Clipfish

» see clipfish.de as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Clipfish was Germany's YouTube. that one sentence is the whole reason i never touched it. it was in German, made for Germany, by a German broadcaster, and there was no version of my life in Ankara where i needed a German-language video portal while the actual YouTube sat right there. i only know it now because i went looking for the video sites that died in other countries' languages.

it launched in June 2006, built by RTL interactive, the digital arm of one of Germany's largest broadcasters. the pitch was the same one a dozen countries tried around then. YouTube is winning, so let us build our own so the ad money and the audience stay at home. Clipfish leaned on music videos and karaoke-style lyrics early, which gave it a real identity for a while, and later filled up with clips from RTL's own casting-show empire, the world around Deutschland sucht den Superstar and the rest of it.

it never worked as a business the way they wanted. user-uploaded video is expensive to host and hard to make money from, and Clipfish was fighting a competitor that had Google's money and the entire world's uploads behind it. a national video site can win on local shows and local language, but it cannot win on everything, and everything is what YouTube offered. so RTL slowly turned Clipfish away from the upload-anything model and toward licensed films and series.

the end came on the 25th of July 2017. type clipfish.de and it bounced you to a new site called Watchbox, redesigned to look like the streaming services everyone was watching by then, free films and series with ads instead of a wall of user clips. Watchbox did not last long as its own brand either. two years on it was folded into RTL's main streaming service, and the Clipfish name was gone twice over. from Turkey none of this ever touched me. it is a grave for a thing that was always somebody else's local option.

~ the dossier ~

~ the national-youtube graveyard ~

almost every country with a big broadcaster tried this. build a homegrown YouTube so the culture and the ad revenue do not all flow to California. most of them are dead now, and Clipfish is a clean version of why. the local site can be genuinely good at the local thing, the regional shows and the language, and still lose, because video is one of the few products where the biggest library wins almost automatically. you cannot out-local a platform that already has everything, including your local stuff, uploaded by its own users.

~ what it became ~

the machinery did not die, only the name. Watchbox carried the licensed-streaming idea forward, and when RTL pulled all its digital properties together, that became part of the paid service it now runs against Netflix in Germany. so Clipfish is less a dead end than a first draft. the broadcaster kept swinging at online video for over a decade, changing its name every few years. it is still swinging. Clipfish was just the version that still believed people would upload the videos themselves.

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