SublimeVideo

» see sublimevideo.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

In January 2010 web video was two incompatible answers to the same question. Flash owned the desktop and could not run on the iPhone, the HTML5 video tag existed in the specification and in nobody's shipping product, and every publisher was being told to bet on one of them. What people actually wanted to see was whether a native video player could look like a real piece of software instead of a gray rectangle with a play triangle in it.

Jilion answered that on 26 January 2010 by tweeting a link to a demo. It was an HTML5 player with custom controls, a scrub bar that behaved, and a full-screen transition that did not feel like a downgrade from Flash. The demo page went past a million visitors. The company behind it was a small team at the EPFL Innovation Park in Lausanne, set up the year before by Zeno Crivelli and Mehdi Aminian, and the plan had only been to show what they could build.

By April they had decided to turn it into a business, and the shape they picked is the interesting part. Rather than sell a player you download and then stop updating, SublimeVideo served the player from Jilion's own infrastructure. Browser support changed underneath you constantly in those years, and a customer who had paid once in 2011 kept getting the fixes without touching their own markup. Paid plans opened on 30 March 2011 after a six-month beta, starting at $9.90 a month, with Media Molecule and the makers of Camera+ among the names on the launch page.

Dailymotion bought the company in December 2013. The French video platform wanted the HTML5 engineering for its own player, which it was rebuilding at the time, and it got a team that had already shipped more than fifty transparent updates to other people's sites.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what the demo proved ~

The argument SublimeVideo settled was not technical. Everybody already knew the video tag worked. What nobody had shown was that a browser-native player could be built to the standard of a designed product, with the controls and the loading behavior and the fullscreen handling all finished rather than merely functional. Once one existed, the case for shipping Flash to a desktop browser got noticeably weaker, and it kept getting weaker every year after.

~ the exit ~

The service kept running under Dailymotion ownership for most of two years, which is longer than these arrangements usually last. The site stayed at roughly six kilobytes of real marketing page through the summer of 2015, selling plans, with no banner and no warning on it.

Then it stopped. The last capture of the working site is 12 September 2015 at 06:26 UTC. The replacement page that sits at the same address carries a Last-Modified header of the same day at 15:32:35 UTC, so the switch was thrown that Saturday afternoon, nine hours after the Internet Archive last saw anything for sale.

~ a saturday afternoon ~

The page is 1,271 bytes. It has the wordmark at the top, then one line reading "SublimeVideo has officially been shut down", then a second line telling former users they can download their player's files from a link. There is no thank you, no founder letter, and no date anywhere on it. It sat there unchanged into 2016 and then went away.

Both domains are occupied now. sublimevideo.net and jilion.com each serve the same search-engine content farm about Mac media players, written by somebody with no connection to any of this.

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