Fanhattan

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

~ the obituary ~

Gilles BianRosa and Olivier Chalouhi founded Fanhattan in 2011 after years on Vuze, the BitTorrent client that a lot of people used for exactly one purpose and never said so out loud. The problem they went after next was the polite version of the same problem: a movie exists somewhere, and finding out where costs more effort than watching it. Fanhattan's first product searched every catalog you were already paying for at once, Netflix and iTunes included, and told you which of them had it.

That was a good product in 2011 and an obvious one by 2013, which is roughly the lifespan of every idea in this category. So the company built hardware. Fan TV was unveiled on 30 May 2013, a small white slab that put live cable and streaming apps behind one search field, with a touch remote instead of a numeric keypad. Cox ran a limited test that July. Time Warner Cable took it to market at 149 dollars.

Rovi bought the company on 3 November 2014 for twelve million dollars, which was more than Fanhattan had raised and not by an enormous margin. Rovi sold program guide data and patents to cable operators, and what it wanted was the interface work plus the relationships that came with having shipped something a carrier had actually put in stores.

~ the case file ~

~ the remote with no buttons ~

The remote is the thing that keeps getting mentioned, and it deserves it. A cable remote in 2013 had somewhere between forty and sixty buttons on it, most of them for functions nobody had used since the DVR was installed. Fan TV shipped a smooth object with a touch-sensitive surface, weighted so your hand knew which end was which without looking, and it worked because the search box behind it meant you were typing rather than paging through a grid.

It also asked the customer to unlearn a decade of habit at the exact moment they had just paid 149 dollars, which is the worst possible moment to ask anyone to unlearn anything. The reviews liked it. The subscriber base did not follow.

~ a thousand customers ~

Roughly a thousand Time Warner Cable subscribers bought a Fan TV box. That figure comes from the trade coverage of the shutdown and it is the number that explains everything else, because a carrier partnership with a thousand units in the field is a pilot that nobody wanted to call a pilot. Rovi stopped supplying boxes on 23 October 2015. Time Warner Cable ended the service on 30 November. Owners were given a Google Nexus Player at no charge and moved onto the Fan TV app for Android TV over the following four weeks.

~ where the software went ~

The carrier's own situation did as much damage as the sales figures. Time Warner Cable spent 2015 inside a merger fight, first with Comcast and then with Charter, and a company being taken apart and reassembled does not defend a set-top experiment with a thousand users on it. Rovi went on to buy TiVo in 2016 and take its name, so the discovery work outlived the box by being absorbed into a guide business that pointed at other people's hardware.

None of this reached me, and the shape of Turkish pay television is why. In 2013 you took the Digiturk or D-Smart box the operator handed you and that was the end of the decision. The American second-screen boom was an argument about who controls the hardware in the living room, and here nobody had ever been offered a second opinion on it. Fan TV needed a market where you could walk into a shop and buy a different box for a subscription you already had.

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