LiveVideo.com

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

~ the obit ~

by the time livevideo actually launched, i was already on youtube, and so was everyone i knew. it arrived in 2008 promising to be youtube with a social layer on top, at a point when youtube had already won that argument.

the man behind it was brad greenspan, who had co-founded intermix media, the company that owned myspace before news corp bought it. livevideo was part of his post-myspace run of web bets. it was pitched as a mashup of a social network and a video host, and it made real noise with live interactive shows and celebrity partners, from an interview series with the basketball player steve nash to a william shatner project called shatnervision.

the trouble was always money. livevideo never had the funding to run a video platform at youtube scale, and greenspan spent a chunk of what it had buying revver, another struggling video site, in 2008. the audience it did pull, including the comedy duo smosh who briefly left youtube for it, mostly drifted back to youtube anyway. the original livevideo.com went dark in 2013.

i have no memory of using it, because i did not. from ankara, livevideo was a us story about the man who used to own myspace trying to do it again with video. it read like a sequel nobody asked for, and it ended the way most youtube challengers of that era ended, quietly and out of cash.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the myspace shadow ~

everything about livevideo was haunted by myspace. greenspan's whole pitch rested on having been there for the first one, and the site was built as if lightning would strike twice if you pointed it at video instead of music and profiles. it would not. myspace itself was already sliding by 2008, and the formula that built it did not transfer.

~ the long tail ~

livevideo's most durable footnote is smosh, who left youtube for it during the exclusive-deal era and then came back, a small early example of a creator being courted off the main platform and returning. the site is gone and the domain has changed hands, but that pattern, of a rival paying to pull talent away from youtube, kept repeating for the next fifteen years.

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