JumpTV

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

~ the goodbye ~

JumpTV's front page in July 2009 listed four Turkish channels: Besiktas TV, CNN Turk, EuroD and EuroStar. The last two are the giveaway. EuroD and EuroStar were the European feeds of Kanal D and Star, assembled for Turks living in Germany, and they existed because a million people had left and still wanted the same broadcast their relatives were watching. I was on the other end of that. In Ankara those channels arrived through an antenna for free, which is exactly why JumpTV was never going to sell me anything.

The company was founded in Toronto in 2000 by Farrel Miller, a broadcast attorney who understood that the hard part was not streaming. The hard part was rights. National broadcasters had never sold internet distribution before and had no idea what it was worth, so JumpTV spent years signing them one at a time, usually cheap, usually exclusive. By its peak it carried more than 300 television and radio broadcasters from over 70 countries with a staff of sixty-six people.

Subscribers paid per channel, per month, in the fifteen-dollar neighborhood. The pitch Forbes ran in November 2006 was blunt about who it was for: internet television bringing immigrants home. It was one of the first businesses on the web built entirely around people who had moved away from somewhere and still had the somewhere in their head.

~ the chronicle ~

~ who bought it ~

NeuLion was a Plainview, New York company doing IPTV set-top delivery, backed by Charles Wang, who had founded Computer Associates and owned the New York Islanders. The merger was announced on 9 June 2008 and closed on 20 October, with an $11 million private placement attached. JumpTV Acquisition Corp merged into NeuLion, NeuLion was the surviving corporation, and Wang became chairman with Nancy Li as chief executive.

On paper JumpTV was the acquirer, since its shares were the ones issued. In practice the combined business took the NeuLion name within months and pointed itself at live sports, which is what NeuLion actually knew how to sell. The ethnic channel catalog became a legacy line item.

~ the toronto listing ~

August 2006 was the high-water mark. The Toronto Stock Exchange approved the listing of 42.9 million common shares, and the offering of 13,273,500 shares at CAD$5.50 raised roughly 73 million dollars. In February 2007 the company announced a further US$100 million raise. In October 2006 it signed a deal to put its channels in front of Comcast broadband subscribers. For about eighteen months JumpTV looked like the company that had figured out what the internet was for before YouTube did.

~ where the name went ~

The consumer site did not stop on merger day. jumptv.com served a full front page until mid-July 2009, then started redirecting into a subdirectory called international, which is where the channel catalog sat for another four years. The Internet Archive has that page loading normally on 10 October 2013 and returning 404 by the following July.

Nobody wrote a shutdown notice for it. The domain today is a Thai entertainment blog running on WordPress, which is the modern version of a headstone. NeuLion itself was bought by Endeavor in 2018 for $250 million and folded into its streaming arm, so the technology that carried Besiktas TV to an apartment in Cologne eventually ended up delivering UFC pay-per-views.

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