Vidivodo

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

~ the last words ~

On the last front page Vidivodo ever served, every single video is credited to a user called admin. Dozens of clips, all of them uploaded by the account that runs the site. A video-sharing site whose entire visible library was posted by its own operator had stopped being a video-sharing site some time before the server stopped answering, and nobody wrote that down at the time.

It started properly. The first full capture, from January 2007, shows an interface in English with tabs for channels and a webcam recorder built into the page, and the Turkish slogan across the top said create your own TV. What was on it that week was Turkish YouTube in miniature: a Shrek scene redubbed in an Elazığ accent sitting above a compilation of Pelé goals. View counts in the hundreds, every entry rated out of five by whoever bothered.

Then it got caught in the machinery. In September 2008 a court order blocked access to it and to İzlesene.com in the same sweep, after Turkish music rights holders noticed how freely music videos were traveling on both. Webrazzi carried the news on the 11th. This was the same period the country spent without YouTube, so the block landed on the sites that were absorbing YouTube's traffic, which is a kind of comedy nobody involved found funny.

I cannot claim this one. Turkish video in that era was a two or three name list depending on who you asked, and the honest position is that the clips reached me without the address attached. What I remember is the category, not the brand: a Turkish video site, ads down the side, a player that took a while to buffer on TTNET.

~ the record ~

~ kendi tv'ni yarat ~

The slogan is the period in four words. In 2006 the promise of a video site was not that you would watch things, it was that you would broadcast. Vidivodo shipped a webcam page and a channels tab because the model everyone copied assumed the user would become a station.

Almost nobody did. The uploads that got views were the same clips circulating everywhere else, ripped off television or lifted from another site, and the actual amateur production stayed at the level of somebody filming their friend. That was true of every site in the category, and it took another decade and a phone camera in every pocket for the slogan to come true somewhere else.

~ the block ~

The September 2008 order is the most Turkish thing in this grave. A local competitor to a globally blocked service gets blocked itself, for hosting the same material the global service was blocked over. Both sites came back and both kept operating, and both went on hosting music videos until somebody complained again.

It is also the reason there is a paper trail at all. Vidivodo's shutdown eleven years later produced no coverage whatsoever, while its temporary blocking in 2008 is in the tech press and still sitting on a digital rights site. Getting censored is a news event. Quietly running out of reasons to exist is not.

~ the pivot ~

On 19 January 2016 the site announced new management under Punto Yeni Medya, with founder partner Fatih Özkara saying the interface and the technology had been rebuilt from scratch. The plan was gaming: original content from gamers, esports coverage, live streaming to follow, the site as a meeting point for young people.

It was 2016. Twitch had been part of Amazon for a year and a half, and YouTube had shipped its own gaming app the previous August. A Turkish general-purpose video site from 2006 announcing that it would now be where gamers gather was announcing a competition it had already lost, and the archive shows the pivot leaving almost no trace on what the site actually served afterward.

~ the last front page ~

The 30 November 2019 capture is a tidy museum of a site with nobody in it. The category list is enormous and reads like an ad sales deck: baby videos, astrology videos, makeup videos, match highlights, cartoons. Under it, the popular videos grid, everything posted by admin, view counts in the ten to twenty thousand range that repeat suspiciously across entries.

The content is the giveaway. An İlber Ortaylı interview, a Reynmen music video, a comparison of a 650 lira guitar against a 38,000 lira one, footage of Istanbul in 1930. That is a page assembled by one person filling slots, not a community uploading. A week later the origin server started returning an error and never came back, and there is no announcement anywhere to find, because by then there was nobody left to announce it to.

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