Wareztuga

» see wareztuga.tv as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Portuguese is not a language I have and Wareztuga was made by Portuguese people for Portuguese viewers, so nothing about it was ever pointed at me. The part that carries across a language barrier is the ranking. For most of its four years this was the most used streaming site in Portugal and one of the most visited Portuguese sites of any kind, and it managed that while frequently refusing to let new people register.

It opened on 1 September 2011 with a stated ambition: to become the country's first great video library, free of charge and reachable by as many Portuguese people as fast as possible. Films and series streamed in the browser, with documentaries and anime alongside them, and an account was required to watch any of it.

Registration was closed for long stretches. Word of mouth carried it anyway, and so did shared accounts, so a site that had stopped taking members kept climbing the national traffic charts. The alternative in 2011 explains most of that. Legal viewing in Portugal meant a rental shop or a cable operator's video-on-demand menu, and a free login covered more ground than either.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how big it got ~

The comparison people in Portugal make is that Wareztuga was the country's Netflix before the country had Netflix. Netflix did not launch in Portugal until January 2016, six months after Wareztuga closed. What the site offered was a catalog with no release windows in it, everything available at once and subtitled by whoever had got there first. The Portuguese rights holders were watching it the whole time and so were the international ones.

~ the announcement ~

On 3 July 2015 the administration team posted that they were shutting the site down, and the reason they gave was that it had grown too much. The notice went through what four years had cost them: threats from Portuguese and international bodies over handing out films for free, and a running toll of blocked addresses and closed servers.

No arrests were announced and no court ordered it. The people running it read four years of correspondence and decided they were done.

~ the brief return ~

It came back once, briefly, and then closed again. The Portuguese Wikipedia article records that in a single sentence with no date attached, which is about as much as anyone wrote down. The .tv address no longer resolves at all, and wareztuga.com answers a request with a bare refusal.

The audience did what audiences do and went to the next one. Portugal spent the following years blocking addresses at the ISP level, hundreds of them at a time, under an arrangement between rights holders and the providers that has never caught up with anything. Wareztuga is the one people still name, because it was the one that was theirs.

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