Tune.pk

» see tune.pk as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

The first version lasted fifteen days. Two brothers put a site up in 2007 to promote Pakistani music. They ran it on third party software they had no right to use, and their hosting provider removed the whole thing. What came out of that was ClipBucket, a video engine they wrote in thirty days for the single purpose of getting their own site back online. Four more relaunches followed between 2008 and 2011, each failing on something different, from inexperience to a funding gap.

The version that worked arrived in September 2012, and the reason is a date. Pakistan blocked YouTube on 17 September 2012 over a film nobody in Lahore had anything to do with, and the block held for three years and four months. Tune.pk had a player ready. By early 2013 it was taking a hundred thousand visitors a day, and in June of that year ProPakistani counted more than forty million playbacks a month across fourteen million users, a hundred thousand videos sitting on over two dozen servers in Europe. Slightly more than half the audience was outside the country.

YouTube came back to Pakistan in January 2016 and Tune.pk kept going almost six more years. Wayback stopped finding a working homepage there after 4 November 2021. The next thing the crawler found at that address, a month later on 6 December, was a short page with a heading on it in capitals: END OF CHAPTER # 1.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the ban that made it ~

A national block does not produce a local competitor by itself. Most countries that lose a service for a few weeks wait it out. Pakistan's block ran long enough that an entire layer of the local internet grew in the gap. Tune.pk built its own video delivery network and started selling pre-roll inventory to Pakistani brands at a time when almost nobody in the country was buying video advertising. Apps followed, iOS on the 2012 relaunch and Android in June 2013.

Turkey ran blocks of its own and produced nothing like it. Ankara cut YouTube off from May 2008 to October 2010 and again for ten weeks in March 2014, and what people here reached for was a workaround. During the second block the numbers for Google's public DNS servers were spray painted on walls in Istanbul so strangers could copy them down. Forty months of a total ban is what it took in Pakistan before somebody built the alternative instead.

~ eleven million videos ~

The closing notice is still served from tune.pk and it is unusually honest for the form. It announces that the company is officially closing the existing system, meaning the part of it that hosted and streamed video. Under a heading reading WHY?, it says: "We got bored & Tired." Under the next heading it says there were over eleven million videos, and that the user generated content was removed because it was costly to preserve and then to secure. Registered users were promised one last email about the takedown of their accounts.

Nothing was handed over and nothing was migrated, which means nine years of uploads from a country that had nowhere else to put them were deleted to save a storage bill. The page then pitches Vodlix, the white label video platform the same company sells to anyone who wants to run their own, and signs off with a line about seeing you in the metaverse.

~ the engine outlived the site ~

ClipBucket was written as an emergency measure in 2007 and ended up as open source infrastructure for other people's video sites long after Tune.pk had stopped mattering to anyone outside Pakistan. Its public repository was archived by its owner on 1 December 2022, a year after the site it was built to rescue went dark. The rescue tool got a dated, deliberate ending. The thing it rescued got a sentence about being bored.

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