NimbleTV

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

~ the goodbye ~

NimbleTV was built for the person who was not in the same room as their television. That was the entire product. You paid a New York cable company every month, you were somewhere that was not New York, and NimbleTV moved the channels you had already bought onto whatever screen was actually with you.

The commercial service opened in New York in December 2013 in two shapes. If you already had a subscription with one of the big local operators, NimbleTV logged into the operator's own web portal to confirm the account was real, then relayed twenty-four channels to you anywhere on earth. If you had no subscription at all, it went and bought one on your behalf and streamed up to a hundred and thirty channels back. Recording was close to unlimited, because the recording happened in a data center rather than under anyone's television.

By the middle of 2014 there were roughly eighty thousand subscribers and an announced plan to add Chicago. The money behind it was small for the ambition, at least six million dollars with the Tribune Company among the investors, which is a rounding error against what a television licensing fight costs.

None of this was pointed at me. My television and the subscription that fed it were in the same country I was, and Turkish pay television in those years meant Digitürk or D-Smart, sold to people sitting in front of their own boxes. NimbleTV was a product for the person who had moved away and still wanted the channels from home. That is a genuine ache. It is not one I have had.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the beta ~

The idea went public in April 2012, when NimbleTV showed a New York beta and said a full launch was a few months out. It took nineteen. The delay was not engineering. Every month the company spent talking to operators and programmers was a month of explaining that it was not stealing anything.

The press liked it more than the industry did. There was a Tribeca Disruptive Innovation Award in 2013 and an Edison nomination in 2014, awards that go to companies with a clean argument rather than to companies with a signed contract.

~ the legal argument ~

Anand Subramanian made the case in public every time somebody asked. Aereo was capturing broadcast signals off the air and selling them to people who had paid nobody. NimbleTV was different, the argument went, because nobody in the chain lost a dollar: the operator kept the subscription and the programmer kept its carriage fee. The customer was only watching what they had already bought.

That argument is coherent and it did not matter. Television rights are sold by territory, and a service whose selling point is that territory no longer applies is a problem for the people who drew the map, whoever pays whom. When the Supreme Court finished Aereo in June 2014, every company doing anything adjacent got read as the next defendant. NimbleTV was never sued into the ground. It was simply never licensed, which for a business built on other people's channels is the same outcome arriving more quietly.

~ the twelfth of january ~

At CES on 5 January 2015, Dish announced Sling TV: twenty dollars a month with no cable subscription underneath it, and every contract already signed. It was the thing NimbleTV had been trying to reach by the side door, done by a company that owned the front door.

Seven days later NimbleTV told subscribers the service would stop on 12 January and that it would concentrate on developing something better and more amazing than before, to relaunch later in the year. On 14 January, Synacor announced it had bought the technology and thirteen employees, and clarified that the consumer business was discontinued and would not return. There was no relaunch. The people who had been watching New York television from the other side of the world went back to not watching it.

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