Innertube

» see cbs.com/innertube as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

i have never seen a frame of innertube and neither has anybody else outside the united states, because that was the arrangement from the first day. cbs put its video behind a country check in 2006, then spent about a year finding out that even inside the country almost nobody was turning up.

the launch was 5 may 2006, five months before google bought youtube. the pitch was that cbs did not need a cable channel in order to run a general entertainment outlet, since it already owned both the shows and the production capacity. three programs streamed daily at the start, at 320 by 240 pixels, against a library the company put at 2,600 titles and 100,000 hours. the original web-only material was mostly reality: a college makeover series called greek to chic, plus a behind-the-scenes strip off survivor.

leslie moonves said at the launch that cbs had essentially bypassed cable and built a general entertainment outlet out of resources it already had lying around. nancy tellem called it a content playground where new talent gets discovered. neither claim was unreasonable and neither of them was the problem. the problem was that a destination requires people to type an address, and they were not typing it.

by may 2007 quincy smith, running cbs interactive, had abandoned the premise out loud. "we can't expect consumers to come to us," he said. "it's arrogant for any media company to assume that."

~ the case file ~

~ rolling thunder ~

the replacement had a name. rolling thunder meant carrying cbs programming out to roughly ten other services, aol and joost among them, and splitting the advertising with them on terms that left cbs holding ninety percent. it is worth being precise about what changed and what did not. the video did not stop existing and the business did not shrink. what stopped was the assumption that an audience owed the network a visit.

~ how the name came off ~

there was never a shutdown announcement, which is why the date on this grave is a year rather than a day. the archive shows it happening in stages across one winter. on 1 december 2007 the page title still read cbs.com - innertube, and by 2 january 2008 the same page read cbs.com - video. the artwork held out slightly longer: the innertube wordmark was still loading on 12 january 2008, and the file that replaced it, cbs_video.jpg, first appears on 16 february. the /innertube/ path itself kept answering until june 2008, when it began redirecting away.

~ what it was right about ~

innertube failed at being a destination and was correct about nearly everything else. free streaming of full network episodes paid for by advertising is what hulu launched with in 2008 and what everyone copied afterward, and cbs was doing it two years earlier off a larger library than hulu started with. the piece it got wrong was believing the front door mattered. the same shows on the same terms worked fine the moment they were served from somewhere the audience already happened to be.

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