Pandora TV

» see pandora.tv as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

pandora.tv never reached turkey at meaningful scale. it was a korean-language product for a korean audience, and by the time i was on ttnet broadband looking at video sites, youtube handled everything else. i learned the name years later going through archiveteam's list of dead video hosts, and it stayed a footnote until i went looking for what killed it.

peter kim founded pandora tv in october 2004 in seoul. this was seven months before youtube went live in the us. korea already had broadband penetration higher than anywhere in the world by then, so a video-sharing site had a real market to run at from day one. pandora shipped with two features nobody else had yet: unlimited upload storage, and a revenue-share model where uploaders got a cut of ad money if their videos were popular. youtube did not have either of those in 2005. it took youtube until 2007 to launch its partner program.

the growth was fast. pandora tv was the fastest-growing korean website by 2007. by 2008 it had 3.6 million members and around 35 percent of the domestic video-sharing market, which for a country of 50 million was a real position. altos ventures and dcm put $16 million in over two rounds in 2006 and 2007, silicon valley money betting on a non-anglo video site (or whatever it was called back then).

~ the record ~

~ the early days ~

what pandora had that youtube did not was a business model that made uploaders feel like partners. really. small korean tv clips, k-drama fan edits, music videos, and eventually a lot of user-generated variety-show content lived on pandora because uploaders could get paid. youtube's revenue-share program came later and was more restrictive in its early years. korean users who wanted to make video content and see any income from it went to pandora.

the platform also allowed longer uploads than youtube's ten-minute cap in the mid 2000s, which was a big deal for full-episode content. that permissiveness on length, combined with weaker enforcement on copyrighted uploads in the 2005-2009 window, made pandora a place where a lot of pirated tv sat quietly for years. that helped growth in the short term and hurt the platform's licensing options later.

~ the day it died ~

the decline was long. youtube korea launched in january 2008 and started pulling korean uploaders into the global platform. the local competition from naver tv and daum tv (later kakaotv) chewed at the domestic market. by the mid 2010s pandora was small enough that the founder pivoted the parent company toward decentralized-film distribution, launching moviebloc on the blockchain in 2018 as a hedge against the video-sharing side dying.

it took another four years. in december 2022 pandora announced the video-sharing service would terminate on 31 january 2023, citing unsustainable operations against ongoing competition. users had until midnight on 31 january to download their uploads. after that everything was permanently discarded. no export tool, no partial-preservation offer, no successor archive from the company itself. archiveteam ran a preservation crawl in the last weeks and pulled what it could.

~ the long tail ~

pandora.tv now redirects to moviebloc, which is a real product but not the same shape at all. [[acfun]] and youku and tudou form the chinese equivalent of the non-anglo video-portal graveyard from the same era. [[metacafe]] and [[revver]] and [[blip-tv]] were the anglo second-tier that also lost to youtube. pandora sits with them in category, but it beat youtube to two of the features youtube got famous for and never got credit for either. the first video site to pay its uploaders got outlived by nineteen years by the copycat that made revenue-share a global product.

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