meTube

» see metube.id as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Turkey ran this same experiment and it worked, which is most of what I have to say about why meTube did not. İzlesene opened here in 2006 and would probably have stayed a minor site forever, except that YouTube was blocked in Turkey from 2008 to 2010 and every video habit in the country had to go somewhere. İzlesene was where it went, and it kept enough of that audience to survive until March 2025.

meTube launched on 29 January 2016, out of MNC Tower in Jakarta, as a unit of MNC Media under the group's founder Hary Tanoesoedibjo. The framing was national. It was to be a home for Indonesian creative work about Indonesia, which is a fine thing to want and a difficult thing to make somebody prefer. Nothing was blocked in Indonesia. YouTube had already been the default there for the better part of a decade, and every creator worth watching had spent that decade building an audience on it.

What arrived was a competent clone. Uploads capped at 300 MB across a long list of container formats, with playback up to 720p. Video was transcoded to HLS with adaptive bitrate so it survived a bad mobile connection. Competition and audition features were bolted on to find new talent, and the group's broadcast channels streamed live inside the same interface. In October 2016 it added HTML5 playback and stopped requiring Flash, and later that month it won an ID Website Award in the entertainment category.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the three hundred megabyte ceiling ~

That upload cap deserves a paragraph on its own, because it dates the product more precisely than the launch announcement does. In 2016 a mid-range Android phone shot 1080p at something like a hundred megabytes a minute. A 300 MB limit meant roughly three minutes of what the uploader's own camera produced by default, and any real creator hit that wall on their first attempt.

Limits like that are not oversights. They are a storage budget made visible, and they tell you what the platform expected to receive. meTube was provisioned for clips, not for anybody's channel. The cost of hosting a country's video is the entire reason there are so few video platforms in the world, and a broadcaster's web unit was never going to carry it.

~ what it was actually for ~

Strip the uploads out and look at what sat on the front page. RCTI and the group's other channels, streaming live, with their programs available afterwards. The user-generated half was the wrapper. The half that brought traffic was MNC putting its own television online in a country where television was still the dominant medium, and where the group owned a very large share of it.

That is a legitimate product. It just is not a video sharing site, and the two want opposite things. A sharing site wants your upload and does not care what it is. A broadcaster wants you watching its schedule. meTube spent four years being asked to be both by people who only really needed the second one.

On 2 November 2020 it stopped, and the address was pointed at RCTI+ and Vision+. Neither of those pretends to be a video sharing site. They are the group's own content, on its own terms, in an app built to keep you inside it. MNC did not abandon the idea so much as drop the costume.

There is no archive question here worth agonizing over, because almost nothing irreplaceable was on it. That is its own kind of verdict. A video platform that closes and takes nothing with it was never holding anything the internet had decided to keep.

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