Mobcaster

~ the goodbye ~

Mobcaster was a crowdfunding site for television. Creators posted a pilot or a six-episode season and the audience funded it before anything was shot, after which the finished show played on Mobcaster itself. If it later got picked up somewhere else, Mobcaster held a 15% participation in it. The tagline on the homepage was "Find It, Fund It, View It" and the logo carried a small "beta" tag for its entire life.

The founder was Aubrey Levy, who had been an actor and a writer and had his own pilot run the full gauntlet of network revisions before it died unmade. His framing of the problem was blunter than most pitch decks: the television business, he said, is "a system built around finding one Modern Family or one Lost that pay for the rest". Mobcaster proposed that the audience could do the picking, earlier and more cheaply.

Economically it was modest by design. The site took 5% of the money raised plus 3% for PayPal, and split advertising revenue evenly with the creator when the show aired on the network. By November 2012 the whole platform had passed $100,000 raised across all projects, which was reported at the time as a milestone and is roughly what one funded show on the site was asking for on its own.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the pitch ~

The campaigns that worked were not American. The first and most successful was The Weatherman, an Australian comedy about an insecure weather presenter trying to stay relevant on hostile television, which closed at 102% with $73,975 against a $72,500 goal. A middle-school comedy called Life Sucks was still climbing in May 2013 at $22,730 of $85,000 with 22 days on the clock, and it did eventually finish, at $85,511.

Levy said in 2012 that he was in conversation with more than a hundred content creators. The homepage in 2013 shows what that converted into: a handful of features at the top, most of them already closed, with a western about Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid sitting at 27% with five days left.

~ the frozen window ~

The written record says the site shut down in September 2013, and the archive does not quite agree, which turns out to be the interesting part. Mobcaster.com kept serving a complete, working-looking homepage at around 5.6 KB continuously through 18 March 2016. Its application endpoints were still answering in 2015, returning authentication errors rather than nothing at all.

Put the 2013 and 2016 captures side by side and the illusion breaks. In May 2013 the homepage carries live campaigns with "5 days left" and "22 days left" on the counters. By March 2016 every single project on the page reads "0 seconds left" and sits at or above 100%. Nothing new had been posted and nothing was running. The company had stopped and the shop window stayed lit, which is why the grave takes September 2013 and not the date the hosting finally lapsed.

After that it decays normally. There is a 302 in September 2018 followed by a run of 403s, and by November 2020 the domain is answering at 20 KB and upward as something else entirely. Today mobcaster.com is a live personal-finance site with no connection to any of this.

~ the funny part ~

The pitch was that the crowd would fund the shows the networks were too cautious to make, and the shows that actually funded were an Australian sitcom and a comedy about middle school. Neither is the kind of project a US network was blocking. Both are small, which is the size the model could actually fund.

A decade on, the audience-funds-the-pilot idea did not vanish so much as get absorbed: the streaming services commission on data, and a creator with a pilot in hand now posts it directly and watches the numbers come back. Mobcaster was built to stand between those two worlds in the years when the gap between them was still wide enough to stand in.

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