces. renamed googl |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
NPR One 📖 2014 - 2023 nine years of public radio built as a river instead of a menu. you opened it and it started talking, newscast first, then whatever it had decided you would sit through, and the only control that mattered was skip. npr set the plan to merge it into the main app in 2019 and the pandemic pushed that ou |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Flimmit 📖 2008 - 2023 an amendment to austria's broadcasting act took effect on 1 january 2024 and it forbade the orf from operating paid services of any kind. flimmit was a paid service the orf owned, 3.99 euro a month for austrian and european film, so it switched off on 30 november 2023 together with the classical por |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Wakanim 📖 2009 - 2023 wakanim opened in a small city in northern france in 2009 with an unpopular proposition: pay for the episode you were already getting free from volunteers, and get it the same week japan does. it worked well enough that aniplex bought most of it in 2015, and well enough that it was still the default |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2021-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Apple Music Voice Plan 📖 2021 - 2023 apple's $4.99 siri-only tier of apple music. you could ask siri for a song but you could not browse the library by hand. positioned for homepod owners who lived inside voice. it lasted twenty-three months before apple quietly pulled it with no public statement. |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2022-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Amazon Amp 📖 2022 - 2023 amazon shipped a clubhouse clone with a licensed music catalog and celebrity djs eighteen months after the moment it needed. the app launched in march 2022 to a category that had already peaked. by mid-2023 the peers were closing one by one. amazon killed amp clean in october and moved the budget to |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
LBRY 📖 2015 - 2023 lbry was a blockchain-native content network launched by jeremy kauffman and jimmy kiselak out of new hampshire in may 2015. the pitch was a decentralized youtube where creators owned their channel names on chain and paid in the native lbc token. its video frontend odysee spiked during the 2020 to 2 |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
BeeTV 📖 2009 - 2023 5.62 million members on 31 july 2013, and that number was the ceiling. avex and ntt docomo opened beetv on 1 may 2009 and sold it as the first broadcast channel in the world made only for phones, fifty-odd original programs a month for ¥315, shot for a small screen and a commute. then the phones cha |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Netflix DVD-by-Mail 📖 1998 - 2023 the red envelope outlived blockbuster, outlived the dvd format itself, and kept shipping until september 29 2023. reed hastings did not actually invent it because of a late fee on apollo 13. that origin story was a marketing tale. what actually happened is that a scotts valley garage worked out a fl |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
SAPO Vídeos 📖 2006 - 2023 120,000 videos by its first birthday, and sixty percent of them shot by the people watching. sapo videos opened on 28 december 2006 as portugal's answer to youtube, run by the portal most of the country already used for mail. it lasted seventeen years. on 19 july 2023 sapo said the service would clo |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Stitcher 📖 2008 - 2023 stitcher was the commute app for the american drive. i never had that commute and podcasts in turkey arrived as youtube tabs and spotify embeds. siriusxm bought the company in 2020 for 325 million, then folded the shows into pandora three years later and shut the app off. |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Voot 📖 2016 - 2023 voot was viacom18's answer to indian streaming, free and paid for by advertising, and it carried everything colors and mtv had already broadcast. it launched in march 2016 and added a paid tier called voot select in 2020. then reliance restructured around jio, and in august 2023 the catalog was move |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2018-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Paravi 📖 2018 - 2023 six japanese media companies, tbs and tv tokyo among them, put money into one holding company in july 2017 and opened paravi on 1 april 2018. the point was to keep japanese television on a japanese shelf instead of licensing it out to whoever paid. it reached 850,000 paying subscribers and about eig |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2023-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
SubRocks 📖 2023 - 2023 at around ten at night on 16 june 2023 somebody exploited subrocks and deleted the whole directory. no backup existed. the site was a careful reconstruction of youtube as it looked around 2012, built and run by one person under the handle aesthetiful, and it had been online for 146 days. the farewel |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
VRV 📖 2016 - 2023 vrv sold a cable package with the cable taken out. one subscription, a dozen small channels inside a single app, each one aimed at an audience too narrow to support its own service. the trouble with a bundle is that you do not own most of what is in it, and one by one the tenants left to open their |
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| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2023|
|_____|
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big big channel 📖 2017 - 2023 hong kong's dominant broadcaster watched twitch and youtube take its audience, then built its own version and stocked it with its own contract artists. big big channel let fans send virtual hearts and flowers to television actors who had never had a direct line to their audience or a cut of what tha |
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| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Facebook Watch 📖 2017 - 2023 1.25 billion monthly visitors in september 2020, forty six percent of everyone on facebook, and hardly anybody can name a single thing it made. meta put a billion dollars into original video and what it bought was a tab. on 26 april 2023 the originals group was shut and none of the shows came back f |
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| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
LINE Live 📖 2015 - 2023 line live was a livestreaming service launched in december 2015 by line corporation under the slogan "live is real." it ran for seven and a half years inside the line app ecosystem in japan with a small expansion into the middle east and north africa. official and celebrity accounts streamed at laun |
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| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
GYAO! 📖 2005 - 2023 gyao! was the free ad-supported japanese streaming service that launched in april 2005 as a usen broadband experiment. it took the usen-yahoo-japan joint ownership shape in april 2009 and merged with yahoo douga in september 2009 to become the gyao! most people in japan actually remember. it ran mov |
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| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Blim TV 📖 2016 - 2023 televisa owned mexican television the way almost nobody owns a national medium anymore, and in 2016 it pointed that at streaming. blim launched at 109 pesos a month with the telenovela back catalog behind it and studio licensing on top, and it never climbed above about 2.7 percent of the mexican str |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Tate Anime / Anime Beans 📖 2017 - 2023 production i.g shipped the first anime service built for a phone held upright on 5 june 2017 and called it タテアニメ. three minute episodes, a new one every weekday, ten to a series, aimed at the train ride instead of at television. it was rebuilt as アニメbeans in june 2018 and switched off on 31 march 20 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Mojvideo 📖 2006 - 2023 a video site in a language two million people speak opened in november 2006, a year after youtube's official launch, and ran for sixteen more years. mojvideo was where slovenia put its television clips and its hidden camera bits, with 174,656 registered members and a croatian edition that pulled in |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
NVIDIA GameStream 📖 2013 - 2023 nvidia spent a decade advertising the shield as the box that would play the games already sitting on your pc, then shipped an app update that removed the feature and renamed the app after its subscription service. gamestream cost nothing because you owned both ends of it, and that turned out to be t |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2020-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Salto 📖 2020 - 2023 three french broadcasters who compete with each other every night of the week agreed in june 2018 to build one streaming service together. the competition authority cleared it in august 2019 on conditions: no exclusive distribution of the free channels, no cross-promotion from the owners' own airtim |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Pandora TV 📖 2004 - 2023 peter kim launched pandora.tv in october 2004, seven months before youtube went live. it was korea's first video-sharing site and the first anywhere to attach ads against user uploads with a share of the revenue going back to the uploader. peak was 3.6 million members with roughly 35 percent domesti |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2022|
|_____|
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V LIVE 📖 2015 - 2022 v live was naver's live video service for korean celebrities, opened on 1 september 2015 so that artists could broadcast to fans directly instead of through a television studio. it worked far better abroad than at home, passing a hundred million downloads by december 2020 with eighty five percent of |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
BuzzVideo 📖 2016 - 2022 bytedance had two video apps in japan and only one of them turned into tiktok. the other one started in the united states in 2015 under the name topbuzz, reached japan the following year, took the name buzzvideo in 2018 and passed twenty million downloads there by the summer of 2020. it paid its cre |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2019-|
| 2022|
|_____|
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Seezn (시즌) 📖 2019 - 2022 four point nine eight percent. that was seezn's average share of korean streaming viewers across the first nine months of 2022, measured against netflix on thirty-eight. kt had launched it on 28 november 2019 as a rebrand of its olleh tv mobile app and spent three years selling 5g latency tricks and |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2019-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
GolfTV 📖 2019 - 2022 discovery bought twelve years of pga tour rights outside the united states for two billion dollars in 2018, signed tiger woods, and put the whole thing behind an app called golftv on new year's day 2019. four years later the company had merged with warner bros and stopped believing in apps built aro |
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| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Weatherscan 📖 1998 - 2022 the last one was in beckley, west virginia. weatherscan was a cable channel with no presenters and no programming, just your local forecast on an endless loop over smooth jazz, generated inside a box at the cable company's own headend rather than broadcast from atlanta. it reached 22 million subscri |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Pantaya 📖 2017 - 2022 nine hundred thousand people were paying six dollars a month for spanish language movies in a country that had never been offered them properly. pantaya launched in august 2017 as a lionsgate and hemisphere joint venture and lasted five years. televisaunivision bought it in september 2022 and switch |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2019-|
| 2022|
|_____|
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Reddit Public Access Network 📖 2019 - 2022 for three years reddit ran a television channel whose schedule was a vote. rpan started on 19 august 2019 as a five day experiment and then stayed, with broadcasts capped at minutes before the limit rose to three hours, ranked by upvote like every other thing on the site. rpan studio arrived on 1 ju |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Olympic Channel 📖 2017 - 2022 olympic channel was a joint venture between the international olympic committee and nbc sports group that ran as a us linear cable channel from 15 july 2017 to 30 september 2022. it filled the four-year gap between olympics with year-round coverage of qualifying events and athlete documentaries betw |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Animax Plus 📖 2007 - 2022 sony spent 2022 collapsing every anime brand it owned into crunchyroll, and the german-language one was among the last to go. animax arrived on unitymedia cable in june 2007, reached the whole country by 2012, gave up linear broadcasting in july 2016 and spent its last six years as a subscription bo |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2020-|
| 2022|
|_____|
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Upstream 📖 2020 - 2022 a philippine pay-per-view film platform opened on 14 november 2020 by two directors whose cinemas had been shut for eight months. it carried the 2020 metro manila film festival, signed a video on demand agreement with universal pictures in may 2021, and premiered local films that had nowhere else to |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2018-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Snap Originals 📖 2018 - 2022 snap originals was snapchat's arm for producing episodic vertical-video shows, launched in october 2018 as an answer to netflix competing for teen attention. shows ran three to five minutes per episode, shot vertically for phone consumption. over four years the slate reached 150-plus titles includin |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2021-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Struum 📖 2021 - 2022 a monthly allowance of credits for $4.99, spent one at a time on a film or an episode from any of about fifty small streaming services you did not want to subscribe to individually. four former disney and discovery executives launched it in the united states on 25 may 2021, with michael eisner backi |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
OLL.TV 📖 2012 - 2022 at 23:00 on 22 july 2022 a ukrainian streaming service stopped mid-evening because of a law about who is allowed to own media. oll.tv had run for ten years on rinat akhmetov's money and on football, and when his holding handed its broadcast licenses to the state the platform underneath them went too |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2021-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Facebook Podcasts 📖 2021 - 2022 facebook podcasts was meta's in-app podcast player and creator platform, rolled out in the united states on 22 june 2021 as part of a wider audio push that also included live audio rooms and the audio hub. creators linked their existing rss feeds to a facebook page, listeners played inside the faceb |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2018-|
| 2022|
|_____|
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Spotify Stations 📖 2018 - 2022 spotify stations was a standalone radio-style listening app that spotify launched in australia in january 2018 and the us in early 2019. the pitch was a pandora-shaped lean-back experience: a list of stations, instant playback, no searching, no playlists. the app never left beta and was never releas |
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| RIP |
|2022-|
| 2022|
|_____|
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CNN+ 📖 2022 - 2022 cnn+ was a $300 million streaming service that never reached turkey at the licensing layer and never reached the us at the subscription layer either. chris licht and jb perrette killed it thirty-two days after launch as part of the warner bros discovery merger cleanup. the most-cited fact about it i |
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| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2022|
|_____|
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Kristal-Astro 📖 2000 - 2022 brunei is small enough that one satellite platform was the whole pay television market. kristal sdn bhd out of the dst group and astro's malaysian broadcast arm launched it together on 24 january 2000, growing from fourteen channels to around eighty television and radio services by 2008. the announc |
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| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2022|
|_____|
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acTVila 📖 2007 - 2022 five japanese television manufacturers put a portal inside their own sets and ran it as a joint venture. panasonic and sony held 35 percent each and the other three split what was left. it switched on for real on 1 february 2007 with weather and program listings, added streaming video that september |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
WakuWaku Japan 📖 2014 - 2022 the japanese government put 15.5 billion yen behind a satellite channel whose job was to get asia watching japanese television. it opened in indonesia in february 2014 with a music festival and eventually reached nine countries, paying for dubbing and subtitles out of the same budget. on 25 february |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2018-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
IGTV 📖 2018 - 2022 IGTV was instagram's long-form vertical video app. it launched in june 2018 with kevin systrom on stage in san francisco, ran for four years, and was killed in march 2022 after the standalone app failed to cross seven million downloads out of instagram's billion-user base. the format got absorbed in |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
YouTube Originals 📖 2016 - 2022 youtube originals launched on february 10 2016 as the scripted content tier of youtube red, a six year run by a major streamer trying to be hbo on a youtube subscription. cobra kai was the breakout, two seasons on youtube before netflix bought it in 2020 for season three onward. step up high water, |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
ESPN Classic 📖 1995 - 2021 espn classic was the twenty four hour sports archive channel that pulled old ncaa games and yankee reruns out of the tape vault and stacked them into a linear feed. classic sports network launched it in may 1995. espn bought the operation for one hundred seventy five million in 1997 and put its own |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2021|
|_____|
