Upstream

» see upstream.ph as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Upstream was geo-locked to the Philippines, which more or less ends my involvement with it. In late 2020 I was in Ankara watching the same lockdown as everybody else, and the streaming argument where I lived was about which international service to keep paying for. A Filipino pay-per-view site built so that a country could still see its own films was never going to enter that conversation.

It launched on 14 november 2020, put together by filmmakers rather than by a technology company. Erik Matti and Dondon Monteverde, who ran Reality Entertainment between them, built it because Philippine cinemas were closed and a domestic film had nowhere to go. The money and the infrastructure came from Kroma Entertainment, which sits under Globe Telecom.

The model was pay per view instead of subscription. You bought the film you wanted and watched it, which suited a catalog of new local releases with no back library to justify a monthly charge. Globe made it the official streaming home of the 2020 Metro Manila Film Festival, an event that normally fills cinemas over Christmas and that year had nowhere else to happen.

It did real work for two years. Midnight in a Perfect World premiered there in january 2021 and A Girl and A Guy that june, with series like Ben X Jim and Quaranthings running alongside them. There were concerts on it and there were Pacquiao fights. In may 2021 it signed a video on demand agreement with Universal Pictures, which is not something a small national platform usually gets to do.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the maintenance notice ~

In august 2022 Upstream posted a notice about scheduled system maintenance beginning on 1 september. The maintenance did not end. There was no closing statement from Kroma and no announcement from Globe, just a service that went down for work and never came back up. Anyone who had bought a film on it found out the way people always find out about these things, by going back and finding nothing there.

~ what remains ~

Kroma still runs Anima on the production side and Globe is still Globe. What closed was the shop, not the company behind the shop. The Philippine films that had their first release on Upstream had to find another home afterward.

The ending is the plainest part of it. A platform built in an emergency, by people who had films with nowhere to go, allowed to lapse without a word once the emergency was over. Two years is not a short life for a lockdown product. Most of them did not get that long.

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