Voddler

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

~ the last words ~

Voddler's entire argument was that it would never need to pay for delivery at the scale the Americans were paying for it, because the audience would do the carrying. Every viewer who had already watched something would seed it to the next viewer. The bandwidth bill would stay roughly flat while the audience grew. In 2009 that was not a stupid idea. It was the only idea a Swedish company with no American money could afford to have.

It launched in beta on 28 October 2009 and only to customers of Swedish ISPs, which is where my distance from it starts and finishes. By then I had TTNet broadband at home and my relationship with peer-to-peer video was the one everybody in Turkey had, which involved no license agreements and no company at the other end. Voddler was building the legal version of something that already existed illegally and, at the time, worked better.

The company was Voddler Group AB of Stockholm, founded in 2005 by Martin Alsen with Magnus Dalhamn and Mattias Bergström. The money came out of Nordic and German venture funds, with Nokia Growth Partners and the Finnish carrier Elisa among the names on the cap table. Warner and Paramount signed, and so did Disney. For a startup in Stockholm in 2009 that is not a small thing, and it happened because of what the technology could promise a rights holder.

~ the record ~

~ the technology it was really selling ~

Vnet had 28 patents across two families and it was the actual asset. The consumer service was, from a certain angle, a demonstration of it. Studios will not license into an open swarm, because a swarm has no off switch and no border. Vnet had both. A central layer decided what entered the network and which users could pull it, so a film could be revoked or fenced to one country the way a contract requires.

The client was built on XBMC to begin with, and in February 2010 that got Voddler attacked by people angry about how it was handling the GPL. The response was to throw out the open-source base entirely and rebuild on Adobe Flash and AIR. In 2010 that read as the safe choice. By 2012 it read as a room with the door locked from outside.

~ the year the pitch stopped working ~

Free and ad-supported was the opening position and it did not hold. Rentals arrived, and then subscriptions and outright purchases, which is the sequence a company runs through when the original model is not covering the license fees. Spain got the service in 2012. There were apps for Symbian and MeeGo, which dates the ambition to the month.

The million-plus registered Nordic users were real, and by 2013 the figure was 1.2 million across five markets against 35 content providers. None of it converted into a business. Netflix reached Sweden on 15 October 2012 with a catalog Voddler could not match and a balance sheet that did not care whether streaming made money that year, and inside twelve months it had a million Nordic households. The peer-to-peer saving was worth something real. It was never going to be worth as much as American capital was willing to lose on purpose.

~ how it actually ended ~

A company reconstruction went through in 2015 and Voddler came out of it as a different business, licensing Vnet to other operators rather than selling films to viewers. That is a fine business if somebody wants your delivery technology. By 2015 the market had settled on ordinary content delivery networks and nobody did.

In November 2017 a liquidator took over the company and filed a bankruptcy petition at Stockholm District Court. It went through in January 2018 with around 70 million kronor of debt standing against it, and Swedish reporting put the total burned across the company's whole life somewhere near 269 million. It had lost money every year it existed. The coverage stated that plainly and without much astonishment, because by 2018 losing money every year had stopped being a remarkable thing for a streaming company to have done.

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