Jaman

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

~ the last words ~

i missed jaman entirely. an early paid vod service in silicon valley pointed at world cinema and bollywood was not a category anyone in turkey was reaching for in 2007. we had our own national cinema tradition, and the foreign-film catalog on jaman leaned heavily toward the sort of festival titles that turkish tv already ran late at night. i had never even heard of the service until i started writing this obit.

the founder was gaurav dhillon. dhillon had co-founded informatica in 1992, taken it public, then stepped down to try consumer product. jaman launched around 2006 out of san mateo with backing from the hearst corporation. the idea was clean. build a proto-netflix that specialized in the tail of the catalog rather than the head, in independent film and non-english cinema.

the technical delivery was a peer-to-peer download client. you picked a film, the client swarmed the file from other jaman users plus jaman's own seed hosts, and you got a rented copy playable for a fixed window. in january 2008 jaman also cut a distribution deal with tivo to push its american indie catalog directly into dvr boxes. in may 2008 it added a free ad-supported browser streaming tier with a hundred launch titles sitting on top of the three-thousand-plus rental catalog.

~ the record ~

~ what it actually was ~

jaman was never trying to be a general streamer. the pitch to distributors was that the market for foreign and indie film needed a global on-demand storefront, and the pitch to viewers was that a service specializing in that catalog would beat a general netflix at surfacing what you actually wanted. the deals said dhillon was right on the distributor side. lionsgate signed titles like girl with a pearl earring and dogville. paramount digital and eros international followed with american indie and bollywood catalogs respectively.

on the viewer side the pitch was harder. paying five dollars for a rented download of a foreign film in 2008, when the average american still associated foreign film with the arthouse down the street or the ifc channel, was a real ask. and the p2p client model, while technically elegant, added an install-and-configure step that a mainstream renter did not want.

~ the day it died ~

the exact death is quiet. by 2011 the vod service was no longer the front of the site. netflix streaming had absorbed the low end of the market and amazon plus hulu had taken the middle. the specialist-catalog thesis lost the funding air it needed to keep the p2p pipeline running. dhillon said later, in the plainest self-assessment, that they had been too early to get online world cinema off the ground. the vod client went dark. the domain kept forwarding for a few years and then reappeared as a discovery site that linked out to whatever netflix or hulu happened to be showing at any moment.

~ the legacy ~

the pattern jaman was trying to run, curated specialist catalog for a global audience, eventually worked. mubi runs a version of it and criterion channel runs a version of it. the jaman version was too early by roughly a decade, and it was built on a p2p client that mainstream renters were never going to install. what remains is the specific 2006-2008 window when a paid indie-and-world-cinema storefront was a real proposition inside silicon valley, and jaman was carrying the flag for it.

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