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NBC Sports Gold 📖 2016 - 2021 nbc sports gold opened in june 2016 as a single cycling pass at thirty dollars a year, sold to the small number of americans who wanted every stage of the tour de france instead of the highlight reel. it grew into roughly fifteen separate passes and it worked, in the plain sense that people paid. th |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2021|
|_____|
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LINE TV Thailand 📖 2014 - 2021 forty million people in thailand used it, which in a country of seventy million is most of the internet. line tv arrived on android on 28 october 2014 and gave away thai drama for free, paid for by advertising. it became the home screen for the boys love series that thailand was about to export to t |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
AnimeLab 📖 2014 - 2021 madman entertainment held the australian and new zealand anime rights, so it built a streaming service that would only load for australians and new zealanders. for seven years it was the best-liked anime service in the region, simulcasting from japan within hours and running a free ad-supported tier |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Anime on Demand 📖 2007 - 2021 anime on demand opened on 7 september 2007 in berlin, built by the distributor av visionen. it was the first legal way to stream anime in german. it carried more than 500 titles over fourteen years, most of them watchable in german or japanese. viz media europe bought it in 2009, sony bought viz med |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2021|
|_____|
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Tune.pk 📖 2007 - 2021 eleven million videos went into a delete queue because storing them cost money the owners no longer wanted to spend. tune.pk was what pakistan watched while youtube was blocked from september 2012, built by two brothers whose first attempt had been pulled offline by their own hosting provider after |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2021|
|_____|
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Primephonic 📖 2014 - 2021 primephonic was the classical-only streaming service for the people who could not stand what spotify and apple music did with beethoven, where searching for the eroica returned a karajan greatest-hits compilation before any of the actual recordings. it built hand-coded composer and conductor metadat |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2018-|
| 2021|
|_____|
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Locast 📖 2018 - 2021 a washington lawyer spent three years testing whether a nonprofit could retransmit free over-the-air television over the internet without paying the broadcasters, on the strength of one exemption written into the copyright act for signal boosters. two and a half million people signed up. a judge in |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Quickflix 📖 2003 - 2021 quickflix started in perth in 2003 as a dvd-by-mail rental business modeled on early netflix, then launched streaming in october 2011 and became the first real movie-streaming service most australians could get. it never had the catalog or the balance sheet to match a global rival, and when netflix |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2021|
|_____|
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Flixwagon 📖 2008 - 2021 in 2008 you could put live video on the web straight off a nokia phone, and a small company in bnei brak was one of the few places that let you. flixwagon raised about a million dollars and shipped symbian and j2me clients while the american press argued over whether it or qik had the better picture |
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| RIP |
|2018-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Yandex.Efir 📖 2018 - 2021 in the spring of 2021 yandex moved every эфир creator across to дзен. the view counts survived the move and the subscriber lists were gone by the end of it, which is the part anyone who had built an audience there still mentions. the service itself was switched off on the first of september. its add |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
PlayStation Video 📖 2008 - 2021 sony opened a video store inside the playstation network on 15 july 2008, called it video unlimited under the qriocity brand, then renamed it playstation video on 29 january 2015. you could buy or rent a film on a games console and watch it on the console, on a sony phone or on a bravia television. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Metacafe 📖 2003 - 2021 metacafe was the israeli pre-youtube video platform that lasted longer than almost any of its peers. founded july 2003 in tel aviv, it ran for eighteen years and went dark without warning on 28 august 2021. its producer rewards program from october 2006 was the first internet-video service to pay in |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2018-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Vlare 📖 2018 - 2021 a small youtube alternative built by a handful of ex-vidlii moderators as a side project. beta launched around december 2018, ran clean for about a year and a half. hetzner pulled the servers on 17 august 2020 over an unforwarded dmca notice. one recovery attempt limped through the winter. the opera |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Mobcrush 📖 2014 - 2021 mobcrush was the most-funded attempt at being twitch for mobile games. it came out of santa monica in 2014, shipped its global ios and android apps on june 21, 2016, and closed a twenty-million-dollar round later that year. the streaming-from-phone category never reached desktop-game scale. super le |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
MobiTV 📖 1999 - 2021 live tv on a phone arrived in the united states in november 2003, cost ten dollars a month on top of a sprint bill, and ran at a frame rate you had to forgive. mobitv built that, then built the same thing for most of the other american carriers, then spent the decade after the iphone selling white l |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1991-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Manga Entertainment 📖 1991 - 2021 manga entertainment was a video label island records started in london in 1991, and the first thing it put out was akira. it sold japanese animation to british teenagers as something adult and slightly dangerous, with dubs written to earn an 18 certificate rather than to match the script. in the pro |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Periscope 📖 2015 - 2021 for a couple of years live streaming from a phone was its own moment. periscope was the app for that moment. twitter bought it before the public launch, ran it as a separate product through 2016 and 2017, then quietly folded the streaming feature into the main twitter app and let the standalone vers |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2018-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
DC Universe 📖 2018 - 2021 dc universe was the standalone streaming experiment that produced titans and doom patrol before warner folded the show side into hbo max. on january 21 2021 the original service was dissolved into dc universe infinite, a comics-only app. the originals and the community features did not survive the r |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
El Rey Network 📖 2013 - 2020 el rey network was the english-language us cable channel that director robert rodriguez launched on 15 december 2013 with a minority stake from univision and financing from factorymade ventures. the programming mixed exploitation cinema with action reruns. combat sports filled the weekend slots. the |
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| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
HBO Now 📖 2015 - 2020 the second hbo streaming app. the one for people who did not have cable but wanted hbo on its own at $14.99 a month. launched april 7 2015 with the game of thrones season five premiere and stayed apple-exclusive for the first three months. peaked around five million subscribers in early 2018. became |
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| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Google Play Music 📖 2011 - 2020 google play music launched november 16, 2011 as a free cloud locker that would hold up to 50,000 of your own mp3s and stream them back to any device signed into your google account. an all access subscription tier was added in may '13 with a catalog of around 40 million songs. google announced the s |
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| RIP |
|2020-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Quibi 📖 2020 - 2020 the streaming service that raised 1.75 billion dollars to put ten-minute hollywood shows on your phone vertically. jeffrey katzenberg ran it. meg whitman was ceo. it launched on 6 april 2020 and shut down on 1 december 2020. eight months. roku bought the whole content library for under 100 million. |
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| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2020|
|_____|
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VyRT 📖 2011 - 2020 jared leto built vyrt in 2011 because streaming a thirty seconds to mars show meant handing it to a sponsor and accepting whatever player the sponsor supplied. the first broadcast was the band's three hundredth concert on 7 december 2011, sold as a ticket rather than given away for the exposure. it |
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| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
FRESH LIVE 📖 2016 - 2020 tokyo, january 2016: cyberagent opened a live streaming service with 200 channels and called it amebafresh!. over the next 31 months it was passed between subsidiaries and renamed four times, finishing as fresh live. new channels were switched off in february 2019 and the service closed on 30 novemb |
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| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Smashcast 📖 2017 - 2020 smashcast was the brand that came out of the may 2017 merger between hitbox, the open-platform twitch competitor that launched in 2013, and azubu, the esports-focused service backed by lars windhorst that launched in 2012. the combined company promised the largest independent esports broadcaster out |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
meTube 📖 2016 - 2020 indonesia's largest broadcaster opened a video sharing site in 2016 and asked the country to upload itself into it. the interface was youtube's and the uploads were capped at three hundred megabytes, but the material anybody came for was mnc's own television output. it won a website award in its fir |
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| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Samsung XR 📖 2014 - 2020 the service was renamed samsung xr in early 2020 and was switched off before the year ended. it had launched on 30 december 2014 as milk vr, a free 360 video channel for a headset that only worked with a galaxy note 4. samsung's shutdown notice blamed the fact that gear vr was no longer available, w |
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| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2020|
|_____|
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Sky España 📖 2017 - 2020 on 23 july 2020 sky told its spanish subscribers the service would end on 1 september, and that it would not be billing them for the weeks in between. sky españa had launched in september 2017 at 6.99 euros a month, with about a dozen live channels, a catalog of fewer than fifteen complete series an |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Spinlet 📖 2006 - 2020 spinlet began in tampere in 2006 as a finnish music player that went nowhere. nigerian investors bought it in 2011 and relaunched it out of lagos as the first streaming service in sub-saharan africa, carrying african catalog nobody else had bothered to license. it reached close to two million app do |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
CarambaTV.ru 📖 2010 - 2020 on 28 july 2020 sts media bought the last 49 percent of ooo karamba tv. four weeks later the site stopped answering, and by early september carambatv.ru was redirecting to a television channel's homepage. the studio had made forty-three shows and employed eighty people at its peak, and the broadcast |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
KissAnime 📖 2012 - 2020 the largest pirate anime site of the 2010s. eight years of subbed and dubbed catalogs running on a wordpress-shaped frontend, killed two months before japan's revised copyright act took effect in 2020. fans got no warning and no migration path. the clones that surfaced after the shutdown were not th |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
HBO Go 📖 2010 - 2020 the streaming app for people who already paid for hbo through their cable provider. launched 2010 as a free-with-cable web player and folded into hbo max in july 2020 after a decade of demanding your cable login. the international versions kept going for four more years under southeast asia rights a |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Alkışlarla Yaşıyorum 📖 2004 - 2020 alkışlarla yaşıyorum was the turkish clip site that got its audience because youtube was illegal. fatih aker started it in august 2004, and when the youtube block came down in may 2008 it was one of the handful of turkish addresses left where video humor lived. investors bought it in 2011 and the co |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Mixer 📖 2016 - 2020 mixer was microsoft's twitch competitor. it launched in 2016 as beam, microsoft bought it the same year, then in summer 2019 wrote ninja and shroud big checks to abandon twitch. the audience did not follow. eleven months after the ninja deal, microsoft folded mixer into facebook gaming and shut down |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Lightbox (New Zealand) 📖 2014 - 2020 lightbox was new zealand's first subscription streaming service, launched by the phone company spark in august 2014, six months before netflix arrived in the country. it grew mostly by being free with a spark broadband plan, which got it past 355,000 subscribers and also explains why it was never re |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Trilulilu 📖 2007 - 2020 trilulilu was the romanian-language youtube clone that sergiu biris and andrei dunca launched 22 january 2007 in bucharest. it ran video and image uploads from romanian users on romanian servers. peak monthly uniques crossed 2.2 million by 2009 with the site briefly topping the trafic.ro chart over |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Dilidili 📖 2014 - 2020 wen bote ran it out of fuzhou for six years and got three years and three months for it. dilidili opened in 2014 as 无名小站, bought the name it would die under in 2015, and filled its shelves by copying whatever the licensed sites were paying for, with no user uploads and no rights of its own. youku su |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2020|
|_____|
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iflix 📖 2014 - 2020 iflix was the kuala lumpur subscription streamer that was supposed to be the regional answer to netflix in southeast asia. it spread across thirteen countries on cheap monthly pricing and big telco bundles, raised around 350 million dollars from sky and hearst and a few other major media investors, |
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|2019-|
| 2020|
|_____|
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Disney Deluxe 📖 2019 - 2020 disney deluxe was the streaming service disney ran in japan before disney+ existed there, built with ntt docomo and charged to a docomo account for 756 yen a month. it launched on 26 march 2019 with a video app called disney theater and a set of companion apps for the film labels. the mandalorian ar |
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| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2020|
|_____|
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Audience Network 📖 1999 - 2020 audience was a directv-only prestige originals channel. it launched 25 november 1999 as freeview. it rebranded to the 101 network in 2005 and became audience in 2011. at&t inherited it with the directv purchase in 2015 and kept it running through scripted originals like rogue and kingdom, paired wit |
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| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2020|
|_____|
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Playster 📖 2014 - 2020 a montreal subscription service that tried to be netflix plus audible plus a book club plus a game pass, all inside one login and one bill. the audiobook library reached the big five publishers, the cash reserves ran out first. staff were laid off in early 2019 and the apps quietly went dark around |
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| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2020|
|_____|
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HOOQ 📖 2015 - 2020 hooq was the singtel-led southeast asia svod product that launched 30 january 2015 with sony pictures and warner bros as the minority partners. it ran across singapore, the philippines, thailand, indonesia and india on a prepaid-telco-bundle pricing model that undercut netflix. cumulative losses cro |
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| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2020|
|_____|
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Manga Rock 📖 2010 - 2020 muso measured it above the pirate bay for traffic and similarweb put it second in books and literature behind wattpad, which is a strange position for a reader app made by a small studio in vietnam. not a basement studio announced in september 2019 that it was stopping, and it meant it, because both |
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| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2020|
|_____|
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SnagFilms 📖 2008 - 2020 snagfilms gave away documentaries. no subscription and no account needed, just an ad before the film and another one partway through, on a catalog that ran past five thousand titles and was on every set-top box worth being on. ted leonsis started it in 2008 with aol money and the same crowd that had |
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| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2020|
|_____|
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Fenglin Net (楓林網) 📖 2014 - 2020 two software engineers with masters degrees from national taiwan university ran the island's largest piracy streaming site out of a flat in taoyuan for six years. 楓林網 carried unlicensed drama from across east asia alongside western film, pulled around thirty million visits a month, and ran on twenty |
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| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2020|
|_____|
