Playster

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

~ the goodbye ~

playster was one of those services i knew existed only because a good e-reader post crossed my rss reader every few months. it was a montreal outfit trying to do a very specific thing: bundle every kind of media into one subscription. books and audiobooks and movies and games, all for a single monthly fee. i was 30-something in ankara at the peak of playster's run, already deep into kindle direct-buy for english books and paper for turkish, spotify for music. i had no slot in my media stack for a canadian all-in-one bundle that was not licensed here anyway.

the company launched in 2014 as an ebook subscription service and added audiobooks in 2015 through findaway. the big win came in april 2016 when the audiobook catalog expanded to include the big five publishers, hachette and harpercollins and simon and schuster and macmillan and penguin random house, at a moment when audible was the only other place you could reliably find all five. the tv side had studio deals with paramount and cinedigm. the games side was gameloft. every category was mid-tier compared to the actual leader, but all four sat under one login for less than the cost of two of the specialist competitors.

the price was where it started to fall apart. mid-2017 the audiobook plan roughly doubled to 29.95 usd a month, or you could stay on 14.95 and lose access to more than half the catalog. i was not a subscriber but even from the outside you could tell that was a solvency move, not a pricing optimization. staff were laid off en masse in early 2019, only a few executives stayed. the apps disappeared from the app stores at the end of april 2020 and the website went dark around the same time. no press release, no shutdown post, no acquirer. accounts kept getting billed for months after the service stopped working, per trustpilot complaints, because there was nobody left inside to run the cancellation flow.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it landed ~

the pitch worked because in 2014 the media stack was already fragmented. netflix for movies, spotify for music, audible for audiobooks, kindle unlimited was brand new for books. playster's bet was that people were tired of paying five subscriptions and would take a mid-tier bundle at 25 usd instead of paying 40-50 across the individual services. it was a rational bet.

the four-vertical bundle at launch was ambitious for a montreal startup with private equity backing. audible had amazon, kindle unlimited had amazon, netflix was netflix, spotify had a war chest. playster had a small team and a couple of montreal offices in what a 2017 arch daily piece called a nicely-designed converted-warehouse space. that is what the money was going toward: office fit-out, licensing deals, marketing to compete with the vertical specialists on their own ground.

~ the decline ~

what actually broke the model was the audiobook math. audible's own economics were tight even inside amazon, and audible was a listen-one-title-per-month credit system, not unlimited. playster promised unlimited access to the same catalog for the same price and paid per-listen wholesale rates to findaway and the publishers. the more audiobook power users the service attracted, the more each subscriber cost. that is why the price doubled in 2017 and the tier system got introduced. by then the churn was already baked in.

the tv and games sides never really mattered. nobody signed up to playster for the movies, the catalog was ancient films you could find on tubi. nobody signed up for the games, gameloft was mobile casual. audiobooks were the whole business and audiobooks were the whole problem. by early 2019 the entire non-executive staff had been let go and playster was on caretaker mode.

~ the day it died ~

there was no announcement. the ios and android apps stopped working, then disappeared from the stores. the domain stopped serving the web app. good e-reader wrote it up in september 2020 basically saying "this thing appears to be gone, has anybody heard anything". quiet exit. no chapter 7, no chapter 11, no press release, no data export. subscribers found out because the app broke and the billing did not stop. the only way to cancel was to call your credit card company.

in the six years playster ran, oyster came and went (google acquihire january 2016), readmill came and went (dropbox acquihire july 2014), scribd changed the "unlimited" definition twice. the media-subscription-bundle idea did survive, but only as apple one and amazon prime, both of which had one advantage playster never had: the parent company could subsidize the bundle indefinitely. montreal's private equity backers could not.

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