DotComedy

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

~ the last words ~

NBC announced DotComedy at its May 2006 upfronts, as part of a slate of internet broadband channels it was promising advertisers, and the site itself went live on 9 November 2006. The press release came out of Burbank at 5:23 in the afternoon under a headline that tried much too hard: "NBC Universal's New Comedy Broadband Channel 'Dotcomedy' Enters Laughing". Jeff Gaspin, then president of NBC Universal Cable Entertainment and Digital Content, made the announcement and described it as "an important milestone", before arriving at the sentence that explains what the thing was actually for: "Comedy is one of the most successful genres on the web and this broadband channel will appeal to the advertisers' targeted demos."

The library it could draw on was the real asset. DotComedy had the first ten years of David Letterman's career at NBC, which is to say Late Night before he left. Saturday Night Live was in there too, along with the Leno and Conan shows. From the NBC Universal television vault it pulled vintage sitcoms, and it listed HBO's "Dream On" as a DotComedy exclusive alongside "Leave It To Beaver" and "The Munsters". There was a user-generated section too, described in the release as giving visitors "a virtual stage", which in late 2006 was the obligatory paragraph in any media company's web announcement.

Then it ran for a year. NBC Universal announced in November 2007 that DotComedy would be folded into NBC.com, and the trade coverage at the time was unsentimental about why: the site competed with NBC.com on one side and with Hulu, which its own parent was launching, on the other.

~ the record ~

~ the lineup ~

The commissioning was not lazy, and the list is a good snapshot of what a television network thought web comedy was in 2006. "Hot Tub in Space" followed four twenty-somethings whose hot tub unexpectedly launches into orbit, leaving them to conduct interstellar diplomacy in swim trunks. Brian Unger hosted an untitled news parody that paid viewers for writing the jokes. Robert Smigel brought Triumph the Insult Comic Dog to Las Vegas for an uncensored live recording. There was a prequel to the viral hit "The Easter Bunny Hates You", a short called "Loaded Cartridge" that imagined the Double Dragon brothers aged into office jobs, and a pilot starring Natasha Leggero as an etiquette instructor who teaches a homeless man to panhandle more graciously.

By the time the site froze it had grown real sections with names in the network idiom: The Idiotbox, The Multiplex, Totally Viral, Stand-Up Straight, Viewer Made. The vlog roster included a music vlog billed to Rhett and Link, which is a detail worth noticing given where those two ended up, along with a show whose entire title was "Dan Bialek Loves Kittens".

~ what it was competing with ~

The timing was close to the worst possible. DotComedy launched in November 2006, and YouTube had been bought by Google a month earlier for $1.65 billion. Hulu, the joint NBC Universal and News Corp venture, went into private beta in October 2007 and opened to the public in March 2008. So within one year of launch, the thing that made DotComedy strategically interesting, that NBC owned a lot of funny video and needed somewhere to put it, had a much better answer inside the same company.

The honest epitaph is the one the comedy trade press reached for at the time: it always felt like an afterthought. A network building a genre-specific destination was behaving as though the web worked like cable, where you win by owning a channel people navigate to. The audience was already somewhere else, watching clips in whatever order a sidebar suggested.

~ the shell that stayed up ~

The fold was announced in November 2007 and the site did not come down. The archive shows it at about 12,600 bytes that month, then dropping to roughly 6,900 in January 2008 and sitting within a couple of hundred bytes of that figure for four and a half years, through to August 2012. The show names are still in the navigation. The newsletter signup is still there. Nothing was updated and nothing was removed, which is the most common ending for a corporate web property: not a tombstone, just a page nobody was assigned to any more. The domain started answering with redirects in 2013 and today resolves to nothing at all.

This was a United States product in a way that went past licensing. A broadband channel built on the NBC late-night archive assumes you grew up with Letterman and Leno as background furniture, and in Turkey in 2006 I did not. I had ttnet broadband by then and I was watching video on the web, but what reached me was whatever was passed around as a link, not a network's destination site. DotComedy was built for people who already had a relationship with the brand on the front door, and that relationship did not export.

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