PORT.ro

» see port.ro as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

PORT.ro never reached Turkey and had no reason to. It was a Romanian-language listings site for a Romanian television grid, and the entire value of the thing was knowing precisely which of 243 channels was showing what tonight, in that country. There is no less portable product category on the internet.

It went online in June 1996, which puts it among the oldest commercial websites in Romania and roughly two years ahead of my own first modem. It was the Romanian edition of a network run out of Hungary, where port.hu had been doing the same job. By the middle of the 2000s it carried schedules for 243 television channels and a film database that had gone past a hundred and ten thousand titles. Cinema programs for the whole country sat beside it, along with a restaurant list of around eighteen hundred entries.

The traffic was not small. Roughly a million unique visitors a month and better than twelve million page views, in a country of about twenty million people. For a listings site that is somewhere close to saturation, and it is the number that makes the ending strange.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the business under the listings ~

The public site was never the product. Compiling an accurate program grid for 243 channels is expensive, repetitive work that has to be redone every single day, and once you are doing it anyway you can sell the output. PORT.ro sold its data to the Romanian pay television operators, so the schedule you scrolled through on a Dolce or UPC set-top box was very often the same schedule the website was showing you.

The content also went out to other Romanian portals under syndication, which is why film descriptions in the same house voice turned up on sites that had nothing to do with each other. The website was the shop window. The feed was the shop.

~ the day it closed ~

On 11 January 2017 the site put up a short notice: this site has been closed as of 11 January 2017, thank you for being with us and for your loyalty. That was the whole obituary, in the second person, addressed to a million people a month.

The stated reason was that the consumer sites were not economically profitable. Four national editions went at once, and the group kept only the Hungarian original. The company did not fold. It carried on in the content supply business, which had been the real one all along, and simply stopped paying for a public address that generated goodwill instead of invoices.

~ the sibling that outlived it ~

port.hu is still up in 2026, still listing what is on Hungarian television tonight, thirty years after the network started. The Romanian arm of exactly the same product has been gone for nine years and its domain now answers with nothing at all.

The difference was not the software or the editorial. It was that one market was big enough to carry the fixed cost of compiling a grid every day and the other was not. That is the ordinary way regional internet products die, and it almost never gets written down, because a listings site closing in Bucharest is not a story anyone outside Bucharest was going to file.

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