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Google Fiber TV 📖 2012 - 2020 google fiber tv was google selling cable television. nearly two hundred channels over its own fiber, a set-top box, a dvr that could record eight shows at once and a nexus 7 tablet handed over as the remote control. it started in kansas city in july 2012 and never passed a hundred thousand subscribe |
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| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2020|
|_____|
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PlayStation Vue 📖 2015 - 2020 playstation vue was sony's live-tv-over-the-internet service, launched in march 2015 with around 75 channels and aimed at cable cutters. it peaked near 750 thousand subscribers while losing money against the cable networks every quarter. sony announced the shutdown on october 29 2019, and the servic |
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| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2020|
|_____|
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CollegeHumor 📖 1999 - 2020 collegehumor went up on 7 december 1999, two friends from baltimore posting jokes for other american undergraduates, and grew into one of the largest comedy operations on the web. iac bought a majority of the parent company in august 2006 for twenty million dollars, and that purchase quietly include |
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| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2020|
|_____|
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SopCast 📖 2004 - 2020 sopcast was a chinese p2p streaming client out of the early 2000s peer-to-peer era. you ran a tiny windows app and joined a channel by pasting a sop:// link from a forum post. the channel relayed whatever sports match was on. the audience was football fans outside the broadcast territory of whatever |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2020|
|_____|
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Radionomy 📖 2008 - 2020 four belgians launched radionomy in brussels in april 2008 with an offer that sounded too easy to be legal: build an internet radio station, we cover the music licensing, you carry four minutes of advertising an hour. it ran for eleven years and picked up winamp and shoutcast from aol along the way. |
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| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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YNN 📖 2011 - 2019 forty-seven prefectures, one comedy act living in each of them, all of them filming. yoshimoto kogyo opened its own video-on-demand service three weeks after it started shipping comedians out to the provinces, and charged for most of what came back. by the end the traffic belonged to an nmb48 channe |
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| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Vidivodo 📖 2006 - 2019 vidivodo opened in december 2006 with an english interface, a webcam recorder and a slogan that told turkish users to create their own tv. a court order took it offline in september 2008 alongside izlesene.com after the music industry complained about clips. it came back, outlived the youtube block |
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| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Murfie 📖 2011 - 2019 murfie was the audiophile mail-in cd locker. you sent your physical discs to madison wisconsin, the company ripped them to flac and held them in a warehouse, you streamed your own collection back through the web player or sonos. it died on november 22 2019 with a single email telling subscribers the |
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| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Rapidvideo 📖 2014 - 2019 warner bros. and netflix went to a german court, and the hollywood trade groups arrived with a list of demands: take down and stay down, plus content-id style fingerprinting on every upload. the operator, who went by alex bytes, did the arithmetic and quit on 21 october 2019 rather than build any of |
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| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Everyon TV (에브리온TV) 📖 2011 - 2019 pandora tv and hyundai hcn built a korean streaming service together and opened the beta on 6 september 2011 with more than fifty live channels. it grew to roughly 250 and asked nothing of you, no account and no fee, just the app and a channel list. in 2014 it sold a 99,000 won hdmi stick so you cou |
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| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Vreal 📖 2015 - 2019 seattle, 2015: a company bet that watching other people play games would move into the headset. vreal streamed the entire 3d scene rather than a flat video, so viewers walked around the player as avatars and looked wherever they wanted. it raised 11.7 million dollars in february 2018 and closed abou |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Kwesé Sports 📖 2015 - 2019 strive masiyiwa announced kwese in december 2015 and spent four years buying the rights africa was already watching on somebody else's satellite. premier league matches free to air, then the nba and most of the 2018 world cup. the rights holders were american and european and they wanted dollars, an |
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| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Viewster 📖 2007 - 2019 a zurich company spent twelve years building the thing everybody says they want, a legal streaming service that costs nothing and does not ask who you are. no registration, no card, ads in the middle, films and anime in over a hundred and twenty countries. it claimed thirty-nine million monthly visi |
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| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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UltraViolet 📖 2011 - 2019 ultraviolet was a digital movie locker run by a consortium of hollywood studios. you redeemed a printed code from inside a blu-ray case and the movie became playable across whatever retailer apps were tied to your account. it had thirty million users at peak. then disney refused to join, apple and g |
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| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Rabb.it 📖 2014 - 2019 rabb.it let strangers and friends share a virtual browser and watch the same video together with voice and webcam in the corner. it peaked at around 3.6 million monthly users and ran a backend that streamed an entire firefox instance per room. a venture round collapsed in may 2019, the servers went |
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| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Yahoo View 📖 2016 - 2019 yahoo view was the place hulu sent its free tier to die in public. it streamed the last five episodes of network shows for a US-only audience for almost three years. when verizon was done paying the bill it vanished without a successor. |
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| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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WatchESPN 📖 2011 - 2019 the first screen was not a game, it was a list of pay-tv providers. authentication was the product: espn had promised the cable industry that streaming would not let anyone leave it, and watchespn is what that promise looked like as software from april 2011 onward. it worked well enough that eight y |
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| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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NRATV 📖 2016 - 2019 an oklahoma city advertising agency called ackerman mcqueen built and ran the national rifle association's television channel, and when the two of them stopped speaking in 2019 the channel went down with the relationship. nratv was the 2016 rebrand of nra news, a streaming operation with no cable ca |
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| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Mediaset Premium 📖 2005 - 2019 italy got a second pay-tv platform in january 2005 and it did not need a dish. you bought a card, slotted it into a decoder and watched serie a through the same aerial that brought you rai. fourteen years later the football had gone to sky and dazn, premium had lost 384 million euros in a single yea |
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| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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YouTube Gaming 📖 2015 - 2019 youtube announced a gaming app at e3 in june 2015 and shipped it that august, in the us and uk first, with a page for each of twenty-five thousand games. it was google's answer to twitch, which amazon had bought the year before for close to a billion dollars. the app never took hold, because the aud |
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| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Global Wrestling Network 📖 2017 - 2019 anthem launched gwn on 10 october 2017 as an alternative to the wwe network, at $7.99 a month, with the impact tape library and a pile of independent promotions behind it. the name came from global force wrestling, which was a problem, because jeff jarrett owned global force wrestling and had walked |
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| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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TVCatchup 📖 2007 - 2019 tvcatchup streamed around fifty free-to-air british channels live into a browser, for nothing, to anyone with a uk ip address. its entire legal existence rested on one sentence of a 1988 copyright act written for cable operators, and it argued for nine years that the internet counted as cable. the h |
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| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Panda TV 📖 2015 - 2019 panda tv opened on 21 september 2015 as wang sicong's answer to twitch, funded out of a chinese property fortune and stocked with streamers signed away from the competition at prices nobody in that market could carry. it claimed eighty million monthly users in may 2017 and had sixteen point eight mi |
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| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Magine TV 📖 2013 - 2019 television rights are sold one country at a time, and magine spent six years finding out what that costs. stockholm, 2013, a cloud tv service with a working product and no leverage: without tv4 and mtg there was no watchable swedish lineup, so sweden closed in 2017. germany lasted two more years and |
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| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Ooyala 📖 2007 - 2019 ooyala was the plumbing behind other people's video players. broadcasters and publishers paid it to host and measure their video, and if it worked you never learned the name. three ex-google engineers built it in 2007, telstra bought most of it in 2014 for two hundred and seventy million dollars, an |
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| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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FilmStruck 📖 2016 - 2018 filmstruck was the streaming service for people who wanted to watch old hollywood, foreign cinema, and the criterion catalog in one place. it ran for two years inside turner. when at&t acquired time warner in june 2018, the new warnermedia leadership decided every streaming product that did not feed |
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| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Break.com 📖 1998 - 2018 break started in 1998 as big-boys.com, a humor site for american men aged eighteen to thirty-five, comedy clips and flash games and stunt videos. it renamed to break.com in the mid-2000s, ran a user-upload video model from 2006, was folded into defy media by the 2013 merger. defy went dark overnight |
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| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Super Deluxe 📖 2007 - 2018 super deluxe was turner broadcasting building an internet comedy network twice, ten years apart, and shutting it down both times. the first one launched in january 2007 with shorts from bob odenkirk and from tim heidecker and eric wareheim, and got folded into adult swim sixteen months later. the se |
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| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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DramaFever 📖 2009 - 2018 dramafever opened in august 2009 as the legal way to watch korean television with subtitles, built for an audience that had been getting the same episodes off pirate streaming sites. softbank paid around a hundred million dollars for it in 2014 and warner bros. bought it from softbank sixteen months |
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| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Terrarium TV 📖 2016 - 2018 nitroxenon shut it down himself, which almost never happens in this category. no court order was published and no studio claimed the kill. the developer said only that it was time to say goodbye and that he would not be involved in streaming apps again. a week later he added that he could be compell |
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| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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FORA.tv 📖 2005 - 2018 brian gruber had been the first marketing director at c-span, and in 2005 he set out to do for the lecture hall what c-span did for congress. fora.tv filmed talks at think tanks and universities and put them online whole, an hour at a time, 25,000 of them in the end. the library came down on 31 augu |
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| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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go90 📖 2015 - 2018 go90 was verizon's attempt to be the place us millennials watched short video on their phones. the name referenced rotating the phone ninety degrees to landscape. it launched in october 2015 with original series plus licensed content from collegehumor, funny or die, mtv, and others. verizon spent ab |
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| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Smotri.com 📖 2003 - 2018 smotri.com was one of russia's first attempts at a homegrown youtube, a moscow video-hosting site that let people upload and watch clips and run their own live broadcast channels. at its peak it claimed more than nine million monthly visitors, a real audience for a real service. but it was one of se |
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| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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TBS OnDemand 📖 2009 - 2018 paravi killed this one on purpose. tbs put its own back catalog online on 3 february 2009, old dramas and music specials sold by the episode, with a ¥900 unlimited pass added in october 2016 once the japanese market finally accepted subscriptions. then tbs went in with tv tokyo, wowow, nikkei and th |
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| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Live.ly 📖 2016 - 2018 live.ly was musical.ly's live video spinoff, launched at vidcon on 24 july 2016 and past periscope on the ios charts inside three months. it worked. that is what makes the ending strange. when bytedance bought musical.ly for close to a billion dollars, the agreement contained a clause requiring live |
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| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Sponavi Live 📖 2016 - 2018 five hundred yen a month if you were a softbank customer and three thousand if you were not, which tells you most of what the service was for. softbank and yahoo japan opened it in march 2016 holding japanese pro baseball and four seasons of la liga, reshuffled the pricing a year later, and never ma |
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| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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DMM LIVEcommune 📖 2017 - 2018 eight months and three days is what dmm gave its live streaming app. it opened on 28 september 2017, iphone only, with a beauty filter and about twenty kinds of cartoon objects you could buy and throw at a broadcaster. the objects turned into commune points in the broadcaster's account, and commune |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Blinkbox 📖 2007 - 2018 a uk transactional video-on-demand service that michael comish and adrian letts launched in october 2007. tesco bought an eighty percent stake in april 2011 to plant a flag in digital entertainment. talktalk picked up the carcass for a token sum in january 2015 and quietly closed the off-network cus |
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| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Network Awesome 📖 2011 - 2018 on 1 january 2011 two people started a television channel with no television in it. network awesome put up a programmed day of old documentaries and public access tape, every day, for seven years, with a written magazine attached to explain why any of it mattered. in may 2018 the schedule stopped an |
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| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Warner Archive Instant 📖 2013 - 2018 on 26 april 2018 warner bros switched off the streaming service it had built out of its own back catalog. warner archive instant opened to the public in april 2013 with a hundred and twenty-two titles and a ten dollar subscription, aimed at people who wanted rko pictures and forgotten television rat |
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| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Mangamura 📖 2016 - 2018 mangamura was japan-only at the language layer. two years of scanlated manga piracy that pulled 98 million visits in january 2018 alone, cost the manga industry an estimated 2.9 billion dollars, and provoked the japanese government into pushing ISPs toward site-blocking for the first time. the opera |
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| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Ustream 📖 2007 - 2018 ustream was a live-streaming platform that ran from 2007 to 2018. it carried obama press calls and the 2012 hugo awards ceremony that got famously cut off mid-acceptance-speech by an automated copyright bot. ibm bought it for up to $150 million in january 2016. by april 2018 the brand was gone, roll |
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| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Watch Me! TV 📖 2006 - 2018 fuji television's answer to youtube was a video site where a human looked at your clip before anybody else could. it opened in july 2006, three months before the japanese rights bodies asked youtube to pull thirty thousand clips at once, and it was aiming at 2.8 million users by 2010. it never got t |
