Netverse

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

~ the last words ~

Netverse is a grave from the wrong side of the world and the wrong end of my own timeline. In 2022 I was working on computer vision for drones in Ankara and my viewing was whatever came with Turkish subtitles. An Indonesian broadcaster launching a subscription app for its own talk shows had no route to me and was never trying to find one.

It came from NET TV, a Jakarta free-to-air station that had spent a decade building a young urban audience and then discovered that the audience was on YouTube. NET had eighteen million subscribers on that channel and around forty million monthly viewers, and none of that relationship belonged to it. PT Net Media Digital was set up to fix that, and Netverse was the fix.

The app appeared on the stores on 25 March 2022 and got its formal launch on 20 May. The catalog was NET's own intellectual property, which in practice meant the talk shows and music programs the station had already made, plus originals commissioned for the platform. Around it the parent company talked about gaming and digital merchandise, in the specific way companies talked in early 2022.

~ the record ~

~ what it was betting on ~

The bet was reasonable on paper. Indonesian internet penetration was second only to television as a media channel, NET already produced the content, and the marginal cost of putting existing shows behind a login is low. Converting half of the YouTube audience gave you a real business.

What the plan skipped is that the audience was not on YouTube by accident. It was there because YouTube was free and already installed, and because it ran on a cheap phone with a small data package. HOOQ had died in 2020 and iflix had been sold off in the same year, both of them better funded than this and both of them beaten by exactly that. A broadcaster with good shows and no distribution advantage is in the same position as everyone else in the store.

~ no notice ~

The end arrived from the corporate side rather than the product side. MD Entertainment, the film company run by Manoj Punjabi, agreed to buy NET's parent for 1.65 trillion rupiah, and the deal became effective on 28 October 2024. An extraordinary shareholders meeting on 8 November renamed the station MDTV, and by December NET was out of the television business under its own name.

Netverse simply stopped. The site went inactive, MD Entertainment stood up MD Now under a new subsidiary as the replacement, and no announcement was made about the old app at any point. There is no shutdown date to cite, which is why this stone carries a year rather than a day. A service with a launch event and no funeral is the ordinary case, and it is worse than a bad ending because there is nothing to point at.

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