Flimmit

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

~ the obit ~

Flimmit was founded in Vienna in 2007 by Karin Haager, Walter Huber and Ulrich Müller-Uri, and the platform went into operation in October 2008. Its pitch was the one thing no global service was ever going to bother with: Austrian film and television, plus the European art-house material that gets a festival run and then disappears. Its own tagline was Streamen auf österreichisch, streaming in Austrian, which is a joke about a dialect and a statement of the business model at the same time.

The ORF, the Austrian public broadcaster, took a stake through subsidiaries in 2014. By June 2016 it owned 97 percent, with each of the three founders keeping just over one percent. In 2020 the structure was converted into a public-law partnership. From that point Flimmit was effectively the commercial shop window of a state broadcaster, selling access to a catalog largely made of that broadcaster's own co-productions for 3.99 euro a month.

A subscription service for Austrian cinema has a natural audience roughly the size of Austria, which is why the name only reached me off a German-language list of dead video portals. What makes it worth a headstone is the manner of death. Very few products are ended by an act of parliament that was not aimed at them.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ a law about charging ~

In 2023 Austria rewrote how the ORF is funded. The old broadcasting fee was replaced by a household levy, and the legislature attached a condition: a broadcaster paid for by everybody may not also sell things to some of them. The amendment, BGBl. I Nr. 112/2023, took effect on 1 January 2024, and from that date the ORF was barred from operating paid services.

Flimmit was a paid service. So was fidelio, the classical music portal at fifteen euro a month. Neither was accused of failing. Both were told in August 2023 that they would end at the close of November, and both did, on the 30th. The last thing flimmit.at served was a page reading Flimmit wurde eingestellt.

~ the number nobody gave ~

When ORF reported its own service closing, it did not publish a subscriber count, and the press noted at the time that how many people were being said goodbye to was still not known. Fifteen years of operation and the size of the audience never became public. What did get reported is that the subscription business had never done especially well even at under four euro a month, which is the kind of thing an owner mentions when the closure is not their idea and not their loss either.

~ where the films went ~

Parts of the catalog were promised a longer life on the ORF's free side, and the same law that closed Flimmit is what made that possible. The seven-day limit on how long a broadcast could stay online came off, stretching to six months for most programs and to no limit at all for children's shows. The free platform that inherited it, ORF ON, opened as a test in January 2024 and took over from the old TVthek on 22 May that year.

The rest of the library went wherever expired licenses go. Both flimmit.com and flimmit.at have stopped resolving.

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