Everyon TV (에브리온TV)

» see everyon.tv as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Everyon TV was a Korean answer to a question most streaming services had already decided against: what if live television on a phone cost nothing and required nothing. Nothing stood between you and the picture, no account and no login screen. You installed the app and a list of channels appeared, paid for by advertising. That list ran to roughly 250 channels by the end, watchable on a phone or on a PC, in a country where paid cable was close to universal.

It was a joint venture, and the launch page said so plainly: Everyon TV was a web cable TV service being built together by Pandora TV and Hyundai HCN. One side was Korea's best-known video portal and the other a cable operator, and the service ran on the video company's plumbing for years. The original address was a subdomain of pandora.tv and the images came off Pandora's CDN. The administrator avatar on the closure notice board was still being served from Pandora in 2019, eight years later.

The beta opened on 6 September 2011 with more than fifty live channels, on PC only. By November 2013 the service had passed three million cumulative downloads and the channel count had reached 250, and those two numbers are the only audience figures the company ever published. A separate operating company was incorporated around 2012 to run it, and over the following years its registered address drifted out of a Seocho office building and into Hyundai HCN's own, with a Hyundai home-shopping email address on the contact page.

~ the record ~

~ no account required ~

The service description the company wrote for itself is worth reading literally. Everyon TV, it said, is a completely free TV service where you can watch whatever channel you want the moment you download the app, with no membership registration and no viewing fee. Korean internet services of that era asked for a great deal at the door, often including a national identity number, so a video product that asked for nothing at all was close to taking a political position.

The cost of that model is visible in how it died. With no subscriptions there was one revenue line, advertising, and with no accounts there was nothing to retain anybody with. When a channel left the lineup, every viewer who had come for that channel simply stopped opening the app, and the service had no way of knowing who they were or of asking them to stay.

~ the dongle ~

In February 2014 it tried hardware. Everyon TV Cast was a small HDMI stick with the app built into it and Miracast mirroring alongside, announced at a media day on 18 February and released to business customers six days later, with consumer sales following in March at 99,000 won. The pitch was that the 250 channels you had on your phone could go back onto the television they had come from.

The Korean press immediately filed it next to Google's device and noted the problem: Chromecast was about 40,000 won and this was 99,000. The product pages survived until 2019, but their contents were images hosted on a Pandora CDN that no longer resolves, so what the thing actually looked like is mostly gone.

~ thirty two days notice ~

At five past three in the afternoon on 29 August 2019, the closure notice went up. It thanked users for eight years of support and apologized for not being able to continue, then named 30 September 2019 as the service termination date. No reason was given anywhere in it. A popup carrying the same date went onto the website as an image file, which is how most Korean farewells are published and the reason text searches miss so many of them.

The reason came later and from outside. Trade press reporting in October 2019 put it as core popular channels leaving, which cut the number of channels users could actually enjoy, against operating losses that kept running. The same article filed it inside a wider retreat, with Hyundai HCN and KT skylife both abandoning free streaming in the same stretch for the same stated reason, which was that neither had any content nobody else had.

~ after the last broadcast ~

The homepage was still serving on 29 September 2019, and that capture is the last working one. A week later the address returns a plain Apache 404 with no farewell in it at all. Every domain the service used has since stopped resolving, and both app listings are delisted, with the iOS lookup returning a result count of zero.

The operating company wound itself up immediately. On 16 and 21 October 2019, within three weeks of the final broadcast, it posted two notices to its own corporate board announcing dissolution and inviting creditors to submit claims. Subscribers were pointed at a sibling service, Hyundai HCN Mobile TV, which posted its own closing notice for live television a year later, naming 30 September 2020. The parent cable business was sold to KT in October 2021, which means the acquisition usually blamed for this shutdown happened two years after it.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »