Struum

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

~ the obit ~

By 2021 everyone had noticed the same thing: the streaming bill had gotten out of hand, and the fifth or sixth service you were paying for was one you opened twice a year. Struum's answer was to stop selling subscriptions. You paid $4.99 a month, received an allowance of credits, and spent them one at a time on individual films and episodes drawn from around fifty small services, the specialist catalogs that had no chance of winning a slot on anybody's home screen. The press called it ClassPass for streaming and the company did not argue.

The people behind it had the right resumes. Four executives out of Disney and Discovery founded the company in April 2020, Michael Eisner put money in through his Tornante firm, Nancy Tellem sat on the board, and Corus Entertainment led a $7 million round in November 2021, six months after the US launch on 25 May. The partner list at launch ran to about fifty catalogs, with BBC Select and Cinedigm among them.

None of that reached anyone outside the United States. Struum launched as a US preview and never left it, so from Turkey the entire thing was a press release, and by the time you might have read a second article about it there was nothing running to sign up for.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the credits ~

The mechanic was the interesting part. A credit bought you a piece of content rather than a month of access, which meant the unit of purchase matched how people actually watch the long tail: one documentary, one series somebody recommended, and then nothing from that catalog for a year. For a small service, being sampled is better than being canceled, and the pitch to partners was that Struum would send them money and viewers they would never have found alone.

The pitch to viewers was the same trick in reverse. You got to be curious without committing $6.99 a month to your curiosity.

~ the wrong year for it ~

Struum launched into the exact moment the industry decided aggregation was the enemy. Every studio wanted its own app with its own subscriber count to show investors, and a service whose whole reason for existing was that you should not have to subscribe was a hard thing to sell into that room. The specialist catalogs signed up because they had nothing to lose. The ones with leverage did not need to.

Then the money market turned. The streaming correction of 2022 arrived while Struum was raising, and a small company with a clever pricing model and no scale was exactly the shape of thing that stopped getting funded that year.

~ what nobody announced ~

The collapse is documented because Matthew Keys at The Desk went and reported it a year later. Executives had warned partners in the spring of 2022 that the company would run out of cash by summer. In early June it did, and the staff stopped being paid. In July the homepage broke on a corrupted database and content partners started withdrawing their libraries. Over that summer the technology vendors stopped supporting it, the apps began freezing, and by August they did not work at all.

The website went fully dark in early 2023 and the domain was later picked up by an Indonesian casino site. CEO Lauren DeVillier stepped down in February 2023, which is the date the encyclopedia records as the end. The service had already been dead for half a year by then, without a farewell page, a refund notice, or a last email to anyone holding unspent credits.

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