MediaBrowser

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

~ the obituary ~

MediaBrowser.com, Inc. was founded in 2000 by Mark C. Brown to sell a product that was not really software. What it sold was the outside of software. You took Internet Explorer, put a company's artwork behind the toolbar and on the navigation buttons and the splash screen, wired the bookmarks to that company's pages, left a strip along the bottom for advertising, and shipped it as a browser with the brand's name on it.

There was one piece of actual engineering in there, a component called MicroTron that played brand-related video inside the browser chrome. Everything else was Internet Explorer, which the licensing of the day made free to reskin. The requirements printed on the box are a good fossil of the moment: a 486 or better, Internet Explorer 5.0, Windows Media Player 6.4, Flash Player 4.0, 32 MB of RAM and 5 MB of disk.

On 5 December 2001 the company filed for Chapter 7 with debts of $2.49 million and a stack of unpaid loans. The website went off the same day. It had been in business for less than two years.

~ the case file ~

~ the nintendo deal ~

In late 2000 Nintendo signed on, and this is the only reason anybody remembers the company at all. The first two branded builds were for Mario Tennis and for Pokemon Gold and Silver, and the Pokemon one shipped as a CD-ROM handed to anyone who preordered the game at retail. More followed through 2001, including Paper Mario and Majora's Mask.

Read that sequence again and it gets stranger. A game publisher paid to have a web browser made out of its own characters and then gave it away as a preorder bonus, in a year when most people's web browser was whatever their ISP had installed for them. It was merchandise in the shape of a program. The Internet Archive still has the Pokemon GS build, so you can install a 2000 browser with Pikachu on the toolbar if you can find something that will run it.

~ the registration server ~

Every MediaBrowser build required you to register on the company's website before it would run. That was the ad business working as designed, since a registered user is a user you can count and sell. It also meant the company held a switch that turned off every copy it had ever distributed.

When the site went down in December 2001, the switch flipped. A fresh install of any MediaBrowser skin has been impossible ever since without editing a registry value to skip the check. Copies that were already registered kept working, which is why the surviving ones are all machines that never got reinstalled.

~ from where i was ~

I was sixteen in 2000 and on dial-up in Turkey, and the browser on that machine had things bolted to it too. Nobody here preordered anything to get them. They came down with a driver disc or with somebody's copied CD, and they were toolbars rather than full skins. The version of this story I recognize is the one where you did not choose the branding. MediaBrowser's whole model assumed a retail counter where a kid reserves a game and walks out with a second disc in the bag, and that counter was in American shopping malls.

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