Magine TV

» see magine.tv as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Magine TV was live television delivered over the internet to a browser or a smart TV, with a cloud recorder and a pause button, at a time when the alternative in most of Europe was a cable box or a satellite dish. The company was founded in Stockholm in 2011 and the Swedish service opened in 2013, Germany following in beta that August and commercially in 2014. The pitch got called Spotify for television often enough that the Swedish press stopped bothering to attribute it.

The product worked, and it won design awards for the interface. The company said 1.5 million people registered in the first three months, and in July 2013 it raised $19 million from Swedish and international investors on the strength of that. What it could not do was buy the thing it was selling, because a streaming service needs a signed deal with every broadcaster whose channel appears in the grid, and the broadcasters in question owned competing services of their own.

Spain went first: Magine pulled out of that market in January 2015, less than two years in. The Swedish consumer arm followed in April 2017 after four years of operation, and the reason given by Ulrika Viklund, who ran the consumer group, was that without Bonnier's TV4 and the channels of Modern Times Group there was no lineup worth paying for. That left Germany, which lasted until 28 February 2019, when Zattoo took the whole business-to-consumer operation off their hands.

~ the record ~

~ the licensing wall ~

Every piece of this story comes back to the same structural fact. Film and sports rights are sold territory by territory, usually to the incumbent broadcaster, and a new entrant arrives with no library and nothing a rights holder wants in trade. Netflix solved it by commissioning its own programming. Magine sold distribution, which meant licensing every channel it carried, one broadcaster at a time.

Broadcasters understood this better than the investors did. Handing a channel to a cloud service meant handing over the viewing data and the subscriber relationship, and in Sweden the two biggest groups simply declined.

~ the german exit ~

Zattoo announced the takeover on 28 January 2019 and the service stopped a month later. Around 150,000 active Magine customers got an email with a personal code for two free months of Zattoo Premium, and anyone who had paid for a full year was compensated for the months after March that they would not be getting. Deutsche Telekom turned up within days with a counter-offer of MagentaTV at EUR 7.95 a month aimed specifically at Magine refugees, which tells you how little switching cost there was in this market.

~ what survived ~

The company did not die. It became Magine Pro, selling the platform to the operators it used to compete with, beIN in the Middle East and the Swedish operator Sappa among them, and magine.tv now redirects to a page about flexible OTT solutions. Turkey was never on the map for the consumer product, and could not have been: live TV here came through satellite packages with their own exclusive deals, and the licensing wall that stopped Magine in Stockholm was built just as high in Istanbul. The brand that 150,000 Germans paid for is now a login page for broadcast engineers.

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