Nook Video

» see nook.com/video as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

nook video did not reach turkey at meaningful scale. it was a US-and-UK product tied to the barnes and noble nook tablet ecosystem, which itself did not sell in continental europe or anywhere in the mediterranean. i knew nook existed the way i knew kobo existed, from techcrunch and the ambient background of the american ebook wars, and never saw one in person. the video store that lived inside it was even further away, a movie rental storefront running on a device barnes and noble sold in the US and britain for four years.

barnes and noble launched the nook color in november 2010 as its first backlit tablet product, then the nook tablet in 2011. the nook hd and nook hd+ shipped in october 2012, with the hd+ hitting a 9-inch 1920x1280 display that was above the ipad 2's resolution at the time. those devices came pre-configured to sell not just books but also video, alongside magazines and apps that had shipped in earlier rounds. nook video was the last of those storefronts to launch and the shortest-lived.

the video store carried disney and universal on the film side, HBO plus other cable content for tv. rentals or purchases at market prices, with both offline downloads and online streaming supported. in the UK it also partnered with curzon home cinema for arthouse titles. all fine as a feature, all wildly underscaled against amazon instant video and vudu on any competing android tablet or roku box.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it was ~

the strategic problem was that barnes and noble as a book retailer had no compelling video-store advantage. amazon owned the video-store-plus-tablet integration and had spent billions building out the prime video catalog. barnes and noble spent whatever it could afford, which was much less. the nook video interface was fine, the catalog was decent within its licensing window, none of it moved consumer preference.

in june 2014 barnes and noble signed the samsung deal that would rebrand the tablet line as the samsung galaxy tab nook. the hardware side of nook became a samsung product with barnes and noble software preinstalled. that transition specifically cut nook video out. samsung already had its own video store on the galaxy tab, and there was no reason to keep two competing storefronts on the same device. by 2015 the writing was on the wall.

~ the day it died ~

barnes and noble announced on 8 march 2016 that the whole video business was closing. new rentals and new purchases stopped on 15 march 2016 in both the US and the UK, on the same day the entire UK nook digital operation shut down alongside it. UK customers were told their libraries would sync down for offline access. purchased-title migration was handled through cinemanow, with credit issued for anything cinemanow could not carry. disney titles went across to disney movies anywhere.

on 30 april 2016 the video service went fully dark. streaming and re-downloads both stopped, and login itself started returning 404. the standalone nook video mobile app was pulled from google play. every device that had a nook video app onboard kept the shortcut icon and got a broken page when tapped. any title that had not been claimed on cinemanow by that date was gone from the customer's reach permanently, though the store credit remained for as long as the cinemanow account stayed active. cinemanow itself was acquired by fandangonow later that year and eventually shut down in 2019, which pulled the second-life migration path down as well.

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