Fullscreen (streaming)

~ the obituary ~

fullscreen made online video for american teenagers, and then it tried to charge them for it. in the spring of 2016 it launched a subscription service, about five dollars a month, built on the youtube creators the company already managed as a multi-channel network. i was in my thirties in ankara, an engineer, about as far from the target audience as you could get in age and in geography. this one was never pointed at me.

the pitch made a kind of sense on paper. fullscreen had relationships with creators teenagers already followed, so put those creators plus some original shows behind a small paywall and become a netflix for the phone generation. the trouble is that the same teenagers could watch most of those creators on youtube for nothing, and had been doing exactly that for years. you were asking people to start paying for a habit they had formed specifically because it was free.

it did not last. fullscreen's owner, a joint venture between at&t and the chernin group called otter media, announced in late 2017 that it was shutting the streaming service, and it went dark in early 2018 with a small round of layoffs. from turkey i did not see any of it directly, but the era was loud with these attempts, big media companies certain that short online video would convert into paid subscriptions if they just packaged it right. mostly it did not.

~ the case file ~

~ the climb ~

for a stretch around 2015 and 2016, the multi-channel networks that managed youtube creators looked like the future of television. fullscreen was one of the big ones, and a paid service felt like the natural next step, a way to stop renting an audience on youtube and own the relationship directly. the streaming launch was that bet made concrete.

~ what really happened ~

the bet lost. the audience would not follow the creators behind a paywall in the numbers the math needed, and the parent company had bigger streaming plans that did not include a small teen-focused service. otter media closed it and later got folded deeper into at&t's media arm. the creators kept working, on the free platforms where their audience actually was. the paid layer on top of them just quietly came off.

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