iFilm

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

~ the goodbye ~

ifilm launched in september 1997 as raphael raphael's project for a curated home of short films on the web. by august 1999 it hosted around 450 movies. the platform became one of the main places where viral video lived in the 2002-2005 window before youtube reached scale. triumph the insult comic dog had his first viral moment there. viacom bought ifilm for $49 million in october 2005 under ceo blair harrison, looking to assemble a youtube competitor through the mtv networks portfolio.

in q1 2008 mtv merged ifilm with spiketv.com and relaunched the property as spike.com in may 2008. the ifilm.com brand retired then. spike.com lost some of the drive-by traffic from the ifilm url change, which clickz reported on at the time. the domain currently redirects to screen junkies under defy media.

in 2005 i was in university in turkey on a fresh ttnet adsl line, the part of internet history where every viral video reached you as an msn forward of a file. ifilm itself was not where i watched things. the early viral video circuit in turkey moved through forum threads on donanimhaber and frmtr, mostly downloaded files rather than embeds on a us site that buffered slowly over a transatlantic link.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the breakout ~

ifilm was the first place a lot of viral video footage actually had a permanent url. before 2005 the standard way to encounter a viral clip was an email attachment with a.wmv or.rm file. ifilm offered a hosted page you could send a link to. that was a new thing in 2002. the curated short-film side coexisted with this until viacom took over and pushed toward the youtube-competitor positioning, at which point the indie short-film angle thinned out.

~ the spike rebrand ~

spike tv was viacom's male-audience cable channel. the strategic logic of merging ifilm with spiketv.com was that both audiences overlapped at a young-male demographic, so why run two web brands. the merger went live as spike.com in may 2008. clickz at the time noted that spike.com lost about a third of the combined unique audience in the first six months from confused users.

spike.com itself eventually dissolved into the paramount network rebrand of 2018. the ifilm content archive stopped being indexed long before that. the url now points at screen junkies, a defy media property, which is itself in financial trouble.

~ what got buried with it ~

what disappeared with the ifilm brand was a snapshot of pre-youtube web culture: the curated short-film side of the portal era and the early creator pages for filmmakers who had not yet figured out that youtube was where their audience was actually going to live. ifilm's archive is mostly readable only through the wayback machine now. raphael raphael went on to academic film writing. the property had a real cultural moment that did not survive its corporate parent.

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