tape.tv

» see tape.tv as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

For seven years Germany had a broken YouTube. GEMA, the collecting society that handles songwriters' rights there, and Google could not agree on what a stream was worth, so a large share of the music catalog answered with a notice instead of a video: this video is not available in Germany. Germans got very used to that sentence. Some of them got used to proxies. A few companies saw a market.

tape.tv went online on 1 July 2008, out of a Berlin company founded the previous October by Conrad Fritzsch, Stephanie Renner and Alexander Mackat. The proposition was simple and completely legal. Around 45,000 music videos sat behind proper licenses from all four majors plus the independent distributors, and watching them cost nothing because advertising paid for it. It was programmed like a television channel rather than presented like a search box, with editorial shows and hosts. A January 2010 relaunch added the personalization that let you steer it.

It worked for a while. IVW counted 11.1 million visitors in 2011, its best year. Staff went from 35 to 85 people. A Series B in May 2012 brought in five million euros. The company won a Deutscher Multimedia Award for an advertising format it invented called 360°MotionAd, and picked up Webby recognition on the way.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the german hole ~

Turkey knows what a blocked YouTube looks like, but for entirely different reasons. Here the whole site went dark by court order, from 2008 to 2010 and again for part of 2014, and the argument was about content and the law rather than about royalty rates. There was no business to build on that, because nobody could license their way around a ban and the workaround everybody used was a DNS setting passed around on forums.

Germany's version was commercial, per-video and permanent-looking, which is exactly the shape a startup can build a company inside. tape.tv did that, and the risk was on the table from day one. Licensing disputes get settled. This one took seven years.

~ twenty-two days ~

The decline had already started. IVW's numbers fell to 8.9 million visitors in 2012, then 3.9 million in 2013, then 2.2 million by September 2014. That October the company cut back to about 20 people.

On 1 November 2016 YouTube and GEMA announced a deal, backdated to 2009 and running to April 2019. Thousands of music videos unblocked in Germany on the same day. On 14 November tape.tv filed for insolvency at the Amtsgericht Berlin-Charlottenburg with fifteen employees left. The company's own statement said a new investor had walked away after several weeks of productive work without giving a reason, and that in capitalism this means you have reached the final stop.

On 23 November the site stopped redirecting to its own homepage and started answering with a single page. Kurz gesagt: wir machen dicht. More information on our Facebook page. A look back at the history of tape.tv will follow here later. It never did.

~ what got buried with it ~

The brand was picked up out of the insolvency by Appolicious Inc and never used for anything anyone noticed. The German trademark registration lapsed in 2018. The domain answers a 436 today, which is nobody's idea of a farewell.

What actually died was the format. tape.tv was one of the last serious attempts to program music videos at you rather than let you pick, which is what MTV had done before it and what nothing has really done since. The videos are all on YouTube now, unblocked, in an order you choose yourself.

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