Film4oD

» see film4.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Film4oD launched on 1 November 2010 with over five hundred films and rentals that started at fifty pence for forty-eight hours. It was Channel 4 putting a shop next to a broadcast brand that British viewers already trusted for films, at a moment when the legal alternatives in the UK were a LoveFilm envelope in the post or an iTunes rental at three or four times the price.

Channel 4 did not build the machinery. FilmFlex did, a joint venture set up by Sony and Disney that powered the rental services sitting behind Virgin Media and TalkTalk among others, and had processed something like ninety million transactions by the middle of the decade. Film4oD was one storefront on a shared engine, which kept the launch cheap and left Channel 4 contributing the brand and the curation.

Download-to-rent arrived in September 2011 so you could take a film with you. Then, in the summer of 2015, a notice went up. The service would close on Wednesday 8 July, anything already rented had to be watched in full by midnight on Tuesday the 7th, and no money would be given back. The statement said Channel 4 was always reviewing the best use of its resources and on this occasion was no longer able to offer Film4oD. Whether it would return was under review, and it did not.

~ the case file ~

~ the plumbing ~

The reason a public service broadcaster could run a film shop at all was that it never had to run one. FilmFlex held the studio deals and the delivery, and the broadcaster rented a front door. When Vubiquity bought FilmFlex in 2014, the front doors carried on serving Virgin and EE and TalkTalk, so the closure was not the platform collapsing under Film4oD. Channel 4 simply stopped paying for its half.

That is what makes this a small death rather than a loud one. Nobody went bankrupt and no catalog was lost, and the same films were rentable the next morning from other shops running on the identical engine.

~ midnight on the seventh ~

The deadline is the part worth keeping. A rental is a promise measured in hours, so a rental service closing has to pick an hour, and Film4oD picked midnight on 7 July 2015 and told everyone to finish their film before it. There is something very specific about a shutdown notice that amounts to homework.

Customers who had paid for a rental and not started it lost it, which the notice stated plainly, with no refunds on offer. Under the terms everybody had agreed to, that was exactly what a rental had always meant.

~ the licensing map ~

None of this was reachable from Turkey. Film4oD was geographically fenced the way every rights-window service of that era was, and the fence was the point of the thing, since what Channel 4 had bought was UK streaming rights for a UK audience and nothing else. From here, in 2010, this whole category was visible only as headlines about how cheap legal films had become somewhere else.

The legal option arrived here later and in a different shape. Netflix opened in Turkey in January 2016, six months after Film4oD closed, and BluTV started up domestically around the same time. Both of them sold a monthly subscription rather than a film at a time, so the pay-per-rental model this service belonged to never had a Turkish version at all.

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