Ripe Digital Entertainment

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

~ the obit ~

Around 2005 a reasonable person in American television could look at the cable set-top box and see the future sitting right there. Tens of millions of homes already had one, and the on-demand menu was already wired up and already billed. Nobody had yet made programming specifically for it. Ripe Digital Entertainment was founded in Los Angeles to do that, aimed at men between eighteen and thirty-four, and it raised real money on the idea from Hearst-Argyle, Time Warner Investments, Columbia Capital and Rho Ventures.

RipeTV launched in October 2005. Octane TV followed in August 2006 with automotive programming and Flow TV in April 2007 with hip-hop. The three channels went out on the large cable video-on-demand systems, Comcast and Time Warner Cable, with Verizon's FiOS carrying them on the telco side, and the same clips were syndicated through the AOL and Yahoo ad networks, and through Google's. Ryan Magnussen was chief executive.

Not one of those carriers reached the country I live in. Turkish cable in 2006 had no on-demand section to put a channel on, so the entire delivery mechanism this company was built around was simply absent, and the short video I did watch in those years came down a TTNet line into a browser tab. The distance here is infrastructural.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the set-top bet ~

The timing is what makes this one legible. RipeTV launched eight months after YouTube did, into the same demand for short video aimed at young men, and it put its content behind a remote control and a cable subscription instead of a URL. The syndication deals show the company understood the web existed. It just treated the web as a marketing channel for the thing on the cable box, which was exactly backwards for the four years that followed.

Carriage on Comcast was the asset a company like this was valued on in 2005. By 2009 the asset was an audience, and an audience that has to find you inside a menu built by someone else is not an audience you own.

~ reported, not announced ~

There was no farewell. On 16 June 2009 SoCalTech wrote that the Los Angeles company had shut down, crediting Deadline Hollywood Daily, and noted that details were scarce and that the firm was reportedly looking for buyers. All three networks ended that month. A company that had taken money from two large media investors got, for an obituary, a short trade-blog item reporting that nobody could get more information out of it.

~ the live namesake ~

ripedigital.com has no DNS left. One caution for anyone checking this row: a startup database still lists an active Los Angeles business under the Ripe Digital name, and it is a digital marketing agency, registered later, holding no relationship to the cable networks at all. Read that listing as a reused name rather than as a revival.

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