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| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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123Movies 📖 2015 - 2018 the streaming-piracy site that briefly outdrew most legal services. operators in vietnam, peak traffic of ninety eight million a month in march 2018. they posted a goodbye telling everyone to respect filmmakers, then the clones took over the brand before the door fully closed. |
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| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Disney Movies Anywhere 📖 2014 - 2018 disney movies anywhere existed to fix a problem the studios had built themselves. a film bought on itunes stayed on itunes, and the disc in your hand came with a code that only worked in one place. disney linked its own catalog across the competing stores instead, which nobody else in hollywood was |
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| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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DittoTV 📖 2012 - 2018 a broadcaster built an app that sold you its competitors' channels, which is a strange thing for a broadcaster to do and the only reason the app was worth opening. it ran for six years on carrier billing and a subscription, then zee decided it wanted one brand instead of two and poured dittotv and o |
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| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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The Key of Awesome 📖 2007 - 2018 mark douglas spent eleven years making a music video every week about whatever song was on american radio that week, on a channel that started life in june 2007 as barely political and whose first hit was obama girl. by the end it had over five million subscribers and more than three billion views. |
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| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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AcFun 📖 2007 - 2018 acfun launched june 2007 as china's first comment-overlay video site. the danmu format put viewer comments scrolling across the playback frame in real time, with anime and game-clip culture as the early content. it ran on sina video infrastructure in the early years. 2 february 2018 the domain went |
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| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Batoto 📖 2011 - 2018 batoto was a manga reader that behaved decently in a category that mostly did not. it hosted fan translations and credited the groups who made them, and when a group asked for a title to come down it came down. the ads stayed light enough that nobody complained, which also meant it never really made |
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|2017-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Anime Strike 📖 2017 - 2018 anime strike was the first branded subscription channel amazon built on its own channels platform, launched on 12 january 2017 at four dollars ninety nine a month on top of prime. it held exclusive rights to shows that were not legally available anywhere else, and it sold access to them in the unite |
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| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Fullscreen (streaming) 📖 2016 - 2018 a subscription video service that cost about five dollars a month and aimed straight at teenagers, built around the youtube-style creators that fullscreen already managed. the idea was a netflix for the digital-native audience, original shows and creator content behind a paywall. the audience it wan |
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| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Voddler 📖 2009 - 2018 voddler's argument was that it would never have to pay for delivery at netflix scale, because the audience would do the carrying. vnet was a controlled peer-to-peer layer with 28 patents behind it, and the service opened in beta to swedish isp customers on 28 october 2009, free and ad-supported, wit |
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| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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Vidme 📖 2014 - 2017 vidme was the youtube competitor with reddit voting on top, the one that thought a creator-first revenue split could pry monetization away from google. it raised about nine million dollars from upfront ventures and reddit's alexis ohanian. it shut down on december 15, 2017, with founder warren shaef |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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Seeso 📖 2016 - 2017 seeso was nbcuniversal's attempt at a comedy-only streaming channel. evan shapiro launched it on january 7 2016 at $3.99 a month with snl and parks and rec in the catalog plus a small slate of originals including harmonquest and bajillion dollar properties. nobody bought enough subscriptions, the sh |
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| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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BBC Store 📖 2015 - 2017 the bbc opened its archive as a shop in november 2015 and let you buy an episode and download it to keep. the corporation believed in the idea enough to close its own physical shop in march 2016 to make room for it. fourteen months later it announced the store was going too, and on 1 november 2017 e |
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| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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Lovefilm 📖 2002 - 2017 lovefilm was the uk version of the netflix-by-mail loop. you set a queue, red envelopes arrived in the post in turn, you sent them back to get the next one. it peaked at about two million subscribers and ran across the uk and ireland plus the nordics before scandinavia got cut in 2013. amazon paid a |
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| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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Daisuki 📖 2013 - 2017 the studios tried to sell anime to the rest of the world themselves. daisuki launched in may 2013, owned by the ad agency asatsu-dk with toei animation and five other japanese companies, and it streamed simulcast episodes to viewers outside japan with a merchandise store attached. government money w |
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| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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Afrostream 📖 2015 - 2017 tonjé bakang spent the summer of 2017 flying between american cities looking for a buyer before the money ran out. afrostream had opened in paris on 1 september 2015 as a subscription service for african and caribbean film, backed by y combinator and orange, and it reached twenty-eight countries. li |
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| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Wrzuta.pl 📖 2006 - 2017 wrzuta was poland's youtube, a place to throw up a video or an mp3 and hand someone the link, and for a couple of years in the mid-2000s it was one of the busiest sites in the country. it started inside the o2 group in 2006 and later passed to wirtualna polska. the traffic drained out slowly across |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
CinemaNow 📖 1999 - 2017 cinemanow was a us video-on-demand service founded in 1999 by curt marvis and bruce eisen, one of the first internet movie storefronts to actually license catalog from the major studios. sonic solutions bought it in 2008, best buy used it as the back end of its online entertainment brand from 2010, |
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| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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Toons.TV 📖 2013 - 2017 rovio launched toons.tv on 17 february 2013 on an argument that made sense at the time. angry birds had passed 1.7 billion downloads, so the games were already a distribution network and a button on the home screen was a broadcast slot nobody had to be sold. angry birds toons started going out weekl |
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| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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Pandora Australia 📖 2012 - 2017 pandora spent its whole life fenced in by music licensing, and australia and new zealand were the only countries outside america it ever managed to open. it went in during 2012, built an audience of about five million registered listeners, and walked out on 31 july 2017 saying it needed to concentra |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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Clipfish 📖 2006 - 2017 clipfish was germany's homegrown answer to youtube, launched by the broadcaster RTL in 2006. it leaned on music videos and clips from RTL's own casting shows, and for a while it had a real local identity, but user-uploaded video is expensive and hard to make money from, and a national site was never |
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| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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Pordede 📖 2013 - 2017 on 4 july 2017 the pordede account database walked out the door and the site never came back up under its own name. for four years it had been where spain went for series and films, built in the space the ley sinde opened when series.ly stopped linking. within hours a clone calling itself plusdede w |
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| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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RTL II You 📖 2016 - 2017 a german broadcaster decided in 2016 that the fourteen to twenty-five audience had stopped turning the television on and could be met on the web instead. rtl ii you went up on 31 may 2016 as an online-only channel carrying anime and american series alongside its own productions, reachable at you.rtl |
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| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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Shut Up! Cartoons 📖 2012 - 2017 one hundred million dollars went into youtube's original channel initiative in 2012, and smosh got one of the slots. shut up! cartoons opened on 30 april 2012 with a disney television animation veteran running it and eighteen short series queued up, which for about two years made it the closest thin |
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| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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Ikbis 📖 2006 - 2017 amman had the arab world's first video and photo sharing site and it opened about eighteen months after youtube did, which for a regional web in 2006 is very close to on time. tootcorp built it, newsweek called it the arab youtube, and it ran for a decade on arabic uploads from across the region. no |
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| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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Azubu 📖 2012 - 2017 azubu launched in 2012 on lars windhorst's theory that watching other people play video games was about to become a real market. he was right about the market and wrong about who would own it. sapinda group put forty million dollars into exclusivity, including fourteen contracted korean league of le |
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| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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Style Code Live 📖 2016 - 2017 thirty minutes live every weeknight at nine eastern, free to watch, with a strip of products under the video that changed as the hosts picked things up. amazon put it on the air on 8 march 2016 and killed it in may 2017 at a friday staff meeting nobody had been warned about, then deleted the show's |
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| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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Kivvi.kz 📖 2009 - 2017 kazakhstan got its own video site on 2 february 2009, launched as kiwi.kz with hosting from the national telephone company and traffic that cost its broadband subscribers nothing, which is how it reached the country's top twenty. a russian court blocked the entire platform in 2014 over a single clip |
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| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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Revision3 📖 2005 - 2017 revision3 was the san francisco video network jay adelson, kevin rose and david prager started in april 2005 as a post-digg side project. the pitch was niche-topic shows distributed as downloadable video episodes, then later as youtube channels. diggnation ran from '05 to '11, tekzilla from '07 to ' |
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| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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UULA 📖 2013 - 2017 1.41 million people were paying 504 yen a month for it at the end of january 2015. two years later there were fewer than half that many and avex closed it. uula was a joint venture between a record label and a phone carrier, sold to people who had bought their handset from that carrier, and when the |
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| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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Zoomby.ru 📖 2010 - 2017 zoomby opened on 19 may 2010 as russia's answer to the piracy problem, a free ad-funded site where you could watch russian television legally the day after it aired. vgtrk was both a shareholder and the main supplier, which gave zoomby a catalog nobody else could match and a bill it could never pay. |
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| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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Ampya 📖 2013 - 2017 ampya was a television company's attempt at spotify, launched in june 2013 with twenty million tracks and a wall of music videos its rivals had not bothered to license. prosiebensat.1 could advertise it to a national audience for free, which turned out not to be the thing that decided the market. in |
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| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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Daum tvPot 📖 2006 - 2017 daum tvpot launched in 2006 as the video upload and streaming service of daum, then south korea's number-two web portal. it covered user uploads, live broadcasts, and a few hundred partner channels with tv and content firms. after kakao merged with daum in 2014 the platform was eventually rolled up |
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| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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Presto 📖 2014 - 2017 foxtel built presto in 2014 to defend australian pay television against streaming, sold half of it to seven west media, then bought that half back and switched the whole thing off. the design fault was on the shopfront: movies were one subscription and television was another, at the exact moment a c |
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| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2016|
|_____|
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Watchever 📖 2013 - 2016 vivendi built a german-only netflix competitor a year before netflix arrived in germany, at exactly the same 8.99 monthly price. the first year burned sixty six million euros against twelve million in revenue. by 2016 watchever sat in one of the last slots in every german streaming survey. paris pul |
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| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2016|
|_____|
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shomi 📖 2014 - 2016 rogers and shaw, two canadian cable companies, put their money together and launched a streaming service in november 2014. for the first nine months you could only buy it if you were already paying one of them for internet or television, which is a curious way to fight netflix. the restriction came |
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| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2016|
|_____|
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Livestation 📖 2008 - 2016 livestation carried live news channels to a computer back when live news was a television arrangement. it came out of skinkers on peer to peer code licensed from microsoft research, went independent, and ended up with around fifty international channels on it. al jazeera english was the tenant that |
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| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2016|
|_____|
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Vokle 📖 2009 - 2016 santa monica, june 2008. robert kiraz and edward dekeratry built a browser page that turned anyone with a webcam into a talk show host, with a queue of callers waiting to be pulled onto the stage. imogen heap put money in. the product worked and nobody could turn it into a habit, and by late 2012 th |
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| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2016|
|_____|
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Vessel 📖 2015 - 2016 jason kilar's post-hulu venture vessel launched in march 2015 with a paid early-access video model. you would pay $2.99 a month for a 72-hour head start on watching new videos by youtubers like casey neistat, and creators would get a better revenue split than youtube was paying. it never reached the |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2016|
|_____|
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Meerkat 📖 2015 - 2016 meerkat is the app that taught everyone what livestreaming felt like on a phone, then watched twitter copy it and shut the door behind. peak hype to obsolete in under two weeks. life on air kept the lights on for another year and a half before pulling the app from the stores on october 4, 2016. the |
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| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2016|
|_____|
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Milk Music 📖 2014 - 2016 samsung shipped milk music in march 2014 as a galaxy-only free radio app with an optional paid tier. the whole catalog and the recommendation engine ran on slacker's backend under a samsung skin. by 22 september 2016 samsung had told the us audience the service was closing and everyone was pushed to |
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| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2016|
|_____|
