SceneOne

» see sceneone.co.uk as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

In 1999 a British entertainment guide did not have to pick one screen. SceneOne ran on the open web and it ran inside the Telewest cable box. Its listings also went out over Orange's WAP portal at a moment when a phone showing you cinema times was genuinely novel. Flextech Television built it in February 1999 and then kept adding surfaces until it was on almost every distribution channel a cable company controlled.

The content was straightforward. Cinema and television listings alongside concerts and theatre, aggregated and reviewed in one place with tickets for sale on the side. The word used at the time was portal. What it actually was is the thing your phone does now for free, built by a cable company, funded by hope.

There was a television channel too. It was announced in 1999 and launched in June 2000, running twenty four hours a day for Telewest subscribers with shows called The Film Scene and The Gig Scene. It closed in March 2001 after nine months. The Guardian reported speculation that viewing figures were low and that Flextech had failed to get the channel carried on Sky Digital. SceneOne's general manager denied both.

The site outlived the channel by a year. Flextech announced the closure in March 2002 and pulled the plug on 4 April 2002, putting eighteen jobs at risk. The Register got the reason on the record from a Flextech spokeswoman: the site had failed to generate sufficient e-commerce revenues to support the business. That is a very 2002 sentence.

None of this reached me. Every surface SceneOne lived on was British infrastructure, and I was in Ankara on a 56k modem and a Turkish ISP. You could not dial into another country's cable walled garden. The open web version was technically reachable and completely pointless, because it listed which cinema in Manchester was showing what on Thursday.

~ the dossier ~

~ the walled garden ~

The reason SceneOne is worth remembering is the shape of its distribution rather than the site itself. Around 2000 the cable operators believed the internet was going to be delivered through them, curated, on a television. Telewest and Cable and Wireless both carried SceneOne inside their walled gardens, where subscribers browsed a small approved set of services with a remote control instead of the whole web with a mouse.

Flextech pushed the same brand onto Sky Digital as well, through the Open interactive shopping service, selling tickets to satellite viewers. So the same entertainment guide was simultaneously a website, a cable channel, an interactive shopping section on a rival platform and a WAP menu. Nobody was sure yet which of those would win, so the answer was to be in all of them.

~ the funny part ~

The open web won, and then the guide business went to Google and to the venues themselves. SceneOne was killed by being early to a model that turned out not to need a middleman with a cable contract. Its parent survived under a new name. Living TV Group went into Virgin Media with the Telewest merger and was sold on to Sky in 2010.

Almost nothing of it is left online. The domain went and the archive is patchy. The only reason there is a dated record at all is that a trade press item about eighteen jobs happened to be filed the week it closed. Most of the cable walled garden era vanished the same way, because nothing inside a set top box was ever crawled.

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