In2TV

» see in2tv.aol.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

full episodes of warner bros television, playing in a browser window, for free, in march 2006. that sentence is unremarkable now and it was close to unbelievable then. youtube was ten months old and capped clips at ten minutes. what aol shipped on 15 march 2006 was babylon 5 and welcome back kotter at what the press release insisted on calling dvd quality, with a launch party at the museum of television and radio to make the point that this was television rather than video.

the deal underneath it was the simplest one available: aol and warner bros television were both owned by time warner, so the content cost the company nothing to license from itself. that is also why it could afford to run one to two minutes of advertising against a thirty minute episode when broadcast needed eight. the shows were sorted into named channels rather than a search box. lol for comedy, drama rama, what a rush for action, toon topia for cartoons, vintage tv for the oldest material. pilot theater carried nothing but first episodes.

the strategic reason for it was less charming. youtube was filling up with time warner material that time warner had not put there, and in2tv launched alongside a wave of dmca notices aimed at getting that material taken down. the plan was to make the legal version good enough that the illegal version stopped mattering. for about eighteen months it more or less worked, which is more than most 2006 answers to youtube managed.

none of it was reachable from turkey. in2tv was licensed for the united states and checked, and by 2006 i had ttnet broadband at home and could finally have streamed something like this if anybody had been willing to serve it to me. that gap is the whole story of the era from where i was sitting. the pipe arrived years before the permission did.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it actually streamed ~

the catalog is worth writing down because it explains why people bothered. wonder woman, kung fu, maverick, f troop, the fugitive, eight is enough, growing pains, perfect strangers, head of the class, falcon crest, scarecrow and mrs king, the adventures of brisco county jr, pinky and the brain, freakazoid, beetlejuice. shows rotated monthly, so the offer was hundreds of episodes at any given time rather than a permanent shelf.

around that sat a layer of original filler nobody remembers, including a channel of clips of stars before they were stars and a karaoke channel built entirely out of theme songs. in december 2006 the whole thing was folded into aol video, the named channels were dropped for generic genre buckets, and in2tv stopped being a place and became a tag on somebody else's page.

~ the corporate divorce ~

in2tv did not fail. it was disassembled by a transaction that had nothing to do with it. time warner separated aol into an independent company in december 2009, and the warner bros library stayed with warner bros. aol was left running a video service with no right to the only content anybody came for.

the programming had already started moving before that. warner relaunched the wb as an online-only brand on 28 april 2008 and took the in2tv shows with it, and the children's material went to the kids wb portal. thewb.com itself closed in december 2013. by the time aol bought the huffington post in 2011 aol video was gone entirely, and the old links resolved to a huffpost television page with no video on it. the shows kept moving after that, to plex in 2019 and later to max and its free ad-supported channels on roku and tubi. the archive outlived four different homes. the service that first put it online lasted less than four years.

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