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Blab.im 📖 2015 - 2016 blab.im was a four-pane video chat app shipped from monkey inferno, the workshop that had bought back bebo. it caught the periscope-era live-video moment and got 3.9 million users on the way up. only one in ten of them came back regularly, and the founders shut it down in august 2016 to start over. |
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| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2016|
|_____|
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Ku6 📖 2006 - 2016 ku6 was the beijing user-generated video site founded by kevin li in 2006, the year after youtube. former sohu editor-in-chief li left to build it, took a first round from baidu and dfj in 2007, then landed the exclusive video-sharing partnership for the beijing olympics in 2008. shanda acquired ku6 |
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| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2016|
|_____|
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Spreecast 📖 2011 - 2016 jeff fluhr sold stubhub to ebay then built a video product where four people could share a screen, an audience could watch, and viewers could raise a hand to join the call. it was group video chat plus broadcast. vh1 ran shows on it, celebrities did q&a panels on it, fluhr raised about eleven millio |
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| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2016|
|_____|
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NOTTV 📖 2012 - 2016 nottv went on the air on 1 april 2012, a subscription television channel broadcast over the old analog vhf band straight into japanese phones for about 420 yen a month. it was run by mmbi, a docomo subsidiary, and it needed a tuner built into the handset, which meant it only ever reached the phones |
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| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2016|
|_____|
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Katch 📖 2015 - 2016 a two-day hack built out of the sxsw 2015 livestream boom that turned into a real product with 1.3 million monthly users. saved meerkat and periscope streams to youtube by adding a hashtag to the title. lasted twelve months before the founders called it, four months before meerkat itself went dark. |
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| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2016|
|_____|
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Neon Alley 📖 2012 - 2016 viz media launched neon alley on 2 october 2012 as a twenty-four hour anime channel you watched through a playstation 3, english dubbed and uncut, for $6.99 a month. it was a television station delivered over a games console at the exact moment everyone else was building on-demand libraries, so it w |
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| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2016|
|_____|
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MyVideo 📖 2006 - 2016 myvideo was a german-language video portal launched in 2006 by magic internet and later absorbed into the prosiebensat.1 broadcast group. it ran the youtube playbook with open uploads and browser viewing in german only. peak traffic reached over 200,000 daily visitors with the domain ranking among t |
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| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2016|
|_____|
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Nook Video 📖 2012 - 2016 barnes and noble tried to make the nook hd into a general-purpose media tablet in late 2012 by adding a video store next to the ebook store. the video store never carried across to the samsung galaxy tab nook when hardware moved to samsung in 2014, and by march 2016 barnes and noble wound the whole |
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| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2016|
|_____|
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Aniboom 📖 2006 - 2016 an israeli television executive worked out that there were thousands of animators with nowhere to be seen and studios with no way to find them, then built the switchboard between them. eight thousand animators across seventy two countries put more than thirteen thousand shorts through it, and the be |
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| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2016|
|_____|
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HuffPost Live 📖 2012 - 2016 huffpost live was aol and huffington post's streaming video newsroom, launched 13 august 2012 with eight live hours a day out of new york and four more out of los angeles. roy sekoff and aol studios head gabriel lewis co-created it as a "cnn meets youtube" replacement for the on-air news panel. aria |
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| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2016|
|_____|
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Nokia MixRadio 📖 2011 - 2016 nokia's free streaming radio built on the ashes of nokia music. announced 26 october 2011 for windows phone at the lumia launch, rebranded from nokia music to mixradio on 20 november 2013. microsoft mobile spun it off to line corporation on 17 march 2015 as part of a divest-non-core sweep. line held |
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| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2016|
|_____|
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Wat.tv 📖 2006 - 2016 wat.tv was the french broadcaster TF1's attempt to own online video, launched in 2006 under a name that stood for we are talented. the plan was a home for user clips and rising stars, a french youtube, but it slid into being a replay service for TF1's own shows instead. at its best it was the third |
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| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2016|
|_____|
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Live365 📖 1999 - 2016 live365 was the platform that let any random person run their own internet radio station. it bundled the licensing so you did not have to negotiate with the rights holders yourself. when the small webcaster settlement act lapsed at the end of 2015 the math broke, and the original company shut down o |
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| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2016|
|_____|
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iTunes Radio 📖 2013 - 2016 apple's pandora response, baked into ios 7's music app on september 18 2013. ad-supported station radio with a buy-this-song button on every now-playing view. apple music absorbed the paid half in june 2015 and the free half went dark seven months later. nobody outside the us or australia ever got t |
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| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2016|
|_____|
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Oyster 📖 2013 - 2016 a new york startup pitched ebook subscription the way netflix pitched dvd subscription. one million titles, ten dollars a month, unlimited reading. the publishers stayed nervous, the amazon kindle unlimited launch cornered the model, and google bought the founders instead of the company. |
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| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2016|
|_____|
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Yahoo Screen 📖 2011 - 2016 yahoo screen was the brand yahoo used between 2011 and 2016 to try to compete with netflix and hulu on original streaming video. the headline buy was the sixth season of community, which sony had just lost when nbc cancelled the show after season five. yahoo's originals slate hit a 42-million-dollar |
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| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2016|
|_____|
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Veetle 📖 2008 - 2016 a few stanford graduate students built veetle in 2008 so one person on a normal home connection could broadcast live video to thousands, by making every viewer carry part of the load for everyone else. it worked, and what it mostly carried was pirated sport and rebroadcast satellite channels. by nov |
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| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2016|
|_____|
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夠Yeah (Goyeah) 📖 2009 - 2016 a hong kong reporter who became a national meme in 2000 for asking jiang zemin one question too many spent eighteen months building the city's first legal free-movie site. goyeah opened in september 2009 with three hundred hours of licensed hong kong cinema and uncut japanese anime, paid for entirel |
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| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2015|
|_____|
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YasakTube 📖 2008 - 2015 turkey blocked youtube on 5 may 2008. four months later a site opened calling itself yasaktube, which translates as bannedtube, and spent two years re-hosting the videos the country could not reach, under the subtitle "youtube turkiye". the ankara court lifted the ban on 30 october 2010 and the site |
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| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2015|
|_____|
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Mega Filmes HD 📖 2010 - 2015 cerquilho, in the interior of são paulo state, was where the biggest pirate streaming site in brazil got its mail. marcos cardoso came back from fourteen years in japan and put it up in august 2010 as an index of films hosted elsewhere, and by the first half of 2015 the police were counting sixty mi |
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| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2015|
|_____|
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Dick Figures 📖 2010 - 2015 $313,411 came out of a kickstarter so that two animators could make a feature film about two stick men named red and blue, and it worked: the movie shipped in september 2013 and the series had passed 250 million views. the show proper ended on 10 july 2014. what came last, on 8 november 2015, was th |
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| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2015|
|_____|
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Ticker.tv 📖 2014 - 2015 119 west 72nd street in manhattan is the address on the only surviving profile of ticker.tv, a financial video network that opened in december 2014 and was gone by 16 october 2015. in those ten months it accumulated more than a hundred channels, over three thousand videos and about thirty-five thous |
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| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2015|
|_____|
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Headweb 📖 2007 - 2015 24 september 2015 is the day headweb's customers opened an email telling them the website had been replaced by plejmo and their apps had been replaced by plejmo's. the service had changed hands three times in under two years before that email went out. the company name survived another year and a ha |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2015|
|_____|
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Gaikai 📖 2008 - 2015 gaikai was the cloud gaming startup that david perry founded in november 2008, a year after onlive launched. the pitch was the same as onlive's, stream a real pc or console game from a datacenter and play it inside a browser. gaikai actually did get the browser delivery working at acceptable latency |
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| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2015|
|_____|
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Blip.tv 📖 2005 - 2015 blip was the video host for the people youtube did not pay yet. independent web series, vodcasts, gaming shows. it ran from 2005 to 2015 with about 500 million monthly views at peak. maker studios bought it in 2013, disney bought maker, and the platform was wound down to fold into the disney digital |
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| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2015|
|_____|
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Xunlei Kankan 📖 2007 - 2015 it had one hundred and thirty six million monthly visitors and almost no recognition outside its own country, which is a shape the english-speaking web does not have a word for. the video was delivered half by servers and half by the people already watching, because the parent company's whole busine |
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| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2015|
|_____|
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Openfilm 📖 2008 - 2015 a video site for independent film, public from 22 july 2008, that refused to be youtube. submissions were screened before they went up and the stated point was to put money behind the good ones. james caan co-founded it and chaired it, with robert duvall and mark rydell sitting on the advisory board |
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| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2015|
|_____|
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Swefilmer 📖 2011 - 2015 roughly a quarter of everything sweden streamed online went through one unlicensed site, and the site was two men and an advertising account. swefilmer started on 13 february 2011 and closed on 31 july 2015, days after police searched an administrator's home and held him for ninety hours. what follo |
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| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2015|
|_____|
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Film4oD 📖 2010 - 2015 fifty pence bought forty-eight hours with a film, which in november 2010 made channel 4's rental shop the cheapest legal way to watch one in britain. the storefront was film4's and the machinery underneath belonged to filmflex, a sony and disney joint venture that ran half the rental services in the |
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| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2015|
|_____|
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Wareztuga 📖 2011 - 2015 for four years the most used streaming site in portugal was an unlicensed one, and for a lot of that time it was not even accepting new members. wareztuga opened on 1 september 2011 promising the country its first great video library, free, in the browser, behind a login. servers were seized, conten |
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| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2015|
|_____|
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Aora 📖 2008 - 2015 aora went nationwide across indonesia in august 2008 with ten channels and the exclusive indonesian rights to the beijing olympics, four of those channels showing nothing else. ten days later it took the entire 2008-09 premier league as well, all 370 matches. the football rights expired hours before |
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| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2015|
|_____|
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もっとTV 📖 2012 - 2015 japan's five biggest commercial broadcasters agreed on one video service exactly once, and this was it. dentsu wired motto tv into panasonic and toshiba and lg sets so the shows arrived through the television rather than through a box, and panasonic put a dedicated button for it on three model years |
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| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2015|
|_____|
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Target Ticket 📖 2013 - 2015 target put a movie store on the internet in september 2013, priced it roughly like itunes, wrapped it in ultraviolet and aimed the whole thing at families. seventeen months later it was gone, and the only real work left was walking everyone's purchases across to cinemanow before the lights went out. |
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| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2015|
|_____|
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GreenCine 📖 1999 - 2015 a mail rental company for the films the big mail rental company did not bother stocking. it started in san francisco in 1999 as a side project inside a technology firm, and it ended up with more than thirty thousand discs and nine thousand titles available to stream before streaming had a name. the |
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| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2015|
|_____|
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Dreamfilm 📖 2012 - 2015 a prosecutor in linköping worked out that the cheapest way to close a streaming site is to let one of its administrators go home and tell him what happens if it is still up tomorrow. dreamfilm had run since the spring of 2012, four men, more than a million kronor in advertising, and enough swedish t |
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| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2015|
|_____|
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NimbleTV 📖 2013 - 2015 nimbletv sold television you had already bought, delivered somewhere else. if you had a new york cable package it verified the account through the operator's own portal and relayed the channels to whatever screen was with you. if you had no package it bought one on your behalf and streamed up to a h |
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| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2015|
|_____|
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Videolog.tv 📖 2004 - 2015 videolog was the brazilian video-sharing site that ran in portuguese while youtube ran in english. ariel alexandre and edson mackeenzy launched it from sao paulo in may 2004. uol carried the partnership from 2006, r7 from the grupo record side took over in november 2010. by january 2015 the funding |
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| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2015|
|_____|
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Clip.vn 📖 2007 - 2015 200,000 visitors came on the first day in february 2007 and 50,000 of them were on the site at the same moment, which the servers did not survive. clip.vn was vega corporation's video sharing site, the first in vietnam, with 230,000 members a month after launch. from 2011 the uploaders drifted to yo |
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| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2014|
|_____|
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Boxee 📖 2008 - 2014 boxee was the media-center software (and later set-top box) that tried to be the netflix-of-everything before netflix was the netflix-of-everything. it forked from xbmc in 2008 and shipped a 200-dollar d-link boxee box in 2010. samsung bought and shelved it in 2013. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2014|
|_____|
