Toonami Jetstream

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

~ the obituary ~

i missed jetstream the way most of the planet missed it, which is that it looked at my ip address and declined. it was licensed for the united states and nowhere else, so from turkey it was a page you could reach and a video you could not start. that was the normal condition of legal video on the web in 2006. anime specifically reached the rest of us through fansubs long before any rights holder worked out how to send it directly, and jetstream is one of the reasons why. the industry built the legal option first for one country.

it launched on 17 july 2006, a joint effort between cartoon network and viz media. the pitch was simple enough. toonami was cartoon network's action-cartoon block, it had been running on television since 1997, and jetstream put its shows on a website for free with advertising around them. this was a year and a half before hulu opened to the public.

technically it was of its moment in a way that is almost painful to read back. launch required adobe flash 8 and windows media player 10 at the same time, which meant internet explorer on windows and nothing else. mac and firefox support only arrived in early 2007. a service built to give away video had spent its first six months turning away anyone with the wrong desktop.

~ the case file ~

~ what it actually streamed ~

the catalog leaned on viz's library, so naruto was the anchor and everything else orbited it. mar and blue dragon filled out the anime side, with cartoon network's own back catalog dropped into the gaps. there were music videos and game reviews stapled on, and a comment section under the player, which in 2006 was still a slightly daring thing to put on a network property.

what it was really doing was testing whether a cable brand could exist on the open web without a cable subscription attached. the answer turned out to be yes, and that is exactly why it was dangerous internally. every free episode of naruto on a website was an argument against needing the channel at all, made by the people who owned the channel.

~ the block dies first ~

toonami itself was canceled on 20 september 2008 after eleven years on the air. that should have been the end of jetstream too, since a website named after a television block does not have much to stand on once the block is gone. it kept running anyway for another four months, which reads less like a plan and more like nobody having got round to it.

the block came back in 2012 on adult swim and is still there, which makes jetstream the odd casualty in the story. the brand survived. the website that tried to take the brand somewhere new did not.

~ the day it died ~

on 30 january 2009 the site went off permanently. there was no wind-down period and no archive. anime news network was reporting it the following day as something that had simply happened. viewers were pointed at cartoonnetwork.com's video section for naruto and at viz.com for the rest, which is a polite way of saying the collection was being broken up and handed back to whoever owned each piece.

crunchyroll went legitimate the same year and eventually became the thing jetstream was gesturing at. the difference is that crunchyroll came out of the fan side and worked its way toward licenses, while jetstream came out of a television network and worked its way toward the web. only one of those directions turned out to be survivable.

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