Veetle

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

~ the obit ~

Live video is expensive in exactly one place, which is the outbound pipe. A thousand viewers means a thousand copies of the same stream leaving the same machine, and in 2008 that priced amateur broadcasting out of existence for anyone without a budget. Veetle, built by Stanford graduate students that year, took the answer the file-sharing world had already worked out and pointed it at live television: every viewer relays a slice of what they receive to the next viewer, so the audience pays for itself in upstream bandwidth it was not using anyway.

What you saw was a directory. Channels with user-uploaded logos and a viewer count next to each one. The player ran either as a browser plugin or as a small desktop application called Veetle TV, built on VLC and never shipped past version 0.9. You clicked a channel and it started, usually within a few seconds, usually at a quality no free site had any business offering.

Most of what ran on it was not the broadcaster's to run. Veetle was one of the standard places to watch a football match you had not paid for, alongside a rotating cast of similar sites with similar names, and the channel list reflected that in a way nobody involved pretended otherwise about. The site's defense was the same one every user-generated platform used: it hosted nothing, it only introduced viewers to each other.

By 2014 the front page was pushing a mobile app called Vidopop instead of the channels. That is usually the last thing a company tries.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how the streams got there ~

The plugin is the part that dates it. Veetle needed code running on your machine because browsers of that era could not do peer-to-peer video on their own, so watching anything meant installing something from a site whose channel list changed by the hour. I never did. Being the sort of person who reads what a Windows installer wants before agreeing to it kept me out of the whole P2PTV category, and that category was large. Sopcast and TVAnts were the names people traded around, and there were a dozen more behind them with Chinese origins and English front pages.

The technology stopped being necessary before Veetle stopped existing. Once ordinary CDNs got cheap enough and browsers could play video without help, the entire reason to make viewers into relays went away, and the sites that survived the transition were the ones with money for bandwidth.

~ the notice ~

There was no shutdown announcement, so the front page has to serve as the death certificate. The last real capture, from 22 November 2016, is not a directory at all. It reads: "Having problem accessing Veetle? Follow the founder of Veetle on Facebook and Twitter for updates." A Google Analytics tag still fires on it, tracking visits to a page whose entire content is an apology for the site being unreachable.

After that the crawler mostly gets nothing. December 2016 is a run of empty responses and then the record goes quiet for six months.

~ imagizer ~

When veetle.com answered again, on 29 June 2017, the title said "Welcome to Imagizer" and the address belonged to somebody in a different business. It bounced through a couple more owners after that, and today it does not resolve at all. Eight years of somebody else's television, and the thing that survives is a sentence asking you to check Facebook.

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