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Samsung Video Hub 📖 2012 - 2014 samsung put a movie store inside the galaxy s iii in may 2012 and switched it off two and a half years later. selling stopped on 1 december 2014. to keep a film you had already paid for you had to re-download it before the 30th and then play at least thirty seconds of it on each device, up to five d |
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| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Nokia Trailers 📖 2012 - 2014 the goodbye note recommended xbox video. nokia trailers was a lumia exclusive that let you download a film trailer and watch it later with no signal at all, which in 2012 was a real feature rather than a gimmick. microsoft completed its purchase of nokia's phone business in april 2014 and the traile |
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| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
nicocas 📖 2014 - 2014 five days separated the release and the switch-off. dwango put nicocas in the app store on 12 december 2014 without a press release, then announced on the 15th that it would close at midnight on the 17th. the notice opens by thanking people for using it 長い間, all this long time, and admits two lines |
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| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2014|
|_____|
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Rev3Games 📖 2012 - 2014 adam sessler walked out of discovery digital networks in april 2014 and took the channel's reason for existing with him. rev3games had launched two years earlier as revision3's answer to the question of where television games criticism goes once television stops making it, and hiring the former x-pl |
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| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2014|
|_____|
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Helix Universal Server 📖 2002 - 2014 the server side of streaming used to be a product you bought once, and realnetworks sold the one that spoke every format. helix universal server arrived in 2002 able to serve four rival media formats from a single install, which was the whole reason it existed. then delivery moved to plain http and |
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| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2014|
|_____|
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Xbox Entertainment Studios 📖 2012 - 2014 microsoft hired the former president of cbs network television and gave her a studio in santa monica to make television for a games console. it lasted about two years and shipped a handful of things against fifteen or so it had in development. satya nadella cut it in july 2014 inside a layoff of eig |
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| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2014|
|_____|
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Redbox Instant 📖 2013 - 2014 redbox instant was verizon and outerwall's shared attempt to build a netflix competitor. it launched on 14 march 2013 at 8 dollars a month for unlimited streaming plus four monthly disc rentals from the redbox kiosks. the catalog stayed small. new signups were suspended in mid 2014 after credit-card |
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| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Zip.ca 📖 2004 - 2014 zip.ca started shipping dvds to canadian mailboxes in february 2004 and spent a decade being the netflix canada did not have. it passed thirty thousand subscribers by early 2006 and six million discs rented by that december, then watched the rental category get taken apart from two directions at onc |
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| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Justin.tv 📖 2007 - 2014 the lifecasting site that started as one guy with a webcam strapped to his head, broadcasting his life 24/7. it pivoted to a generic streaming platform. a sub-section called twitch.tv absorbed the parent. the original justin.tv brand was shut down in august 2014. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2014|
|_____|
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Swell Radio 📖 2013 - 2014 thirteen months on the app store, then apple paid about $30 million for it and switched it off. concept.io built it to do for talk what pandora did for music: press play once and get a continuous stream of news and podcasts, tuned by what you listened through and what you skipped past. abc news radi |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2014|
|_____|
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Aereo 📖 2012 - 2014 aereo's idea was almost a legal gag. each user rents one physical antenna in a warehouse, the antenna catches free over-the-air tv, the warehouse internet sends it to that user's screen. one user, one antenna. the broadcasters sued anyway. the supreme court agreed it was retransmission and the compa |
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| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2014|
|_____|
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Google TV 📖 2010 - 2014 six american television networks decided, separately and within weeks of each other, that a browser running on a television was not allowed to load their websites. that was enough to finish it. google's 2010 living-room platform shipped on a 299 dollar logitech box and a sony set costing twice that, |
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| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2014|
|_____|
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Bambuser 📖 2007 - 2014 bambuser was a swedish mobile live-streaming app out of stockholm. it launched in 2007 with the pitch that anyone with a smartphone could broadcast live video to the web. by the arab spring in 2011 it was the citizen-journalism tool of choice in egypt and syria. by 2013 the associated press had boug |
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| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2014|
|_____|
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Wowloud 📖 2011 - 2014 on 1 june 2014 the first music streaming service malaysia built for itself stopped, and the page that replaced it did the unglamorous thing: it told premium plus subscribers with time left on their accounts that they would be refunded, and pointed the rest at tontonmusic. wowloud had the local major |
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| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2014|
|_____|
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HitBliss 📖 2013 - 2014 eight to ten minutes of commercials bought you a new release. the catch was that the software watched back, with a meter you had to click and a trust score that went up as you proved you were still in the room. sharon peyer and andrew prihodko spent five years building it and fourteen months running |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2014|
|_____|
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Cuevana 📖 2009 - 2014 three students in argentina put cuevana online on 1 october 2009 and within two years it was how a large part of latin america watched american television. it stored nothing itself. it was an index plus a browser plugin that played files sitting on other people's hosts, which is why hbo's criminal c |
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| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2014|
|_____|
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Bloom.fm 📖 2013 - 2014 bloom.fm was a british music app that tried a middle path between buying songs and paying a flat streaming fee. it let you rent music. a pound a month rented you twenty tracks you could keep offline and swap in and out like library books, and you paid more for more, up to ten pounds for unlimited st |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2014|
|_____|
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Qik 📖 2007 - 2014 qik was a live video app from 2007 that pushed a stream off a phone and onto a web page while the phone was still pointed at the thing, back when the phone doing it was a nokia running symbian. it went from 600,000 users in january 2010 to five million by that december, and skype bought it on 6 janu |
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| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2014|
|_____|
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QVOD (Kuaibo) 📖 2007 - 2014 qvod, known in chinese as kuaibo, was a video player out of shenzhen that turned every machine running it into a node in one enormous streaming swarm. it shipped in 2007, passed three hundred million installations by 2012, and became the way a large part of china watched anything nobody had licensed |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2014|
|_____|
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Sevenload 📖 2006 - 2014 sevenload was germany's attempt at a domestic youtube. founded in cologne in april 2006 by ibrahim evsan with two cofounders, it grew to twelve language portals and licensed deals with universal music and mtv before hubert burda media took the majority in december 2010. by 2014 burda could not find |
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| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2014|
|_____|
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My Damn Channel 📖 2007 - 2014 rob barnett came out of eleven years of programming at mtv and vh1 and started my damn channel with warren chao on 31 july 2007, when the open question was whether the web needed programmed comedy or just more uploads. it made you suck at photoshop, which won two webbys and a streamy and put close t |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2014|
|_____|
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Mevio 📖 2004 - 2014 mevio was the san francisco podcast network founded on 1 october 2004 as podshow inc. by adam curry and ron bloom. it opened as the flagship ad network of the first podcast boom, running the daily source code and no agenda alongside the dawn and drew show and roughly twenty other early podcasts. the |
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| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2014|
|_____|
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Nintendo Video 📖 2011 - 2014 nintendo put a free video app on the 3ds and then did the choosing for you. spotpass pulled four shorts at a time down onto the sd card while the console sat closed in a bag, and every file carried an expiry date that removed it again to make room for the next four. collegehumor and aardman supplied |
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| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2014|
|_____|
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Totalmovie 📖 2011 - 2014 ninety-nine pesos a month bought a catalog that ran across forty latin american markets, and by the end of 2012 totalmovie had 1.9 million registered accounts and second place in the region behind netflix. ricardo salinas pliego's group had set out to copy netflix openly and said as much in public. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2014|
|_____|
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WWE Classics on Demand 📖 2004 - 2014 wwe owns one of the largest privately held video archives on earth, well past 100,000 hours running back to the 1950s and swollen further by buying wcw and ecw outright. from november 2004 it sold access to that archive as a video-on-demand tier on american cable, about forty hours rotating in and o |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2014|
|_____|
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MOBTV 📖 2008 - 2014 mediacorp online broadband television launched in august 2008 as singapore's national broadcaster selling its own back catalog by subscription, streamed or downloaded. in march 2010 it was folded into xinmsn and went free, at which point watching required a singapore identity card number. the websit |
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| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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Spill.com 📖 2006 - 2013 spill.com came out of an austin cable-access show and turned film criticism into cartoons. the crew reviewed movies as animated versions of themselves under aliases, then released the unedited argument as a podcast. it won best film podcast at the podcast awards in 2009 and again in 2012 and had ove |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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TheWB.com 📖 2008 - 2013 a television network that had already stopped broadcasting came back in 2008 as a website. warner bros put the old wb catalog online, gilmore girls and buffy the vampire slayer among it, alongside short original serials cut into five-minute episodes. it was free and advertising-funded, and it would |
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| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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Acetrax 📖 2006 - 2013 a zürich company that sold films over the internet to televisions, back when a television could barely manage it, by getting its software installed at the factory instead of asking anyone to seek it out. it claimed a reach of 282 million households across 48 countries, a figure that counted sets rat |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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BBM Music 📖 2011 - 2013 fifty songs. that was the library you got for $4.99 a month, and the only way to make it bigger was to recruit your blackberry messenger contacts onto the same subscription so their fifty became visible to you. rim licensed the catalog from all four majors to build it and launched in august 2011 wit |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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JManga 📖 2011 - 2013 thirty-six japanese publishers agreed to put manga online legally in english, which had never happened before and has not happened in that form since. the reader was streaming only, so nothing was ever on your machine. when the service closed after twenty-one months it refunded the points you had no |
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| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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We7 📖 2007 - 2013 we7 launched in april 2007 as a uk music download service co-founded by peter gabriel and steve purdham of surfcontrol. the model was an audio ad spliced into each track in exchange for free mp3s, which shifted in october 2008 to free ad-supported streaming. by january 2011 it carried three million |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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Spinner.com 📖 1996 - 2013 spinner started as thedj.com in 1996 in san francisco. one of the very first internet radio services, claimed to be the largest by 2001. aol bought it in june 1999 alongside nullsoft for around four hundred million dollars in stock and folded both into the aol music portfolio. for fourteen more year |
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| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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Dai-2 Nippon Television 📖 2005 - 2013 toshio tsuchiya had already made his name at nippon television with denpa shonen, and in october 2005 he was handed a website instead of a time slot. he insisted the 2 in the name did not mean second, it meant against, as in everything the terrestrial channel would not let him air. for three years y |
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| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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BlogTV 📖 2007 - 2013 blogtv was the israeli-run live-video site that let anyone with a webcam broadcast a channel while a chat scroll ran alongside it. the whole thing covered the 2007 to 2013 window between stickam dying off and twitch turning into anything but a games site. younow acquired blogtv on 13 march 2013 and |
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| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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Bandai Entertainment 📖 1998 - 2013 bandai entertainment started in 1998 as a california dvd label named after a website, animevillage.com, and grew into the north american arm of the company that owned gundam. it never had to bid for its best licenses because its parent made them. on 2 january 2012 it announced it would stop putting |
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| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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TVU Player 📖 2010 - 2013 every viewer was also a server, and that was the whole trick. tvu player pulled a live television channel off a peer to peer swarm and pushed it back out to other people watching the same thing, so the audience carried the bandwidth instead of the broadcaster. tvu networks of mountain view ran it, a |
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| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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Stickam 📖 2005 - 2013 stickam launched in 2005 as one of the first websites you could embed a live webcam stream into another page. by 2012 it had 9.3 million registered users, mostly teens broadcasting from bedrooms. it lived in a space mainstream platforms would not touch, with chronic predator-safety problems and at l |
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| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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own3D.tv 📖 2009 - 2013 for a couple of years this was a real rival to Justin.tv for people who wanted to watch others play, especially in the starcraft and counter-strike scenes. it paid top streamers and looked like it might be where esports lived. it could never make the money work against a competitor with deeper pocke |
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| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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LiveVideo.com 📖 2006 - 2013 livevideo was brad greenspan's attempt to build a second myspace out of video. greenspan had co-founded intermix, the company behind myspace, and after that he backed a string of web ventures with livevideo among them. it launched properly in 2008 as a mix of youtube and a social network, with live |
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| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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Orb Networks 📖 2004 - 2013 orb was a program you installed on the windows machine at home so that everything on its hard drive became reachable from anywhere else, transcoded on the fly and pushed out to a browser or a phone. if the machine had a tv tuner card you got live television and a recorder along with it. it worked, a |
