ExerciseTV

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

~ the obit ~

ExerciseTV ran through the exact years I was finally getting a proper broadband line, and I could not have watched a minute of it. There was no address to type. It was a menu item inside an American cable box, and the only way in was to be paying an operator that did not sell anything within two thousand miles of me.

Comcast launched it on 18 January 2006 with Jake Steinfeld, the trainer who had spent the previous two decades selling Body by Jake equipment on American television. New Balance came in as an equity partner and the exclusive apparel sponsor. Time Warner Cable took equity as well and carried the channel from day one. Ninety-odd programs sat in the menu at launch, running from yoga through prenatal workouts, free to anyone whose digital cable package already included video on demand.

The trial numbers were the whole pitch. Comcast reported two million views a month before the thing had even launched properly, and twenty million workouts watched across the test period. Steve Burke, then running Comcast Cable, called fitness ideally suited to video on demand and put the home exercise market in the billions. He was right about the first part. The second part is where it came apart, because the workouts themselves were free and the revenue was supposed to arrive later, when you liked one enough to buy it on DVD for about fifteen dollars.

My own 2006 was a TTNet line into a desk in Ankara, and everything that moved on a screen arrived at a computer. The television in the room was for television. What ExerciseTV assumed, and what it needed in order to survive, was a household where the TV was the thing you asked for video and the cable operator was the one who answered.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the free thing that had to be paid for ~

At its working peak the channel was drawing somewhere around eight million views a month, which for a fitness product on cable is a genuinely large number. It was also the wrong number to be proud of. Every one of those views cost the joint venture something in licensing and carriage and produced nothing directly, because the viewing was a free perk bundled into a subscription somebody else billed.

The conversion step was the DVD. You worked out with a trainer in the on-demand menu, then bought her whole series on disc for roughly fifteen dollars. In 2006 that was a reasonable read of how people acquired video. By 2010 it was asking someone to pay for a physical object containing a thing they had just watched for nothing, which is a hard sale to make twice.

~ what came for it ~

Nothing dramatic killed ExerciseTV. The same workout simply became available on a laptop with no box, no operator and no carriage agreement, uploaded by trainers who wanted the audience more than they wanted fifteen dollars. Fitness turned out to be one of the categories the open web took fastest, because a workout video needs no rights clearance, no studio and no schedule. It needs one person, a camera and a floor.

The cable bundle had been the moat. It was also the ceiling. ExerciseTV could only ever reach households that were already buying digital cable from one of four American operators, and it had no way to follow anyone out of that house.

~ the day it died ~

On 25 November 2011 an open letter went up on the website announcing that the on-demand channel and the site would both close on 31 December. Select programming would stay available to buy, which is the sentence a service uses when the catalog is worth more than the service. The closure landed on the last day of the year and subscribers found the channel gone from their menus on 1 January 2012.

~ what it would be now ~

It is a strange product to look back on now, in an era when a phone will count your reps and a subscription app will sell you the same yoga class for a monthly fee. ExerciseTV had the content and the audience and even the distribution. What it did not have was any way to charge for the part people actually used.

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