Flixwagon

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

~ the eulogy ~

Flixwagon needed a 3G handset and a carrier that would let you stream off it. Turkey did not switch 3G on until 30 July 2009, which is a year and a half after this launched and about six months after it stopped mattering. So this one I only ever read about.

The company sat in Bnei Brak and the product was a client you downloaded onto the phone itself: 76 kilobytes for the Symbian build, 218 for the Java one. You started it, pointed the camera, and the video went out to a page on flixwagon.com while you were still shooting. If you walked into an elevator and lost the signal, the broadcast paused and resumed itself when the bars came back, which in 2008 was the genuinely hard part.

It opened as a private alpha in January 2008 and let everyone in later that month. Roughly a million dollars went in across a single round and that was the entire balance sheet. TechCrunch had already looked at it in December 2007 and handed it the picture quality, noting that Qik degraded badly the moment the handset moved.

The logo it used for most of its life carried a tagline with a typo baked into the image: "Broadcast and share live video fro your mobile phone." Nobody ever fixed it.

~ the dossier ~

~ the livecasting race ~

For about eighteen months mobile live video was a real race with real money in it. Kyte had raised more than twenty three million dollars and had 50 Cent broadcasting on it, and Qik had the American press plus a Silicon Valley address. Flixwagon had one seed round and a better encoder, which is not what decides these things. Skype bought Qik in January 2011 and the category stopped being one.

~ the unraveling ~

The home page records this better than any report does, because there is no report. The Live Now panel that listed active broadcasts was already commented out of the markup by January 2011. By March 2014 it was gone from the file entirely and the page had shrunk to a Browse link and a login form that had nothing behind it.

The footer, though, kept working. Its copyright line read 2007 to 2011 in January 2012 and 2007 to 2021 in August 2021, because whoever built the page had the end year generated rather than typed. It updated itself every January for nine years after the last person stopped looking.

On 4 August 2021 flixwagon.com was still serving the full 12 kilobyte page with the login form on it. On 18 September 2021 it served 883 bytes: one stylesheet rule centering an image, and the image. It has been that ever since.

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