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| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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Verizon V CAST 📖 2005 - 2012 the verizon mobile portal that piped video and music over 3g ev-do straight to feature phones and early smartphones from february 2005 to december 15 2012. it was a closed garden in an era before the iphone made closed gardens look silly. when smartphone data plans arrived, nobody needed the carrier |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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Google Listen 📖 2009 - 2012 580,000 people a month were using it when google decided it was not needed. listen was the first podcast app google ever shipped, out of labs in august 2009, and from february 2010 it kept your subscriptions in google reader folders rather than in the app. it was pulled from the play store on 3 augu |
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| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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DMM.TV for Blu-ray Disc 📖 2009 - 2012 dmm would post you a blu-ray disc for nothing. you put it in a playstation 3, it reached the network through the bd-live function, and a video store came up on the television. there was no film on the disc. what the disc held was your account, tied to one id by a protection layer dmm wrote itself, s |
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| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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MovieGate (ムービーゲート) 📖 2007 - 2012 kadokawa opened it on 2 july 2007 as the single video hub behind all forty-three of its official i-mode sites, and it kept opening new fronts for five years. the pc site shut in september 2010 and an iphone service opened two months later. the last of it stopped on 31 august 2012, by which point the |
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| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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TU Media (TU미디어) 📖 2005 - 2012 a broadcast satellite named hanbyul reached orbit on 13 march 2004 so that koreans could watch television on a handset, and for several years it worked. tu media began paid service on 1 may 2005, passed a million subscribers by december 2006 and two million by november 2009. then the handsets learne |
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| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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Google Video 📖 2005 - 2012 google video was the video-hosting service google launched in january 2005 and then made instantly redundant by buying youtube in october 2006. it kept accepting uploads until 2009, kept serving old videos for three more years after that, and quietly folded into youtube on 20 august 2012. by the end |
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| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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Joost 📖 2007 - 2012 joost was niklas zennström and janus friis's third act, after kazaa and skype: a desktop p2p television client that streamed mtv and viacom-tier shows in near-tv resolution. the beta opened in 2007 with a million signups. the licensing geofence was us-first, the desktop client was heavy, and by the |
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| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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Wii no Ma 📖 2009 - 2012 nintendo and the biggest advertising agency in japan built a television channel inside the wii, and instead of a menu they drew a living room. your family of miis lived in it, vacuuming and reading manga on the floor, and the low table in the middle was the whole design idea. it ran three years, was |
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| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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QuickSilverScreen 📖 2004 - 2012 the megaupload raid landed on 19 january 2012, and quicksilverscreen was not named in it. that did not matter. the site had passed through several owners by then, it hosted no video of its own, and the man holding it in early february decided he did not want to be the test case. eight years of links |
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| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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Babelgum 📖 2007 - 2012 babelgum was a 2007 italian internet tv platform funded by silvio scaglia, who put around fifty million euros of his own money into the project. it ran on a proprietary p2p streaming stack until march 2009, then pivoted to flash. by 2012 it was in liquidation. scaglia's separate criminal investigati |
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| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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Jaman 📖 2006 - 2011 jaman was a proto-netflix for foreign films. gaurav dhillon, fresh off co-founding informatica, put together a curated catalog of independent and international titles and shipped it through a peer-to-peer download client with deals from lionsgate and paramount. the world was not ready to pay for wor |
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| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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ExerciseTV 📖 2006 - 2011 comcast and the trainer jake steinfeld built a fitness channel that lived inside the video on demand menu of an american cable box. the workouts were free if you already paid for digital cable, and the money was meant to come from selling the same sessions on dvd afterwards. that second half stopped |
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| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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AOL Video 📖 2006 - 2011 two acquisitions and a television library went into this thing and none of them saved it. aol bought truveo in january 2006 for the crawler and had already bought singingfish for the index, then opened a free video destination that summer with warner brothers trailers, cnn clips and the whole in2tv |
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| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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Minna no Theater Wii 📖 2009 - 2011 fujitsu software built a video rental shop and shipped it as a wiiware channel, which made it the first video-on-demand service the wii ever carried in japan. it opened on 27 january 2009 with around 150 titles, took payment in wii points, and streamed at 640 by 480. two years and nine months later |
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| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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SeeSaw 📖 2010 - 2011 seesaw was assembled out of the parts of project kangaroo, the joint catch-up service bbc worldwide and channel 4 had been building with itv until the competition commission blocked it in february 2009. arqiva, the company that runs britain's television transmitters, bought the wreckage for around e |
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| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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Qwikster 📖 2011 - 2011 netflix split its dvd-by-mail business out under a new name on september 18, 2011, gave it a separate website and a separate bill, and announced it in a blog post that opened with an apology and got worse from there. subscribers read it as being charged twice for a habit they already had. the brand |
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| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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Sezmi 📖 2007 - 2011 sezmi was a box that pulled free over-the-air television in through a smart antenna and recorded it onto a terabyte drive, with internet video mixed into the same guide. it started as building b in 2007 and raised somewhere north of seventy million dollars. thirty-six american markets got the five-d |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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Sony Qriocity 📖 2010 - 2011 qriocity was sony's umbrella brand for cloud video and music on ps3 and bravia, launched in the us in april 2010 as video on demand powered by qriocity. music unlimited powered by qriocity launched in europe later that year. the april 2011 psn breach took qriocity offline for six weeks. kaz hirai fo |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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Zoome 📖 2007 - 2011 zoome was japan's second-largest video-sharing site through the late 2000s, sitting behind niconico as the smaller alternative with cleaner h.264 uploads. acca networks launched it on 30 january 2007 and spun it into its own subsidiary in june 2008. it absorbed the stage6 refugees after 2008 and a c |
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| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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Revver 📖 2005 - 2011 revver invented the youtube deal before youtube did, then lost the audience because the acquirer stopped honoring it. the model was simple: pre-roll and post-roll ad revenue split fifty-fifty with the creator, tracked by a per-video revtag. the model died the day liveuniverse decided the payouts wer |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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Kyte.tv 📖 2006 - 2011 kyte was a san francisco startup that built a mobile live-video platform when the iphone was still on its first generation. founded in 2006 by daniel graf and erik abair, funded by steamboat ventures and others, peaked at $3.7 million in fiscal 2010 revenue. kit digital bought the company on january |
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| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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Zediva 📖 2010 - 2011 zediva rented movies the way a video store did, except the disc and the machine playing it stayed in a rack in santa clara and only the picture came to you. $1.99 a film, or ten for ten dollars, for new releases that no licensed streaming service could legally carry for months yet. six major studios |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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MyP2P 📖 2005 - 2011 a registry status line did it: "this domain name has been registered and is on hold", pending the outcome of legal activity. myp2p was a dutch-run schedule site from 2005 that carried no video of its own. it listed kickoff times and, beside each one, the sopcast or tvants channel that would show the |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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TroopTube 📖 2008 - 2011 in may 2007 the defense department blocked youtube and myspace on its own networks, then spent a year and a half working out that soldiers still wanted to send video home. trooptube launched in november 2008 through military onesource, built on technology from a seattle startup called delve networks |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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Holy Soap 📖 2009 - 2011 a british broadcaster built a whole separate website for two australian soap operas, ran it for two years and five days, then closed it with a notice posted on the morning of the closure. the episodes moved to channel5.com, where they should probably have been all along. about a quarter of holy soap |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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Kino.to 📖 2008 - 2011 on 8 june 2011 police in four countries knocked on doors within the same hour and the largest german-language streaming site went dark before lunch. dirk böttcher had run kino.to out of leipzig since march 2008, hosting nothing and selling the advertising that sat around a grid of links to other peo |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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FLO TV / MediaFLO 📖 2007 - 2011 flo tv was qualcomm's bet that the future of mobile video was a broadcast tower and a tuner inside the phone. verizon launched the first version in march 2007 as v cast mobile tv, att followed in 2008, and qualcomm tried a stand-alone receiver device with car-friendly hardware. the iphone shipped da |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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Next New Networks 📖 2007 - 2011 five people started next new networks in march 2007 with eight million dollars, on the idea that web video needed programmed channels rather than loose uploads. barely political and channel frederator came out of it, and so did vsauce. the catalog had passed two billion views and six million subscri |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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ivi TV 📖 2010 - 2011 $4.99 a month bought you new york and seattle broadcast television on a computer anywhere in the world, which is the part the networks could not live with. ivi argued that it was a cable system under the copyright act and therefore entitled to the same compulsory license every cable operator in the |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Nokia Comes with Music 📖 2008 - 2011 nokia comes with music was the bundled unlimited music subscription that shipped with an xpressmusic phone in the uk on 17 october 2008. one year of downloads from a 2.1 million track catalog licensed under the three major labels, locked to that phone and one paired pc through windows media drm. it |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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GoFish 📖 2003 - 2010 november 2010: a company that had once been a video site with close to twenty million users stopped paying the publishers it sold ads for, and then stopped existing. gofish started in 2003 as a search engine for music and ringtones and ended up a youtube competitor. by january 2009 it had renamed it |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
NBC Direct 📖 2007 - 2010 nbc direct was nbc universal's own download-to-watch service for prime-time episodes, launched in november 2007 in beta and through three painful iterations before nbc gave up. the client was windows only. the files were drm-protected and expired seven days after broadcast. hulu, which nbc co-owned, |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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DMMポータブル (DMM Portable) 📖 2009 - 2010 you pointed the psp's browser at a japanese video store, bought an episode over wi-fi, and it came down onto the memory stick without a computer anywhere in the transaction. that was 2009, and the file arrived in a sony container format that would not play back on a pc even though you owned it. dmm |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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Motionbox 📖 2006 - 2010 motionbox was a video-sharing site out of new york, built for people who wanted to share clips with a few friends instead of the whole internet. chris o'brien and andrew wason started it in 2006, and its trick was editing in the browser, you could trim and stitch clips online before you shared them, |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
quarterlife 📖 2007 - 2010 marshall herskovitz and edward zwick, the men behind thirtysomething and my so-called life, put a drama on myspace in november 2007, and nine million views later nbc bought it for television. the broadcast premiere on 26 february 2008 drew 3.1 million viewers and was canceled the following day after |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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DMM.TV for STB 📖 2008 - 2010 i-o data made the box, dmm rented it to you for 680 yen a month, and the video on it was charged per title on top of that. it lasted fourteen months. dmm said the rental numbers never grew the way it wanted, and moved its television plans onto a blu-ray disc that loaded the store through a ps3 inste |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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YouAre.TV 📖 2006 - 2010 be seen, said the logo. youare.tv launched in january 2006 into the same twelve months as every other video startup, and tried to win on taste rather than volume: a front page of featured indie films and machinima episodes chosen by a person. it never got large. the last working capture is 24 februa |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2009|
|_____|
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In2TV 📖 2006 - 2009 in2tv was aol and warner bros putting the warner television archive on the web for free in march 2006, paid for by one or two minutes of advertising per episode instead of the eight minutes broadcast took. it worked well enough that business insider later called it the thing that invented binge watc |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1992-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
ADV Films 📖 1992 - 2009 adv films opened in houston on 17 august 1992 and spent the next fifteen years deciding which japanese cartoons got english voices in north america. at its widest it ran a cable channel and had newtype usa on american newsstands. sojitz money arrived in june 2006 and withdrew in january 2008, taking |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Soapbox 📖 2006 - 2009 soapbox was the youtube clone microsoft built into msn video. it required a windows live id, played back through windows media player inside internet explorer, and ran in american english only. uploads stopped on july 29 2009 and the service was retired on august 31 of the same year. |
