Mola

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

~ the eulogy ~

Mola was a streaming service owned by a cigarette company. Djarum makes kretek, the clove cigarettes whose smell is most of the air on an Indonesian street, and the family behind it, the Hartonos, have spent most of this century as the richest people in the country. In 2018 some of that money went out looking for football, and what it came back with was the English Premier League.

The rights to Indonesia and Timor-Leste came off beIN Sports in October 2018, and the platform to use them opened on 2 August 2019, operated through Polytron, the group's electronics arm. UFC arrived alongside, sold into Singapore and Malaysia as well as at home, and there was a catalog of films and original programming underneath. Nobody subscribed to Mola for the films.

The league rights ran to 2022 and then went elsewhere, which was the end of the argument for the service even though it took three more years to admit it. A platform assembled around one competition has precisely one thing to sell. When the competition leaves, the app is still good and the payment page still works and there is nothing on the other side of them worth the monthly charge.

The company Mola outbid is the only reason any of this is visible from where I sit. beIN lost Indonesia in 2018 and won Turkey in 2022, taking the Premier League here off Saran and folding it into the subscription that had already owned Digiturk since 2016. Same rights and the same buyer, moving opposite directions four years apart. From this end only the Turkish half was ever news.

~ the dossier ~

~ who actually owned it ~

Indonesian business is built out of a handful of family groups that own an implausible number of unrelated things, and Djarum is one of the older ones. Cigarettes are the base, but the group also controls one of the country's largest banks and an electronics manufacturer, and it has run the national badminton program for decades. A streaming service is not a strange thing for a group like that to build. It is closer to an ornament, a prestige holding that also happens to sell subscriptions.

That shape explains the timeline better than any business plan would. Mola was funded well enough to outbid a Qatari sports broadcaster for a top tier league, which is not a thing a normal Indonesian startup could contemplate, and it was also expendable enough to be switched off in a single announcement with no attempt at a sale. The service never had to earn its existence, so when the reason for it expired there was nothing else keeping it upright.

~ the seasons it rented ~

Everyone in Indonesian football has a version of the same memory from those years, which is that watching the Premier League suddenly required a new app and a new payment. Mola charged little enough that the switch was not painful, and it did the technical part well, which is hard at that scale in an archipelago of that shape. What it could not do was own anything. Broadcast rights are rented in three year blocks and the landlord raises the price on whoever wants them next.

UFC was the other pillar and it held longer, across Indonesia and the two neighbors, along with boxing and a scatter of motorsport. None of that is a substitute for a football league in a football country. The originals it commissioned included a documentary about the family's own Italian club, which is one way of describing what the service had become by then.

~ the lake in italy ~

In 2019 the Hartonos bought Como 1907, a club in the Italian third division with a beautiful lake behind it and nothing else going for it. Mola became the main sponsor, which is the ordinary arrangement where one arm of a group pays another arm for advertising nobody outside the group is measuring. Como then did something clubs bought this way almost never do, and went up twice, reaching Serie A in 2024 with money and attention arriving behind it.

So the sponsorship outlived the sponsor. When Mola announced its closure, the exception written into the announcement was Italy, where the brand continues as Como TV and carries the club's material to an Italian audience. The streaming platform that was supposed to be the family's media business is now a channel attached to their football team, in a country where neither of them started.

~ no refunds ~

The notice went up on 3 December 2025 and gave four weeks. Service ended across every platform on 31 December, in Indonesia and in the neighboring markets it had reached, along with a small British operation nobody outside it remembers, and no reason was offered for any of it. Mola stated plainly that no compensation would be provided in any form, and added a paragraph about how personal data would be deleted or anonymized under the data protection law except where retention was required.

It is a very corporate way to leave. The clove cigarette money that had bought a league and then a football club wound up its streaming service the way you would cancel a supplier contract, in a notice that spends more words on data retention than on the six years of subscribers reading it.

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