Computer Channel

» see computerchannel.fr as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Computer Channel was a television channel about computers that you could not casually watch. It went out by satellite in French from 1991, aimed at businesses rather than households. The subscription was priced for a company budget, because companies were the subscribers. France Telecom was behind it, later alongside Wanadoo, so the French telephone monopoly was underwriting a trade channel about computing at the moment computing was rearranging the telephone business.

The interesting part is what it tried next. In 1999 it built an intranet version of its own broadcasts, so a company could drop the shows inside its own network and staff could watch them at their desks. On 14 February 2000 it opened a computing and multimedia portal on the web, and France Telecom relayed that portal on the Wanadoo and Voila front pages, which in early 2000 was most of the French web's attention available in a single placement.

It did not take, and the reason on record is the reason that killed a great many 1999 and 2000 video plans. Not enough people had the bandwidth. A French home connection of that year could not carry a television program in any form a viewer would sit through, and a professional subscription channel had no consumer audience waiting to grow into the capacity later. I was on a 56k modem in Turkey in exactly those years, which is how I know what that arithmetic felt like from the receiving end: video on the web was something you read about having seen.

The record has the channel disappearing in 2002, and the domain roughly agrees. computerchannel.fr answers with a real page through the end of June 2001, and by 30 May 2002 the crawler finds a redirect where the site used to be. The parked pages that turn up in 2007 and 2008 belong to whoever was holding the name by then.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ a channel for companies ~

The subscription was the whole design. Firms paid a serious monthly fee and got coverage of computing and telecoms pitched at the level of someone who bought those things for a living rather than someone shopping for a modem.

That is a defensible business in 1991, when the alternative source for the same material was a trade magazine and a trade show. It is a much harder business by 2000, when the trade press had moved onto the web and stopped charging.

~ the pipe was too thin ~

The intranet edition of 1999 reads now like the right answer arriving early. If the public internet could not carry your video, put the video inside the corporate network, where the pipe was wide and the viewers were already the paying customers. Corporate video platforms are a substantial industry today and that is more or less their shape.

The portal was the wrong answer at the right address. February 2000 was the top of the French portal era and a slot on Wanadoo and Voila was worth having, but the thing in the slot was video, and the people clicking through were on modems.

~ the inheritance ~

Wanadoo and Voila are both graves here already, and both outlasted the channel whose launch they carried. France Telecom spent the following decade retiring its own consumer brands one after another, and the trade channel it had been funding since 1991 was simply the first of them to go.

What went with it is a 1990s assumption, that a satellite channel was a natural shape for technology journalism and that firms would pay monthly to receive it. The last capture of the site with anything real on it is dated 30 June 2001.

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