TheWB.com

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

~ the goodbye ~

TheWB.com checked where you were before it played anything, and Turkey was the wrong answer. That is the entire distance in one sentence. The catalog was famous enough that the shows reached here by other routes and other schedules, but the site itself was a closed door with a polite message on it.

The setup is odd enough to be worth stating plainly. The WB Television Network stopped broadcasting in September 2006, merged into what became The CW, and eighteen months later Warner Bros brought the brand back as a website. Not as a channel. As a free, advertising-supported video site carrying the network's own reruns.

It went into beta on 28 April 2008 and launched properly on 27 August. You could watch full episodes from the 1995 to 2006 run, so Gilmore Girls, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Dawson's Creek, Friends and The O.C. Charmed and Felicity were missing because their distribution rights sat with somebody else, which is the kind of hole that tells you exactly what these deals looked like.

Craig Erwich ran it out of Warner Horizon Television, aiming at viewers between 15 and 39. The economics were the Hulu economics of that moment: a studio putting its library online itself rather than watching it appear somewhere else for free.

~ the chronicle ~

~ a network with no channel ~

Alongside the reruns it commissioned original serials, built as ten-episode runs of five-minute episodes. Sorority Forever premiered on 8 September 2008. There was also The Lake, Rockville CA, Pushed, and an early version of Childrens Hospital that later had a much longer life on television.

Five minutes an episode is a format decision made by people guessing at how the web would be watched, and it was a reasonable guess in 2008. It was also the guess that everybody made, and almost none of the web-serial experiments from that window survived their own network.

~ the geoblock ~

The site would not serve anybody outside the United States. That was not an oversight, it was the licensing: Warner Bros could put its library online for free in one territory because it had already sold that library into every other territory separately.

This is the shape most of the 2008 streaming wave had, and it is why the era reads so differently depending on where you were sitting. In America the story is studios experimenting with free video. Everywhere else the story is a wall, and then a decade later the same catalogs arriving as subscriptions.

~ where the url points now ~

It carried In2TV's library too, the AOL classic-television service that predated the Time Warner and AOL split, so TheWB.com was already a graveyard with a second graveyard inside it.

The CW eventually built its own digital arm, CW Seed, and there was no argument for running two of them. The website closed in December 2013 and the addresses were redirected to cwtv.com, which is how a brand name gets used up. The network stopped first, then the website carrying the name stopped, and now the name resolves to somebody else's homepage.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »