Vdio

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

~ the obit ~

Some products die young enough that missing them is not a personal failing. Vdio ran for eight months and twenty five days in three countries, none of which was mine, and the entire population of people who ever bought a film on it would fit in a mid-size stadium. There is no honest anchor to reach for here. I could not have opened it in 2013 even if I had known the name.

It came out of Rdio, the music subscription service backed by Janus Friis, who had already co-founded Skype and Kazaa before that. The name had been sitting around since 2011. It finally launched on 2 April 2013 for Rdio premium subscribers in the United States and the United Kingdom, with Canada added on 6 August. Every existing subscriber got twenty five US dollars of credit to spend, which is a large amount of free money to hand out for a beta.

The model was the opposite of the parent company's. Rdio sold unlimited listening for a monthly fee, and Vdio sold you one film at a time, either rented or bought outright. The catalog was real: Disney, Warner Bros, Paramount, Sony, Fox, DreamWorks, MGM, CBS, Lionsgate, NBCUniversal and Starz all licensed to it. That is not a shortage of content. It is a shortage of reason.

On 27 December 2013 the company sent an email saying it was ending the beta because it had not been able to deliver the experience it wanted. The domain started redirecting to rdio.com. Rdio itself filed for bankruptcy protection two years later, in November 2015, and sold its technology to Pandora.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the eight months ~

The problem was visible from the first day and nobody involved could have missed it. iTunes already sold films, Amazon already sold films, and both were already installed on the device you owned. Vdio's pitch was that buying a film inside your music app would somehow feel better, and it needed that feeling to be worth abandoning a store where your payment details were already saved.

Twenty five dollars of free credit was an attempt to buy the switch. It did the opposite. Handing every subscriber enough money for four or five films means the launch numbers measure how many people will spend somebody else's money, and the second month measures how many will spend their own. The gap between those two numbers is presumably what the email was describing.

~ paid in someone else's currency ~

The shutdown detail is the one worth keeping. Customers who had bought films or had rentals still running were refunded, and the refund arrived as Amazon gift cards equal to what they had spent. The promotional credit was not covered, which is fair enough given that it was never real money.

A video store closing and handing its customers store credit at the largest competing video store is an administrative decision that describes the whole competitive position. Whoever signed off on it was not making a statement. They were picking the most convenient way to move value to people, and the most convenient way was the competitor, which was also the answer to the question the product had been asking since April.

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