Livestation

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

~ the obituary ~

Watching a foreign news channel live used to be a hardware question. In Turkey the answer was on the roof, because satellite dishes were everywhere and had been since the nineties, and a dish gave you BBC World and CNN International without anybody's website being involved. Livestation was solving that same problem for people whose answer was a computer, which is why its best years were the years when a computer was the only screen you had with you.

It started inside Skinkers, a London company working with peer to peer streaming technology licensed out of Microsoft Research. The idea was that live video could be distributed by the audience instead of by the broadcaster's bandwidth bill, which mattered enormously when a channel suddenly had a hundred times its usual viewers. It went public on 24 September 2008 after a year of beta and spun out as Livestation Ltd. The peer to peer part got dropped later, once ordinary content delivery had become cheap enough to make it pointless.

At its widest it carried something like fifty international news channels. BBC World News, Al Jazeera English, CNN International, Russia Today, plus a long tail of regional broadcasters. Some were free and some sat behind a subscription, and a fair number were blocked depending on where your address said you were. The whole operation ran on about ten people and it was making money, which is rare enough in streaming that it deserves saying twice.

~ the case file ~

~ the window it had ~

Late 2010 into 2011 was the moment. Al Jazeera English was the channel covering Tunisia and then Egypt, and outside the Arab world almost nobody could get it on a television. American cable systems had refused to carry it for years. So people watched the feed on the web, and Livestation was one of the two or three places that feed reliably was, which meant a small London company sat in the middle of how the rest of the world followed Tahrir Square.

That arrangement got stranger in August 2013, when Al Jazeera America launched and the English channel's US stream was cut to protect the new cable deal. Livestation kept offering Al Jazeera English to American viewers as a paid subscription, so for a while the way to watch a channel your own country had made unavailable was to pay a company in another one.

~ how it ended ~

There was no announcement. Sometime in late 2016 the service simply stopped answering, and by 23 November the site was unreachable. Subscribers with active accounts found out the way everyone else did, which is by clicking something and getting nothing.

The cause is not mysterious. By 2016 every channel Livestation carried had its own app and its own YouTube feed, and the aggregator in the middle had stopped being necessary. Al Jazeera America closed on 30 April 2016 after its own three-year experiment, and the whole idea that a live news channel was a thing you had to go somewhere specific to find had quietly expired.

~ what it proved ~

For about six years the geography of television was negotiable, and a company with ten employees was doing the negotiating. That did not last, but not because it failed. The broadcasters learned to stream, and then there was nothing left in the middle for anybody to run.

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