Reeltime.tv

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

~ the obituary ~

ReelTime Media was a Melbourne company that decided Australia should stop being last in line. The industry practice of the time was to put a film in American shops and let the rest of the world wait months for it, and ReelTime's whole reason for existing was to break that queue with a download. It claimed to be the first company anywhere outside the United States to sell a major Hollywood studio's title for download on the same day the disc reached retail shelves.

The company was formed in 2005 and listed on the Australian Securities Exchange in April 2006, which is early for a business whose product barely worked yet. A beta service opened in November 2006 and the commercial launch followed in February 2007. Beyond films, the store sold television episodes and games, and it also ran a conventional online shop for discs, because a download business in 2007 needed something that shipped.

By September 2007 the market capitalization sat around ten million Australian dollars and Sony had taken a stake of roughly eight percent. That was as good as it got. Five months later ReelTime Infotainment, the subsidiary that actually ran the service, was handed to voluntary administrators on 11 February 2008.

~ the case file ~

~ what it actually sold ~

The technical pitch was progressive download. You started a film and it began playing within a few minutes rather than after the whole file arrived, which in 2007 was a genuine selling point and also a promise the network underneath was rarely able to keep. ReelTime pushed content to PCs and to a set-top box it called the ReelTime Media Centre, and it held an Australian carrier license so it could work across internet providers instead of being locked to one.

Australia in 2007 was not a good country in which to sell people gigabytes. Most households were on ADSL plans with monthly download caps measured in single-digit gigabytes, and a feature film ate a meaningful fraction of the month. A store selling large files to customers who were metered on large files has a ceiling built into it, and ReelTime hit that ceiling before it ever hit a copyright problem.

~ the distance ~

Turkey had no equivalent of this and would not for years. Legal film downloads did not arrive here in any real form until the streaming services showed up much later, and the idea of buying a film as a file to keep never took hold at all. What ReelTime was fighting, the delay between an American release and a local one, was a fight Turkish audiences settled a different way entirely in that decade, and it did not involve a store.

~ the administrators ~

EzyDVD, which had been a retail partner, bought the assets out of administration and turned them into a service called EzyDownload. The listed shell sat dormant on the ASX for about five years before it was reused, starting in 2012, as a vehicle for buying digital marketing companies. The listing outlasted the product it was floated to fund by about a decade.

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