Intertainer

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

~ the last words ~

In october 2002 the fastest connection in my life was a modem at home and a rented machine in an internet cafe. Intertainer was selling a full-length film delivered over a cable line into an american living room, priced per title, playing on a television. There was no version of that product that could have been sold to me, and there would not be one in Turkey for years. This grave is about a company that was right about the product and wrong about the decade.

Jonathan Taplin founded it in 1996 with Richard Baskin and Jeremiah Chechik. Taplin had produced films and had managed tours before that, which is an unusual background for someone building a video server, and it is probably why the licensing worked at all. The money came from Intel, Comcast, Microsoft, NBC, Qwest and Sony, a list that reads like every party with an interest in broadband arriving at once.

By 2000 the company held licenses to more than seven thousand films from Sony, Warner Bros., Universal, MGM and Lions Gate. The service ran as a trial in Cincinnati first and expanded in october 2001 to 35 US markets, delivered over cable and over the DSL lines of the phone companies. At the end it had 147,000 broadband subscribers, which in 2002 was a large fraction of everyone in America who could actually watch it.

~ the record ~

~ the early days ~

The technical bet was Windows Media, which is why Microsoft was on the cap table and why MSN carried the promotion. Playback went to a set-top box or to a PC, and the catalog sat on servers that the cable operator or the phone company hosted close to the customer. That was the only way to move a film over a 2002 consumer line without asking someone to wait overnight for it.

What made the thing possible was that the studios were willing to license before they had a plan of their own. Between 1998 and 2001 a small company in Los Angeles could sign Warner Bros. and Universal for internet delivery, because internet delivery was a rounding error and the executives signing it thought they were selling a lottery ticket. That window closed the moment the same executives worked out what the numbers might look like at scale.

~ what really happened ~

In 2001 five studios announced their own venture. Movielink was owned by MGM, Paramount, Sony, Universal and Warner Bros., and it went live in november 2002. Intertainer's account was that its terms got worse as Movielink got closer, and that the studios had used what they learned from the licensing talks to build the competing product. It filed an antitrust complaint on 23 september 2002 in the US District Court for the Central District of California naming the studios and Movielink.

A month after filing, on 23 october 2002, the company switched off its own service. Ten of the fifteen remaining employees went with it, from a payroll that had once been eighty. Taplin said they would put the service back up if the suit went well. The Justice Department opened its own look at Movielink and closed it in 2004 without acting. The parties reached a settlement in principle at mediation on 14 december 2005 and signed it in february 2006, and the case was dismissed. Nothing came back on.

~ the long tail ~

What the company still had was a patent application filed in 2001 and granted in 2005 as US 6,925,469, covering distribution and management of digital media files. On 29 december 2006 a two-person Intertainer sued Apple and Google in Texas over it, with Napster named alongside them. The company that had been first on the product had become a company that owned nine patents and no service, which is a familiar late chapter for anyone who was early.

Movielink did not outlive it by much. Blockbuster bought the whole thing in 2007 for a figure smaller than any single studio had put in, and it was gone soon after. The service that a small company died to sue was itself worth almost nothing five years later. intertainer.com now answers on a server with nothing recognizable behind it.

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