Hakuna Live

» see hakuna.live as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Hyperconnect was the Korean company behind Azar, the random video chat app that made most of its money in the Middle East and Europe. Hakuna Live was the second thing it built on the same video stack, launched to Arabic-speaking users first and then properly in Korea at the end of March 2019. A Tokyo subsidiary called Movefast Company ran the service, and Japan turned into one of its two big markets.

The format put everybody in one room. A host went live and could pull up to three guests into the same broadcast, so what you watched was usually a conversation between several people who had never met, with the audience in a chat column and a gift button that turned cash into diamonds and diamonds into cartoon animations on the host's screen. There were avatars for anyone who did not want to show a face. It was downloaded more than 21 million times, with over 10 million of those in the first year.

This one is outside my reach in the ordinary way. It launched in 2019 in a language I do not read, on a phone-first social format that I was already too old for and too settled into other habits to try. What makes it worth a grave is not the app, it is how the app ended, which had nothing to do with anyone who used it.

~ the case file ~

~ the acquisition ~

Match Group, which owns Tinder and Hinge and most of the rest of the dating market, agreed to buy Hyperconnect in February 2021 and closed the deal that June for about 1.7 billion dollars. It was Match's largest acquisition and it was explicitly about technology: the video and AI infrastructure that Azar ran on, to be folded into the dating products. Hakuna Live was a working consumer business with millions of users, and it was a side effect of the purchase.

For two years afterward nothing much changed. Then the parent company started narrowing. The service closed in the United States and the United Kingdom on 28 November 2023, and everything left was Korea and Japan.

~ the wind-down ~

On 31 July 2024 Match told investors it was ending live streaming as a business line, including the feature inside Plenty of Fish, and cut staff to match. The reasoning offered was that livestreaming had been a thing people wanted when they were stuck at home and was not that anymore.

The wind-down ran on a published schedule, and each step closed a door before the next one. New registrations stopped on 29 July 2024. Diamond purchases and subscriptions stopped on 20 August, which meant the hosts could still be paid but only out of currency already bought. On 1 October the service ended, and the app came off Google Play on 29 October. Hosts in Korea and Japan who had spent five years building an audience inside somebody else's room got about nine weeks of notice.

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