Sputnik7

» see sputnik7.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

sputnik7 launched in august 1999 as a streaming music video website. the pitch was that it would be MTV on the web. you would tune into curated channels for indie rock, electronic music, hip-hop, anime, and a few other niches. each channel played a continuous stream of music videos picked by editors.

i never used sputnik7. it was a US site at a time when streaming video over a turkish dial-up connection was basically impossible. i was on a 56k modem in 1999, and even an mp3 was eight minutes of phone time. a music video would have taken half an hour to buffer for thirty seconds of playback. so this is a sputnik7 grave from outside, written from articles and the small archive that survives.

sputnik7 raised real money during the dot-com bubble. by 2001 the bubble had collapsed and the company was running out of cash. the bandwidth costs were enormous. each viewer hour cost real money in raw streaming infrastructure. the ad revenue was tiny in comparison. the math never worked.

on 31 january 2003 the company shut the service down. youtube launched two years later, in february 2005, and did almost exactly what sputnik7 had been trying to do. youtube succeeded because broadband was now widespread, flash video was cheaper than realmedia, and they had the right timing.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it was ~

sputnik7 streamed music videos through your browser, mostly using realplayer (see the realplayer grave). you went to sputnik7.com, picked a channel, and the realplayer plugin opened a small video window in your browser. the video quality was bad by modern standards (320x240 at 30 frames per second was the high-quality option, and most people watched at lower bitrates).

the channels were the differentiator. instead of one big homepage of videos, sputnik7 had themed streams. indie rock channel. electronic channel. anime music videos. you tuned in to a channel like you would tune in to a radio station. the editors picked the playlist. you could not really skip ahead or pick specific videos.

the audience was tiny but devoted. sputnik7 had a small chat room and a basic forum where users discussed videos. the indie rock channel had a community of a few hundred regulars who treated it like a daily ritual. when the site shut down, those communities scattered.

~ why the timing was wrong ~

sputnik7 launched in august 1999. by that point the dot-com bubble was peaking. there was money to raise, partnerships to sign, big plans to make. the company raised in 2000 and 2001 with high valuations.

then the bubble collapsed. ad revenue dropped across the entire web. broadband adoption was slower than predicted. bandwidth costs were not coming down as fast as expected. by 2002 sputnik7 was burning through cash faster than it could raise new money. by 2003 the cash was gone.

youtube launched in february 2005, two years after sputnik7 died. by 2005 broadband was much more widespread. flash video had matured and was significantly cheaper than realmedia. youtube was also user-uploaded rather than editor-curated, which meant the catalog grew faster than any editorial team could manage. youtube's economics worked because the timing was right.

~ how it died ~

sputnik7 had several rounds of layoffs through 2002. the editorial team got smaller. some of the channels stopped getting fresh content. existing users could tell the site was running on fumes. on 31 january 2003 the service went offline. there was a small farewell post on the site explaining that bandwidth costs were no longer sustainable.

the founder, phil leigh, was a tech analyst before sputnik7 and went back to that work after. the rest of the team scattered to various other media and tech companies. some of them ended up at youtube and similar later video startups, where the timing was finally right for what they had been trying to do at sputnik7.

~ what it left ~

the case for waiting for infrastructure. sputnik7 had the right idea four years too early. the technology to make web video work for a mass audience did not exist yet. the lesson is that being first in a category is sometimes worse than being later. the company that arrives when the infrastructure is ready usually wins, even if the original idea came from someone else.

the curated music video channel as a format. sputnik7's editorial-curated streams were closer to MTV than youtube ever has been. youtube's algorithm picks what plays next based on engagement. sputnik7 had humans with taste picking the playlist. that human-curated streaming format mostly does not exist on the modern web. apple music has it for some channels. spotify has it for podcasts. the music video version is gone.

the small dedicated audience of pre-broadband video pioneers. people who used sputnik7 in 2001 to 2003 were patient. they put up with bad video quality, frequent buffering, and unreliable streams. they cared about the music more than the convenience. that audience moved on to napster, kazaa, eventually youtube. but the specific community that gathered on sputnik7's small chat rooms was a real internet subculture for three years.

@}-->--

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »