Fatso

» see fatso.co.nz as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Renting a film where I grew up meant walking somewhere. There was a shop with shelves and a due date that mattered, and nobody ever tried to run that trade through the post office. New Zealand did, for thirteen years, and it worked well enough that Sky Television bought control of it.

Fatso started in Auckland in 2004, built by Rob Berman of Westside Media. The service was DVDs and later Blu-rays delivered by New Zealand Post. You picked a monthly plan, from about ten dollars for two discs at a time up to thirty-eight for unlimited swapping with three out at once. There were no late fees and no return date, because the whole design assumed the disc came back when you sent it and the next one shipped when it arrived. The economics of that only work in a place where the mail is reliable and the distances are large, which describes New Zealand precisely.

In 2008 it merged with two competitors, DVD Unlimited and Movieshack, into a company called Screen Enterprises. Sky TV took 51 percent of it and Berman stayed on as general manager with a share of the business. By 2011 the merged operation had twenty thousand subscribers against more than twenty-seven thousand titles, with twenty-five full-time staff and about five percent of the New Zealand DVD rental market. In 2012 it added a games club with per-day pricing, renting console titles going back to the PS2 and forward to the PS4.

Then Netflix arrived in the country in 2015 and Sky put its own energy into a streaming service called Neon, and the membership drained out of the postal business underneath both of them. In September 2017 Sky announced Fatso would close, with the subscriber count by then under ten thousand and no path back. The final disc went out on Thursday 23 November 2017. The 32,000 discs left in the warehouse were given away to hospitals and libraries around the country, which is a better ending than a skip.

~ the dossier ~

~ what postage bought you ~

The reason rental-by-mail existed at all was inventory. A shop can hold a few thousand discs and every one of them has to earn its shelf space, so what you find in a suburban branch is the twelve films currently being advertised. A central warehouse serving a whole country can hold twenty-seven thousand titles, because the obscure ones do not need to rent often, they need to rent occasionally to somebody, anybody, from anywhere.

That is the same argument streaming made ten years later and then quietly abandoned. Fatso's catalog was deeper in 2011 than any single streaming service in New Zealand is now, because a warehouse of physical discs has no licensing window. Once you own the disc you can keep renting it until it stops spinning.

~ the games club ~

The 2012 addition is the detail that dates it. Games were charged by the day rather than by the month, from about fifty cents up to three dollars, across nine consoles that spanned two hardware generations. Somebody in that warehouse was still stocking GameCube discs while shipping PS4 titles out of the same building.

It was also a hedge that did not work. Console games were moving to download stores at exactly that moment, and a rental model built around a physical disc arriving three days after you wanted it could not survive a store that installed the game overnight while you slept.

~ where the discs went ~

Most dead services leave nothing behind you can hold. This one had a warehouse, and rather than pulping the contents Sky handed them to hospitals and libraries. Somewhere in New Zealand there are still trolleys of Fatso stock in a ward, with the sleeves worn at the corners from a decade of being posted around.

That is the last practical difference between a disc business and a subscription. When a streaming service shuts down, the catalog does not go anywhere, it just stops resolving. When a rental library shuts down, thirty-two thousand films are still sitting in boxes in Auckland and somebody has to decide who gets them.

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