Headweb

» see headweb.se as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Peter Alvarsson founded the company in 2006 and the service went live in 2007, described in Swedish as a film service and a film community in one. You could stream, or you could buy a film for a window of time and download it. By 2010 the catalog was past 3,900 titles, and it ran on computers, the PlayStation 3, the Xbox 360 and the iPhone, which in 2010 was most of the hardware a Swedish household might plausibly point at a television.

By 2014 it had 350,000 users. For a service selling licensed film in a country of roughly nine and a half million people, that was a real business, and Swedish tech press would later write about it with the phrase could have become a Swedish Netflix attached.

~ the case file ~

~ three owners in two years ~

In 2014 Flow Network acquired Headweb AB and Alvarsson left. The service itself was then bought in January 2015 by Film2home, a competitor and the older of the two companies, and by that September Magine had acquired Film2home. Three transactions, none of them a year apart, and at the end of them the thing customers had signed up for was a line item inside a business that had been assembled from other people's film services.

Film2home's own plan was to merge what it had bought into a single new brand. That brand was Plejmo, announced as a service that would challenge the streaming market with dynamic pricing and Sweden's largest film selection. Headweb was the part of it that had the customers.

The merged thing did not survive either. Film2home became the oldest Swedish streaming service to go bankrupt, and Plejmo shut down in its turn. The Swedish press eventually covered the whole cluster as a set of streaming bankruptcies rather than as separate stories.

~ sweden only ~

Headweb was Sweden-only at the licensing layer. That kind of border does not announce itself. There was no technical reason a film service could not have sold to me in Ankara in 2010, and no commercial route by which it ever did: the rights it bought were Swedish rights, sold by distributors who sliced the map that way, and a Turkish IP address sat outside the shape of the contract.

~ the email of 24 september ~

What landed in inboxes on 24 September 2015 was not a shutdown notice, it was a replacement notice: the website had been replaced by Plejmo, and the Headweb apps had been replaced by Plejmo's apps. Nothing was being taken away in the sense the word shutdown usually carries. The brand was simply being switched off around a customer base that was being carried across to something else.

The corporate end came later and from an odd direction. In April 2017 Headweb AB was put into bankruptcy proceedings, initiated by Flow Network, the company that had bought it in 2014.

~ what the domains sell now ~

Both addresses still resolve, and neither one has anything to do with film. headweb.se serves a Swedish blog whose title translates to a site for interesting facts and company recommendations, which is the standard signature of a lapsed domain bought for whatever search authority it still carried.

headweb.com is stranger. It redirects to sverige.plejmo.com, so the old domain still points dutifully at its successor, except that the successor's hostname now serves a page titled, in Swedish, casinos without a Swedish license. The redirect from 2015 is intact. What answers at the far end of it is a gambling affiliate farm.

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