TurboNick

» see nick.com/all_nick/turbonick as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

I turned twenty-one the summer TurboNick launched. That is the first reason it was never going to be mine, and the smaller of the two: this was a video service for American children, geoblocked to the United States, delivered over a connection profile that did not exist in Turkey in 2005. I was on a Turkish broadband line that could just about handle a page of images.

What Nickelodeon built was more interesting than the audience implies. On 1 July 2005 it relaunched a popup video panel as a proper destination at nick.com/all_nick/turbonick, and started putting full-length episodes of its shows on the open web. No cable subscription, no login, no charge. The Internet Archive's first capture of the address is dated 2 July, one day after launch, which is about as clean a birth certificate as this queue produces.

The word in the name is the whole argument. Turbo, as in you have broadband now, as in this is the fast version of the internet and it is different enough to need its own brand. Every media company in 2005 believed that, and most of them built a separate broadband site to prove it. What the term actually meant was that video on a web page was still surprising.

~ the case file ~

~ what it was up against ~

Nothing much, at first, which is the point. YouTube incorporated five months before TurboNick relaunched and spent its first year as a place for clips of undetermined origin. Hulu did not open to the public until March 2008. For roughly two and a half years, a legal, free, full-length episode of a television show you could watch in a browser window was a rare object, and Nickelodeon had a wall of them.

The company also had a second front open. Nicktropolis, its virtual world for kids, passed seven million registered users by July 2008, and that number tells you where Nickelodeon thought the web was going. Both projects assumed children would come to a destination the network owned. Both were right for about four years.

~ the revamp ~

In 2009 the American service was rebuilt to carry only shows currently on the schedule, and the TurboNick branding went away at the same time. There was no announcement and no closing date, because from the inside nothing closed. The video did not go anywhere. It moved up a level, into Nick.com itself, and the separate address stopped meaning anything.

That is how most of the broadband sites of that era ended. They were not shut down so much as made redundant by their parents, once it became obvious that a website could simply have video on it and did not need a subsidiary with a faster-sounding name. The infrastructure won and the branding was the casualty.

~ what replaced it ~

The free full episode did not survive. Nickelodeon spent the following decade moving its catalog behind a cable login, then onto Nick's own apps, then onto Paramount+, where watching the same SpongeBob episode that was free in 2006 now requires a subscription. The direction of travel over twenty years has been consistent, and TurboNick sits near the beginning of it, at the point where a television network briefly decided the answer was to give the whole thing away.

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