Viewster

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

~ the obit ~

viewster's pitch was free and legal, arriving in a decade when free had already been solved by other means and legal was the part nobody was asking for. that is not a criticism of the people who built it. it is the market they walked into. anime in particular had a working distribution system here long before it had a licensed one, run by volunteers, and a swiss website with a banner ad every twelve minutes was competing against something that had a fifteen-year head start on habit.

kai henniges and jörg boksberger started it in zurich in 2007 under the name diva, rebranding to viewster in 2011. the model was advertising-funded video on demand, which at the time meant a catalog of films nobody was fighting over plus whatever else could be licensed cheaply. offices went up in london and berlin, and later in new york and adelaide, which is a lot of geography for a company whose product was a web page.

the piece it got right, and got right early, was the absence of a signup. you landed on a title and it played. no account, no card on file. in 2012 that was close to unique among legal services, all of which were busy building the login wall that streaming still has, and it is the reason viewster's traffic numbers looked as good as they did.

the numbers were real enough to be audited by third parties: more than thirty-nine million unique visitors a month, available in over a hundred and twenty countries, ranked inside the top ten us online video properties in august 2014. that is the size of a genuine business. it was not the size of a genuine business selling ads, because an anonymous visitor is the cheapest inventory there is.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the anime bet ~

somewhere around 2013 viewster worked out that the general film catalog was a commodity and anime was not. it started licensing simulcasts for european territories, spun the good stuff into a viewster anime brand, and for a few years occupied a genuinely useful position: the free tier of a category where the paid tiers were crunchyroll and wakanim.

territory-by-territory licensing is what makes that position fragile. what a european simulcast deal covers is a list of countries, and turkey sits outside most such lists by default rather than by anybody's decision. so the fact that viewster was reachable from here did not mean the part worth watching was. that gap is the whole reason the volunteer scene kept its audience through the entire licensed era.

~ the redirect ~

cinedigm closed its acquisition of viewster and viewster anime on 5 february 2019. the press release talked about a homegrown consumer base and a global footprint, which is what you say when you have bought an audience. cinedigm already ran contv, and running two free ad-supported services with overlapping catalogs was never going to last a budget cycle.

the site stopped being a site quietly. the internet archive has viewster.com serving pages normally on 12 august 2019 and returning a redirect to contv.com by the end of that month, with no announcement anybody recorded in between. the anime library resurfaced properly on 13 june 2020, when cinedigm launched contv anime and folded what was left of viewster into it. by then the brand had been dark for ten months.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »