MyVideo

» see myvideo.de as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

myvideo was german-only at the language and licensing layer. the site was up between 2006 and 2016 and i lived through that whole window from ankara on ttnet, but german-language video portals were not in my orbit. by the late 2000s anyone outside the dach region looking for online video defaulted to youtube. myvideo's audience was the german web.

the company started in 2006. magic internet, a small team based in bucharest before relocating to berlin, built the platform as a youtube competitor for german-speaking europe. open uploads with browser viewing, the same playbook as youtube's. by alexa's count the domain was one of the most visited websites worldwide for parts of its run, with german-speaking traffic carrying the numbers.

prosiebensat.1, the german commercial broadcasting group, brought myvideo into its digital portfolio. the strategic logic was clear at the time. germany had a strong tv-broadcasting industry and a stated wariness about ceding online video to an american platform. myvideo was the local hedge.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it landed ~

in the launch years the site peaked at over 200,000 daily visitors with content in german only. the upload library skewed toward music videos and user clips, with the kind of comedy that played to a german-speaking audience as the local flavor. prosiebensat.1 used the platform to clip and host segments from its broadcast programming, which gave it a content base youtube did not have without rights deals.

the regional strategy worked for a few years. between 2008 and 2011 myvideo was the default second-tier video destination in germany after youtube. its audience numbers were never youtube-scale but they were real and they were local.

~ the unraveling ~

the cracks were structural. youtube reached scale and rights deals faster than any european competitor could match. by 2013 the network effect was settled: every uploader of consequence was on youtube first. local sites could keep their existing libraries warm but new content was going somewhere else.

prosiebensat.1 spent the early-2010s shifting strategy toward maxdome, its subscription video-on-demand service, where the company controlled the catalog instead of competing with user uploads. myvideo as a youtube-style platform stopped being the priority. the video service was wound down in april 2016 after a decade.

~ what it became ~

the brand did not die cleanly. the video-hosting function moved to quazer.com, later picked up by pluto tv. the myvideo url itself was repurposed as an entertainment news site under the maxdome umbrella. the original concept of user uploads on a german open platform ended in april 2016.

the lesson for european video was the same lesson local search and local social drew earlier. you could build a real audience in a local-language market for several years, and then you would still lose to the global platform once its content library crossed a threshold. myvideo's ten-year run was longer than most second-tier youtube competitors managed.

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