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| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Milanca 📖 2006 - 2009 october 2006, and the japanese web had already decided that video should be free. gyao was streaming whole television programs with ads and no charge at all. neo opened a portal that charged you instead, and the bet looked survivable for a while because it had one show nobody else could get. it last |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Setanta Sports 📖 2002 - 2009 setanta was an irish company that spent the 2000s buying sports rights in britain that sky had held on its own since 1992. in 2006 it took two premier league packages for £392 million, forty-six live matches a season from 2007. the subscriber base needed to pay for that never turned up, and on 19 ju |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Sony eyeVio 📖 2007 - 2009 sony eyeVio was a japan-only video-sharing site launched by sony corporation on 27 april 2007, six months after google bought youtube. the site required a creative commons license on any clip made available for download, an unusual policy choice that made almost every downloadable video CC-licensed |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1990-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Central Park Media 📖 1990 - 2009 central park media opened in new york on 11 april 1990 and spent nineteen years buying north american rights to japanese animation that nobody else was bidding on. us manga corps carried the general catalog and anime 18 carried the rest, and for most of the 1990s the two paid for each other. the ret |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Putfile 📖 2004 - 2009 putfile was the kind of video host i should have known about. it ran 2004 to 2009 out of godalming, england, founded by gordon page. ZVUE acquired it in 2007. uploads stopped in october 2008, the site went dark on 23 april 2009, and putfile.com quietly started redirecting to ebaumsworld.com without |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Yahoo! Videocast 📖 2007 - 2009 the guidelines banned putting a commercial recording into your video, so the only music you could legally upload to yahoo! videocast was music you performed yourself. yahoo! japan opened the beta on 12 april 2007 and agreed to jasrac's licensing terms at the official launch that july, with the royal |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
MyToons 📖 2007 - 2009 three weeks after the march 2007 launch it had taken over 1.5 million unique visitors, which looked like proof that animation wanted its own video site rather than a corner of youtube. austin money and a texas state grant kept it building through 2008, including the first hd upload and playback on a |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
MobaHO! 📖 2004 - 2009 a hundred thousand subscribers against a target of a million is the whole story. mobaho! put eight video channels and thirty audio channels on a satellite over japan and sold you a handheld receiver to watch them, and while it was doing that every japanese phone quietly grew a free terrestrial tuner |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
ITV Local 📖 2005 - 2009 itv's attempt at putting the english regions online, tried first in brighton and hastings in 2005 and then rolled out across the whole network. local news and weather on demand, five day forecasts, classifieds, jobs, a webcam pointed at something scenic, and a video upload page called yournews that |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Fabchannel 📖 2000 - 2009 a concert hall turned itself into a broadcaster. fabchannel put television-grade cameras into paradiso and melkweg in amsterdam and streamed whole gigs, free and on demand, for nine years, ending up with more than nine hundred full concerts. it won a webby and the city of amsterdam bought a quarter |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Bud.TV 📖 2007 - 2009 fifteen million dollars bought a beer company its own television network in february 2007, and the first thing the network did was ask for your driver's license. 253,000 people came in the opening month against a target of three million a month, and the figure halved by the second. anheuser-busch sw |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Project Kangaroo 📖 2007 - 2009 kangaroo was going to be one place to watch british television, built jointly by bbc worldwide and itv with channel 4 alongside them, holding more than ten thousand hours between them. the competition commission decided on 4 february 2009 that three broadcasters holding that much british content in |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Toonami Jetstream 📖 2006 - 2009 cartoon network and viz media put toonami on the web in july 2006, free and paid for by advertising, at a point when almost nobody was doing legal video streaming of anything. it needed flash 8 and windows media player 10 and it checked where you were connecting from, because the licensing only cove |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Guba 📖 1998 - 2009 guba started as an archive, not a video site. the name was an acronym, gigantic usenet binaries archive, and in 1998 that is what it was, a way to search the files people posted into usenet newsgroups and pull them down through a browser instead of a news client. thomas mcinerney built it in san fra |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
vSocial 📖 2005 - 2009 white-label video hosting from arizona, sold to publishers who wanted their own branded player without building one. it worked for a while, then youtube handed the same thing to everyone for free and the reason to pay for vsocial went away. it faded out around 2009 without much of a funeral. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
eyeSpot 📖 2006 - 2008 eyespot was a browser video-mashup tool out of san diego, built so you could mix clips and music together online and pass the result around. jim kaskade and david dudas started it, opened a public beta in april 2006, and raised about three point seven million dollars that october. its angle was the |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2008|
|_____|
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Movielink 📖 2002 - 2008 hollywood's studio-cartel attempt at legal movie downloads, owned jointly by paramount, sony, mgm, universal, and warner bros. it ran from november 2002 to december 2008. the catalog had real titles, the rentals worked on windows media player nine, and the prices were $1.99 to $4.99. blockbuster bou |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2008|
|_____|
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iTVP 📖 2005 - 2008 twelve million złoty of polish science ministry money went into a television system that deliberately avoided the public internet, because in 2005 the polish internet could not be trusted to carry 750 kilobits into a living room. tvp built it on pionier, the national academic fiber network, with the |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Yahoo! Live 📖 2008 - 2008 yahoo opened a webcam broadcasting site on 6 february 2008 and it fell over the same evening, because there was not enough bandwidth standing behind it. the product was a channel per person with a chat box beside the video, built at the exact moment every company on earth wanted one of those. the en |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
JumpTV 📖 2000 - 2008 toronto, 2000: a broadcast lawyer named farrel miller started buying internet rights to national television channels nobody in north america could otherwise watch. by 2006 jumptv carried feeds from more than 300 broadcasters in over 70 countries and listed on the toronto stock exchange, raising abou |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
MTV Overdrive 📖 2005 - 2008 mtv overdrive was mtv networks' first serious attempt at a broadband video portal, launched april 25 2005 with six channels of music videos, artist interviews, live performances, and short-form mtv content. it shipped at the exact moment youtube was figuring out user-uploaded video. the mtv.com rede |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2008|
|_____|
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Vongo 📖 2006 - 2008 vongo was starz entertainment's first attempt at a direct-to-consumer streaming and download service, launched at ces in january 2006 with a thousand-movie catalog and a $9.99 monthly price. it ran for two and a half years on windows-only drm, never broke through outside starz's existing pay-tv base |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2008|
|_____|
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Amazon Unbox 📖 2006 - 2008 amazon's first video store did not stream anything. you installed a windows program called the unbox video player, bought a film, waited for a few gigabytes of windows media to come down the line, and accepted a license that let the file live on two machines. cory doctorow read the terms of service |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Rimo 📖 2007 - 2008 in early 2007 a lot of japanese households were putting the web on a television for the first time, through the browser channel on a wii, and hatena shipped something built for that exact situation. you opened rimo and a video was already playing. an algorithm picked popular youtube clips by access |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2008|
|_____|
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Mercora 📖 2004 - 2008 mercora was a licensed peer-to-peer streaming radio service founded in 2003 by srivats sampath, the ex-mcafee.com and ex-netscape executive. it went live in june 2004 as a windows client that let users stream music from each other's libraries with royalties paid to the US performance rights organiza |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2008|
|_____|
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tunespoon 📖 2004 - 2008 students at the hochschule furtwangen put an online music channel on the web in 2004, a year before youtube existed. tunespoon streamed music videos in a browser and called itself an alternative to viva and mtv, which in 2005 was a serious claim rather than a joke. it took an alternativer medienprei |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2008|
|_____|
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The 9 on Yahoo 📖 2006 - 2008 nine web finds a day, numbered down the side of the video player, one of them usually a pepsi tenth sent in by somebody watching. yahoo put the show on its own homepage on 10 july 2006, moved it into a real studio that october when it came out of beta, and watched time name it one of the fifty coole |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2008|
|_____|
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Stage6 📖 2006 - 2008 stage6 was divx inc.'s answer to youtube: the same upload model but encoded in divx at up to 1080p. bandwidth costs ran around $1m a month and copyright lawsuits were lining up. divx pulled the plug on 29 february 2008 after roughly 20 months online. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2008|
|_____|
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Reeltime.tv 📖 2005 - 2008 melbourne had a download-to-own movie store running in February 2007, which put australia ahead of nearly everywhere outside the united states, and the pitch was that nobody in the country would wait for a hollywood release to cross the pacific anymore. reeltime listed on the asx in april 2006 and b |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1985-|
| 2007|
|_____|
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Geneon USA 📖 1985 - 2007 pioneer opened a laserdisc company in america in december 1985, and by 1993 its anime division was the reason tenchi muyo existed in english. dentsu bought the japanese parent in july 2003 and the american arm was renamed geneon that october. on 26 september 2007 it announced it was finished, stoppe |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2007|
|_____|
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DotComedy 📖 2006 - 2007 november 9, 2006 to november 2007, almost to the day. nbc universal built a comedy channel for the web, commissioned eleven original series and shorts for it, stocked it with ten years of letterman and the whole late-night library, and then folded it into nbc.com twelve months later. hulu launched i |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2007|
|_____|
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TV Links 📖 2006 - 2007 tv links held no video. every link on it pointed at a file already sitting on youtube or dailymotion, and the site's entire contribution was knowing which link went with which episode. on 18 october 2007 gloucestershire police and the federation against copyright theft raided a house in gloucester a |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2007|
|_____|
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S!ケータイ動画 📖 2004 - 2007 vodafone japan built a video service in december 2004 that treated the phone as the worst part of the setup. you downloaded the file on a pc and carried it over on a memory card, then paid for a license key over the air to unlock it. softbank renamed it after buying the network in 2006 and closed it |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2007|
|_____|
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S!CAST (S!キャスト) 📖 2006 - 2007 on 10 august 2007 softbank mobile published four paragraphs ending a service it had launched seventeen months earlier. s!cast pushed magazine-style content onto a handset overnight, without the owner asking for it each time, and it went off on 28 september along with the weather icon that had sat on |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2007|
|_____|
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Innertube 📖 2006 - 2007 cbs opened innertube on 5 may 2006 as its answer to youtube, a free advertiser-supported video channel living on cbs.com, carrying full episodes alongside original web-only shows and available inside the united states and nowhere else. a year later the network's own internet strategist was joking th |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2007|
|_____|
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HomeChoice 📖 2000 - 2007 homechoice was video on demand over a telephone line in 2000, which was several years before that sentence sounded reasonable to anyone. video networks limited ran it out of shepherd's bush, wired up a piece of north london, and then spent three years signing up three thousand people. a relaunch in |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2007|
|_____|
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Radio Free Virgin 📖 1999 - 2007 sixty-something channels, a downloadable player past a million installs within months of launching, and by march 2003 about 2.8 million unique listeners a month. richard branson paid for it out of virgin audio holdings in los angeles and zack zalon ran it, free tier underneath and a paid RFV Royal s |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
MSN Music 📖 2004 - 2006 msn music opened september 1, 2004 as microsoft's branded download store, built on top of windows media drm and the playsforsure ecosystem and aimed straight at apple's itunes music store. 500 thousand tracks at launch, 99 cents each, available in the us first then uk and a handful of european count |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1991-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
Foxnet 📖 1991 - 2006 in 1991 fox reached 91 percent of american television households, the worst coverage of the four big networks, because the small markets had no spare station to hand it. foxnet was the workaround: a cable-only feed of the network, sold to rural cable systems for a hundred dollars a year, carrying fo |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2002|
|_____|
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Intertainer 📖 1996 - 2002 jonathan taplin started intertainer in 1996 and had movies running over cable and dsl lines into american homes while most of the country was still on a modem. by october 2002 it had 147,000 broadband subscribers and licenses to more than seven thousand films. then the studios that had licensed it b |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
Broadcast.com 📖 1995 - 2002 broadcast.com was the streaming portal yahoo bought for about $5.7 billion in stock in july 1999, the most expensive acquisition in yahoo's history at the time. it had launched as audionet in 1995 to stream indiana university basketball games for mark cuban, then expanded to hundreds of radio and tv |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2002|
|_____|
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Quiero TV 📖 2000 - 2002 quiero tv started broadcasting in may 2000 and tried to sell spain pay television through the aerial already on the roof, instead of a dish or a cable. the decoder shipped with a telephone modem and a wireless keyboard, and the pitch was that your television now had the internet in it. it went past |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
ITV Digital 📖 1998 - 2002 ondigital launched in november 1998 as the first pay-tv platform that came in through the ordinary aerial on your roof, which was meant to be its advantage over sky's dish. the signal turned out weaker than promised across a lot of the country, and the encryption was broken well enough that by 2002 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1991-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
Computer Channel 📖 1991 - 2002 a satellite television channel about computers, sold by subscription to french companies at company prices, with france telecom and wanadoo behind it. it ran from 1991 and spent the late nineties trying to get out of the television set: an intranet edition in 1999 that played inside a firm's own net |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
WhirlGirl 📖 1997 - 2001 david b. williams launched a superhero webcomic in 1997 built out of still panels and looping sound, because a 1997 modem could not carry anything better. by august 1998 it was five-minute flash episodes, and in january 1999 showtime licensed it, put it on cable and on sho.com at the same moment and |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Icebox.com 📖 1999 - 2001 icebox.com was a web animation studio staffed out of the simpsons writers room, funded like a dot-com and run like a network. it launched on 1 june 1999, put out more than twenty original animated series, and became briefly famous for mr. wong, a racial caricature that asian american groups spent 20 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
iCAST 📖 2000 - 2001 david wetherell's cmgi folded two of its companies into an entertainment portal, put it live on 29 february 2000, and announced it was leaving the business nine months later. the icaster combined a radio tuner and an instant messenger in one window before anyone had settled on those being separate p |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
iCraveTV 📖 1999 - 2000 icravetv was a canadian web service that grabbed over-the-air broadcast tv signals from the toronto market and pushed them back out as live realvideo streams on the web. it ran for about ten weeks. fox and the nfl got an injunction in pennsylvania, and the service went dark in february 2000. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 1999|
|_____|
|
USSB 📖 1994 - 1999 17 june 1994: two companies started selling television off the same satellites to the same 18-inch dish. directv took the general channels and ussb took the movies, so anyone who wanted both paid two subscriptions for one piece of hardware on the roof. stanley hubbard had been waiting since 1981 for |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 1997|
|_____|
|
Full Service Network 📖 1994 - 1997 orlando had working video on demand in december 1994, a decade before youtube and longer than that before anyone streamed a film to a television at home. time warner built the full service network there with scientific-atlanta and silicon graphics, ran it into a four thousand home service area, and |