Rapidvideo

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

~ the obit ~

Rapidvideo was plumbing. What it had instead of an audience was an embed code, and the pirate streaming sites of the middle 2010s used that embed code to serve the actual video files while they handled the listings and the advertising themselves. It shows up in the Wayback record at rapidvideo.ws from December 2014. If you clicked play on a film at some site with a name like a domain registrar's autocomplete in 2017, there was a decent chance the bytes came from Rapidvideo.

That position made it a target, and specifically a better target than the sites linking to it. The Motion Picture Association and the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment came to it with demands rather than a writ at first: implement take-down-and-stay-down, and build Content-ID style fingerprinting so that anything the studios had identified once could never be uploaded again. Warner Bros. and Netflix separately filed suit in Germany.

On 21 October 2019 the operator shut it down, effective immediately. He used the name Alex Bytes and he was fairly candid about the calculation. Advertising revenue had been falling, the anti-piracy engineering the studios wanted would have cost real money to build, and the EU Copyright Directive was about to make hosts liable in a way they had not been before. He told TorrentFreak that by shutting down, the lawyers have no more reason to fight in the court against him.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the demand ~

The interesting thing about the ACE approach here is that it was not asking for money. It was asking Rapidvideo to become an enforcement contractor for the studios, at Rapidvideo's own expense, in perpetuity. Content fingerprinting at upload time is genuinely expensive infrastructure, and YouTube's version of it took years and a very large budget to reach the state it is in.

For a host running on ad revenue that was already declining, that demand had exactly one possible answer. The studios presumably knew that, which is why the demand works as a shutdown mechanism whether or not the host ever agrees to it.

~ article 17 ~

The Copyright Directive got through the European Parliament in March 2019 and the contested clause, known for years during the fight as Article 13, was renumbered to Article 17 in the final text. Its effect was to make platforms liable for infringing uploads rather than safe as long as they responded to takedowns, which reverses the assumption every file host built on.

Alex Bytes named this directly as part of his reasoning, and he was reading it correctly. A host in Germany in 2019 was looking at a legal regime where the old defense would stop working within a couple of years, and he was being sued by two of the largest plaintiffs available in the meantime.

~ the day it died ~

Seven years on, rapidvideo.com does not resolve at all. The rapidvid.to address that the service also used answers, but what it serves now is a domain parking page, with a comment in the source explaining that the referrer is being set so the domain marketplace can attribute the visit. Both halves of the name are inventory.

By 2019 I was thirty-five and working as an engineer, and the streaming question in Turkey had been settled by Netflix, which launched here in 2016 and priced itself to be affordable. That is the part of this story that gets left out when a host like Rapidvideo closes: a large share of the people using it stopped because a legal option finally existed where they lived, not because a German court did anything.

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