Lightbox (New Zealand)

» see lightbox.co.nz as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Lightbox was a country-sized product. It worked in New Zealand and nowhere else, because the rights it bought stopped at the border, and a service with five million potential customers is a different animal from one with five hundred million. Everything odd about it follows from that number.

Spark, the national phone company that had been Telecom NZ until that year, announced it in June 2014 under the working name ShowmeTV and launched it that August, at fifteen dollars a month with a thirty day trial. It was the first subscription streaming service in the country. Netflix did not arrive there until March 2015, which gave Lightbox a head start of about six months and a catalog nobody was expecting from a telco: Mad Men, Better Call Saul, Vikings, later The Handmaid's Tale. In January 2015 it added sport through Coliseum Sports Media, with Premier League football and Top 14 rugby on it.

The head start did not last, and the catalog was never the strategy anyway. Lightbox existed because Spark wanted a reason for people to stay on a Spark broadband plan, and it was thrown in free with those plans. That is a fine way to get subscribers and a terrible way to find out whether anyone would have paid for it.

~ the record ~

~ the bundle problem ~

By April 2019 Lightbox had more than 355,000 subscribers, which in a country of five million is a serious number on paper. How many of them were choosing it rather than receiving it is a question Spark never had to answer out loud, and the answer arrived anyway when the bundling stopped and the discounted price went up by a few dollars.

Spark spent 2018 and 2019 looking for a media partner to grow it. A telco can carry a streaming service as a retention tool for about as long as the content bill stays small. Once the rights holders understood what streaming was worth, the bill stopped staying small, and a national phone company found itself bidding against Netflix for American drama.

~ the day it died ~

Spark announced the sale to Sky, the local pay television incumbent, on 19 December 2019, and completed it on 3 February 2020. Neither side put a price on it in public. Sky already had its own streaming service, Neon, and had no intention of running two.

On 7 July 2020 the merge happened, and it went the way these usually do not. Sky kept Lightbox's platform and put Neon's name on it. The Lightbox app updated itself into the new Neon app, existing logins carried across, the profiles and downloads and movie rentals that Lightbox had built stayed in place, and the yellow branding turned green. Spark customers kept free access for another three weeks and then paid $9.95 a month like everyone else on a discount.

~ what survived it ~

So the product outlived the brand. Every New Zealander who opens Neon today is using software built by a phone company for a service that no longer exists, wearing the name of the competitor that bought it. That is a cleaner outcome than most acquisitions manage, and it is still a death: the thing that made Lightbox interesting was that it was first and that it was not Sky.

What went with the name was the argument it had been making since 2014, that a small country could run its own streaming service rather than renting shelf space in somebody else's. Six years later the shelf space was all there was, and the incumbent it had been built to threaten owned the code.

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