Qubit.tv

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

~ the goodbye ~

Netflix reached Latin America in 2011. So did Qubit.tv, out of Argentina, in the same year, and for the next thirteen it sold the part of cinema the American service was never going to bother licensing. Argentine features and festival titles, the kind of catalog a regional distributor can assemble because they already know everybody holding the rights.

It grew into Uruguay, Paraguay, Chile and Colombia and got past 150,000 subscribers, which is a serious number for a service selling auteur cinema in one language. You could subscribe or rent a single film, with a limited free tier sitting underneath both. Separately, Qubit built and ran white label video platforms for telephone companies and cable operators who wanted something extra to hand their own customers.

That second business is probably what kept the first one breathing as long as it did. Qubit had been supplying video infrastructure to the region's telcos since before most of them had a video product of their own, and that work does not depend on taking subscribers off anybody.

~ the chronicle ~

~ who it was actually for ~

The landing page in its later years carried film critics by name and photograph. Diego Lerer, Javier Porta Fouz and Santiago García, people Argentine readers actually check before deciding what to watch, sat on the front of the site as recommendation engines with faces on them. There was no algorithm doing that job and no trailer firing at you on mouseover.

Argentina is one of the few countries in the region that could sustain a business shaped like this, with a domestic film industry and an audience raised on subtitles. Qubit was built to the size of that audience and never had much room past it.

~ no announcement ~

From late 2023 people noticed the catalog thinning and the site going stale. Titles left and nothing replaced them. In June 2024 the traffic figures collapsed and the platform stopped answering, with no closing post and no email to subscribers. The regional trade press eventually got hold of executives who confirmed the service had been deactivated, and that confirmation is the only public record of the shutdown there is.

Curl qubit.tv now and you get nothing at all, not a parking page, not a redirect to a buyer. None of this is first hand for me. A Spanish language art house service in the Southern Cone was never going to reach a house in Ankara, and I am reading it in the regional trade press like everybody else outside those five countries. It lasted thirteen years against Netflix and then went out the door without a word to the hundred and fifty thousand people who had paid.

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