Network Awesome

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

~ the obituary ~

Network Awesome launched on 1 January 2011, built by the electronic musician Jason Forrest with his co-founder Greg Sadetsky. The idea was almost perverse for 2011: instead of a search box and a recommendation engine, you got a schedule. Somebody had decided what was on today, and if you missed it you missed it.

What was on tended to be the material nobody was clearing rights for. Old documentaries, concert tape, public access, industrial films, television that had aged into something else. Forrest programmed it in themed runs, so a week might be given over to women in punk or to the way corporations used to make films about themselves. The Los Angeles Times wrote up the punk week in July 2011. Denver's Westword ran a piece the same month under a headline that explained the whole project in one line, that Network Awesome was here to remind us what television was like before it sucked.

The other half was a magazine. Daily articles about the day's programming, written by contributors, syndicated out to the Huffington Post and to DigBoston. That was the part that made it legible to people who were never going to sit through two hours of a 1974 industrial film: you could read about it instead, and the reading was good.

~ the case file ~

~ the schedule ~

The schedule is the thing worth remembering, because it is the opposite of everything that won. Network Awesome's front page showed you the days of the week as thumbnails. Monday had a thing on it. Tuesday had a different thing. There was no queue and no history of what you had already watched. The site was not asking what you wanted, it was telling you what was on.

That made it a hard sell outside its own circle, and the circle was an English-reading, art-adjacent one that read Westword and DigBoston. I was on broadband in Ankara by then and watching plenty of video, but a programmed daily channel in somebody else's timezone is a thing you have to decide to join. Nobody in Turkey was going to stumble into it the way we all stumbled into YouTube.

~ the day the signal cut ~

The Internet Archive's copies are precise about this in a way the written record is not. On 19 May 2018 networkawesome.com still served its normal 16 KB front page, with show descriptions and category navigation and a link to the full archive. By 25 May the page was 7 KB, and the top of it was an animated GIF of television static under the words "Please stay tuned!".

Wikipedia dates the site's inactivity to 23 August 2018. The captures do not support that. The static card was up in May and it was still up through June and July, the same 7 KB page, week after week. Whoever wrote that sentence was recording the day they noticed, which is a different thing from the day it happened.

~ what got buried with it ~

No announcement was ever made. No farewell post, no explanation, nothing signed by either founder. The schedule simply stopped and the holding card went up, and then the holding card stayed up until November 2020, when the domain went dark completely.

The programming went with it. Network Awesome's value was never the video files, most of which lived on other people's servers anyway. It was the curation: somebody's judgment about which two hours of forgotten footage belonged next to each other, written down daily for seven years. Today networkawesome.com answers as a site called MATRIX HUB, a cyber dashboard with nothing to do with any of this, which is what happens to a good domain when the people holding it stop paying attention.

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