Sezmi

~ the last words ~

Sezmi was built to solve an American problem, and that is the honest reason it is not my grave to tell from the inside. The pitch was a hundred-dollar cable bill you could not get out of without losing television altogether. In Turkey the terrestrial channels came out of the air for nothing and the pay tier was a separate purchase with its own logic. The pain Sezmi was selling relief from was not a pain I had.

The company was founded in 2007 by Phil Wiser and Buno Pati under the name Building B, which is the sort of placeholder that suggests the product was decided on after the funding. What they eventually shipped was a set-top box with a terabyte drive and a smart antenna, the antenna doing real work in fringe reception areas where broadcast television is theoretically free and practically a mess of ghosting.

The idea underneath it was sound and is now completely ordinary. One box and one guide, with broadcast television and internet video sitting next to each other and nobody having to know or care which pipe anything arrived through. Every television sold today does that. Sezmi was doing it in 2010 with a set-top and a hardware bill of about a hundred and fifty dollars.

~ the record ~

~ the pitch ~

There were two tiers and the gap between them is the whole story. Sezmi Select was $4.99 a month across thirty-six markets, and what it gave you was the over-the-air channels recorded properly with internet video on demand next to them. Sezmi Select Plus was $19.99 and added actual pay-television channels, and it only ever launched in Los Angeles.

That is not a rollout schedule, it is a wall. Carriage rights are the business, and buying channels wholesale to resell them at twenty dollars requires a subscriber count large enough for the networks to take the call. Sezmi needed scale to get the channels and needed the channels to get scale. The five-dollar tier that did scale to thirty-six markets was the version of the product with nothing in it that people were leaving cable to keep.

~ the funny part ~

Customers were notified on 23 September 2011 that the service ended on the 26th, which is three days. The statement said the company had changed its business focus to providing its platform to service providers instead, which is the standard way of saying that the consumer product was the experiment and the experiment had concluded.

KIT digital bought the assets in January 2012 for $27 million, sixteen in cash and eleven in stock, picking up eighteen patents in the process. Later that year Totalmovie bought Sezmi off KIT digital. KIT digital itself filed for bankruptcy in 2013. The asset changed hands twice inside twelve months and the buyer went under the year after, which is roughly what happens to a set-top platform once the company that believed in it is gone.

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