CinemaNow

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

~ the obituary ~

cinemanow never came to turkey. it was an early us video-on-demand service that lived through the whole dial-up-to-streaming arc, founded in 1999 when the modem on my desk at home was still 33.6k, and shuttered in 2017 when i was watching netflix on my phone. between those two endpoints it changed hands four times and never quite became the brand the founders had in mind.

curt marvis and bruce eisen founded cinemanow in los angeles in 1999. the original product was streaming and download-to-burn. you could pay per movie and get a windows media file with drm wrapped around it, or you could subscribe for unlimited access to whatever the licensing window let cinemanow show that month. the catalog was always smaller than netflix-by-mail and the streaming was always rougher than the studios wanted, but cinemanow had real licensing deals with warner and lionsgate when most internet movie sites were still mp3-style gray markets.

sonic solutions bought cinemanow in 2008 to give roxio's burning software a legitimate movie source. best buy did a deal in 2010 to make cinemanow the back end of its online entertainment brand, replacing the earlier napster catalog it had bought. regent equity partners bought cinemanow from best buy in july 2014 in a private-equity stripping deal. filmon, alki david's uk web video company, bought it in january 2016 and ran it for about eighteen months before pulling the plug on 1 august 2017. customers who had paid to own movies outright lost their libraries with no migration plan and no refund.

~ the case file ~

~ what it tried to be ~

the founding pitch in 1999 was that movies would follow music online and the studios needed a legal storefront before the napster model happened to film. cinemanow was the first or second of those legal storefronts, depending on how you count movielink, the studio-owned consortium that launched in late 2002. the technical bet was streaming over consumer broadband at a point when consumer broadband meant dsl in three or four us metros (close enough). that was always going to be a slow growth curve until the iphone and the cable-modem rollout caught up.

~ the buyer chain ~

sonic solutions, the company behind roxio cd-burning, bought cinemanow in 2008 to anchor a download-to-disc story. best buy then licensed cinemanow as the back end of its online entertainment storefront in 2010, running it under the best buy brand for north american customers while keeping the cinemanow brand in parallel. regent equity partners took it off best buy's hands in july 2014, a typical "we will run the lights cheaper than you can" private-equity deal. filmon picked it up from regent in january 2016, alki david's uk web-video group adding it to a catalog of broadcasting plays. each handoff made the catalog smaller and the future shorter.

~ the day it went off ~

filmon pulled cinemanow on 1 august 2017 without warning. the storefront page just stopped resolving. customers who had paid for movies outright (the download-to-own tier had always been a meaningful slice of cinemanow's revenue) found their libraries gone with no migration to a sister service. ultraviolet, the studio digital-locker system that cinemanow had supported, did not have any obligation to keep the redemption flow open after a partner left the program. for the small number of users who had built whole libraries inside cinemanow over a decade, the day the storefront went dark was the day they learned a paid-for movie file is not the same as a paid-for movie.

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