iCraveTV

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

~ the eulogy ~

icravetv launched in late november 1999, during the same months i was learning what 33.6 kbps actually meant on a ttnet dialup line at home. video streaming of over-the-air television was not a thing my modem could honestly do. the service was canadian, not turkish. it lasted ten weeks.

william craig set up the operation in toronto through a company called tvradionow corporation. the trick was to grab toronto's free over-the-air broadcast signals from canadian and american stations near the niagara border and encode them into realvideo, which then went back out as live web streams. anyone with a browser could load icravetv.com and watch buffalo's fox affiliate next to ctv toronto, in a tiny windowed player. craig's legal theory was that canadian retransmission law allowed cable-style rebroadcast and that the web was simply another cable.

the geofence was an honor box. the site asked visitors to type "yes" if they were in canada before letting them through. nobody believed this was holding anyone out. the majority of estimated viewers during peak were american, tuning in to live us-network feeds bounced through a canadian server.

~ the dossier ~

~ the origin ~

peak traffic in the case filings hit around 600,000 streams per day. for late 1999 that was an enormous number for live web video, more than every legitimate streaming service combined. craig spoke publicly about expansion to vancouver and seattle. the trade press treated icravetv as either the future of television or a clean napster-style copyright bomb depending on which side you read.

~ the postmortem ~

fox filed in the western district of pennsylvania in january 2000, joined by the other major us networks and the nfl. the case was twentieth century fox film corp v. icravetv. the legal hook was that the click-through canadian-only screen was a fig leaf, and that streaming us-network content into us homes without retransmission consent violated copyright law in a way napster would soon also test from a different angle. on 28 january 2000 the judge granted a preliminary injunction. craig agreed to take the site dark on 22 february 2000 rather than face continued action.

~ the long tail ~

the ten weeks of streaming itself was a footnote. the deeper consequence was that the major us networks went home from the case and started building their own web video plans. by mid-2000 every broadcaster had a streaming initiative on the roadmap. hulu does not happen without the wake icravetv left. craig himself moved on, later acquiring the canadian lgbt channel pridevision in 2003.

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