Filsh

» see filsh.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Every country had its own version of this site, and Germany's was Filsh. You pasted a YouTube link into a box, chose MP3, waited, and got a file. No install, no toolbar, no account. FILSH Media GmbH put it online on 17 July 2007, first as a downloader with no conversion at all, then with the format menu that became the whole point of it.

At its height the German Wikipedia article calls it market-leading in the German-language internet, with three million unique visitors a month and up to thirty million pageviews. It read links from YouTube and Vimeo, from the German portals that mattered at the time such as MyVideo.de, and from a row of others that are dead now too, Blip.tv and Veoh included. Six audio formats and six video formats, with a 90-minute cap on audio jobs and 40 minutes on video. It ran on ads, and it had a politely worded page asking you to switch off your adblocker so the thing could stay free.

The category is one I lived inside; the site is not one I ever used. By 2007 I was on TTNet broadband with a music library assembled the way everyone's was, and the converter box was a fixture of that decade. Filsh was German-language and aimed at a German audience, so the version of this tool I had in front of me was somebody else's. Two identical products, one border apart.

~ the dossier ~

~ the box on the front page ~

The interface was one input and one dropdown. Behind it was a job queue, and the progress states the site shipped with tell you exactly what it was doing: download the file, convert file one of however many, prepare the download, done. You could set an audio bitrate or trim a time range if you wanted, and almost nobody did, because the default was the reason people came.

It also had an error message for each way the job could fail, including one for videos the servers could not touch for copyright reasons and one for content the site would not process. That is a fairly careful legal posture for a free converter, and it is the sort of detail a German company with a real GmbH behind it would think about.

~ the last three months ~

The archive dates the ending better than anyone reported it. On 4 October 2017 the homepage was still the working converter. On 12 October the same page read "Unfortunately the service of filsh.net has been discontinued and is no longer available." A capture from 24 November shows the converter back, and from 18 December onward the notice is all that is there, through 2018, 2019 and 2020.

No press release, no farewell post, no legal filing anyone wrote about. The German Wikipedia article still says only that the service is suspended for the time being, a sentence that has been sitting there for the better part of a decade.

~ who owns the name now ~

filsh.net still answers in 2026, and what it serves is an Impressum. The responsible party listed is InsightLetter Verlag GmbH in Bonn, a publisher with no connection to video conversion, and the page carries a noindex tag so search engines leave it alone. The address that three million people a month used now exists as a legal notice pointing at a company most of them never heard of.

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