Target Ticket

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

~ the obit ~

Target has never opened a store in Turkey, and Target Ticket would not have sold me anything if it had. Film rights get drawn along national borders, so a US retailer's video service is one of the cleanest examples of a thing that simply does not exist where you are standing. I know what a Target is the way i know what a Sears was, from other people's television.

It launched across the United States on 13 September 2013 with more than 30,000 movies and TV episodes, sold or rented rather than streamed on subscription. The pitch was family-friendly: Target leaned on Common Sense Media ratings inside the product, and the press release used the word family more than once. Rentals ran $3.99 to $4.99 and purchases $14.99 to $19.99, which is to say it was priced at exactly what iTunes already charged.

Technically it did the right things. It was platform-agnostic by design, with apps on Roku boxes, Samsung smart TVs, Xbox consoles and both phone platforms, and purchases were locked to UltraViolet rather than to Target itself.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the rental window ~

The catalog was not the problem. By late 2013 iTunes and Amazon had the top of the transactional video market locked, and Vudu already occupied the exact slot Target was reaching for: the big-box retailer who also sells you the movie. Walmart had bought Vudu in 2010 and spent three years building it out. Target arrived in 2013 with the same idea and no head start.

Word came in February 2015 that the service would close the following month. Less than eighteen months after launch, Target was out of the digital video business.

~ where the purchases went ~

On 7 March 2015 Target Ticket stopped selling. Because the library had been built on UltraViolet, most of what customers had bought was portable by design, and Target arranged two landing places: CinemaNow took the general catalog, and Disney titles moved to Disney Movies Anywhere with unlock codes sent by email. If a film you owned was not supported anywhere, you could ask for store credit instead.

Rentals were the exception. A rental is a clock, and the clock does not transfer, so anyone who had paid $4.99 for something and not gotten around to watching it before the closing date got nothing back.

targetticket.com still resolves. It sends you to target.com, where you can buy a physical disc.

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