Vongo

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

~ the eulogy ~

vongo was us-only at the licensing layer. starz held cable rights inside the united states and nowhere else, so the download client never had anything to show a turkish ip address. i did not encounter it in 2006-2008, and i would not have been able to if i had tried. the entire run of vongo happened inside a regional cable-rights window i was not on the inside of.

starz entertainment launched vongo at ces in january 2006 with about a thousand movies, a simulcast of the linear starz channel, and a $9.99 monthly subscription. the model was unlimited downloads to a windows pc, plus a separate transactional tier for new releases starz did not have streaming rights for yet. the drm was windows media drm with a portable-device sideload story that worked on a small handful of approved players.

on 1 august 2008, starz posted a notice that vongo would stop accepting new subscribers. the service shut for everyone on 30 september 2008. starz replaced it with starz play, a $5.99 product powered by verizon's broadband content infrastructure, with the same catalog but no transactional tier on top.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it was ~

vongo lived in the brief window between movielink and netflix-streaming. by 2006 broadband penetration in the united states was high enough that a download service was viable, but streaming over consumer dsl still meant heavy buffering at sd resolution. vongo's answer was to download first and play later. the client cached movies for offline viewing inside the windows media drm sandbox.

the catalog peaked at around 2,500 titles in late 2007. the curation came from starz's own pay-tv licensing, which meant a lot of sony and disney first-window movies sitting next to whatever the network had bought for its linear channel.

~ the unraveling ~

the windows-only requirement was a hard ceiling. macos users could not run the client at all. the portable-device sideload story required a windows-media-compatible player, and apple's ipod was already the only mp3 player most consumers owned. the standalone subscription never made sense for households that already had the starz cable channel and could watch the same movies at no extra charge.

netflix watch instantly launched in january 2007, the year after vongo. it streamed in a browser. it worked on macos. it ran inside the netflix dvd subscription people were already paying for. vongo's $9.99 standalone product had no answer to any of that.

~ how it actually ended ~

starz never positioned vongo's shutdown as a failure. the press release framed starz play as the next-generation product, taking the catalog into a partnership with verizon's content delivery network. for users it was simpler than that. the vongo client stopped logging in on 30 september 2008, the downloads stopped phoning home to the license server, and the cached files stopped playing once the drm token expired. starz play kept the library available at a lower price, but the standalone download model was over.

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