KeepVid

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

~ the last words ~

KeepVid belongs to my TTNet broadband years, from about 2006 on, when a YouTube video was something that buffered and a saved FLV file was something that did not. The site was one text box. You pasted the address of a video page into it and got back direct links to the file, in whatever formats the host kept.

The domain was registered on 7 March 2006, about a year after YouTube's own. By 14 June CNET News.com had a story headlined "Service lets people rip videos from YouTube, other sites", and twelve days later The Age in Melbourne filed it under video piracy's new battleground. Both reports tied it to Peekvid, a directory of links to TV episodes. KeepVid was registered to an address in the Cayman Islands and shared an Australian email address with Peekvid, and that is as much as anybody ever established about who ran it.

It outlived most of what it was built to copy from. When CNET wrote a how-to in March 2012 it still called KeepVid "likely the fastest way to grab just about any video from the Web", and listed Megavideo and Metacafe among the compatible sites. Megavideo had been seized by the FBI two months earlier. For some years the site fetched its links through a Java applet, which meant a security prompt before every download, and it sold a desktop program called KeepVid Pro beside the free page.

~ the record ~

~ netflix, hulu, spotify, pandora ~

There was no countdown. Up to 16 March 2018 the Wayback Machine's captures of the front page run to about ten kilobytes, with the box in the middle. On 17 March they drop to four and the box is gone. In its place stood an essay on why downloading video is a copyright risk, followed by the four services in the heading above as the places to pay instead.

TorrentFreak got a representative to answer on 20 March. "KeepVid won't provide video/audio downloading feature from now on", the reply said, and the team would work on other audio and video tools. Asked whether legal pressure had anything to do with it, they did not answer. The record labels had sued YouTube-MP3, the biggest stream ripper of all, out of existence six months before. KeepVid Pro went the same week, starting with a purchase link that stopped working.

~ is keepvid down ~

That is the title of the page the domain forwards to today, on a Wondershare subdomain, above a list of ten alternatives for converting video. The name still gets typed into search engines by people who remember it working, and the redirect exists to collect them. The job itself moved to a command line. The Slashdot thread about the closure is mostly people telling each other to install youtube-dl.

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