My Damn Channel

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

~ the last words ~

a rename is not usually a death. a company changes what it is called, the staff stay in their chairs, and nothing gets buried. this one goes in the ground anyway, because the name was the entire proposition. my damn channel was a bet that the word channel was coming back and that ordinary people were about to want one, and the company gave that bet up in april 2014 to go be called something that sounded like a television studio.

rob barnett had spent more than eleven years programming mtv and vh1 and then run programming for cbs radio, which is a career built entirely on deciding what other people watch and when. he founded my damn channel with warren chao on 31 july 2007, four months after next new networks, in the same new york, on nearly the same theory. youtube at that point was a pile of uploads with a search box on it, and a room full of television people looked at that and saw a scheduling problem.

what they made was a comedy studio: original series with names attached, harry shearer among them, and david wain doing wainy days. time put the site on its list of the fifty best websites in 2011. in 2013 it did a deal with blip to share exclusive first runs on four shows, which was the last serious structural move it made under this name.

i was at university in 2007 on a ttnet line, and the part of this i can speak to is the address. my damn channel's business was getting you to go to mydamnchannel.com, in the exact years when everyone stopped going to addresses and started going to two or three places that held everything. from outside the united states the effect was total. you could see the videos, and you saw them wherever they had been reposted.

~ the record ~

~ the one that traveled ~

you suck at photoshop went up on 21 december 2007 and got away from everybody. matt bledsoe and troy hitch built it as a one-off parody of a tutorial video, narrated by a fictional designer named donnie hoyle whose marriage was collapsing in the background while he demonstrated the color range selector. the first episode alone has passed 4.7 million views on youtube against 600,000 on my damn channel's own site, which is the whole business model failing and the whole show working, in one pair of numbers.

it took two webby awards and a streamy. written as a single joke, it got a second season in 2008 on public demand, and ended that halloween with the narrator apparently shot by an unknown assailant. photoshop was a global product, so the joke was legible anywhere someone had opened the curves dialog and hated their job. that is the piece that crossed borders, and it crossed them with no studio name attached to it.

~ the rename ~

on 4 april 2014 the company relaunched as omnivision entertainment. barnett described it as an entertainment company spread across traditional and digital platforms, which is the industry's way of saying it had signed a television deal, and it had: videocracy, on hln. it kept my damn channel as the label on the youtube and dailymotion channels, which is the standard way a brand gets demoted without being announced dead.

the timing is the thing worth marking. 2014 was the year multi-channel networks were being bought at prices nobody has repeated since, and this one went the other direction, back toward the medium its founders had left in 2007. the last upload on the my damn channel youtube account is from january 2015. dailymotion carried on until november 2016 and then stopped too.

~ where the domains went ~

mydamnchannel.com still resolves. it redirects to a london company with an unrelated name, which then redirects again into a chain of betting sites. omnivisionent.com, the address the company moved to in 2014, redirects to a turkish escort listing in kadıköy, istanbul.

that is the ordinary end of a media domain with age on it. the name keeps whatever authority the search engines assigned it a decade ago, someone buys it in a lapsed-domain auction for that authority alone, and it gets pointed at whatever needs the traffic. a studio built to make you visit an address ends up as an address making somebody money by pointing somewhere else.

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