Wat.tv

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

~ the last words ~

WAT stood for We Are Talented, which tells you what TF1 thought it was building and how far off it landed. i knew TF1 as a name on the satellite dial, one of the French channels that came down with the European package, a thing you scrolled past looking for something in a language you spoke. its video website was a layer past that, a French portal for French clips, and it never had a reason to reach me in Ankara.

TF1 is France's biggest broadcaster, and in 2006 it did what most big broadcasters did that year. it looked at YouTube, got nervous, and built its own. Wat.tv launched in May of that year aimed at the 15-to-35 crowd, comedy and music clips, a place where French talent would upload itself and where, crucially, the ad money would stay in France instead of flowing to California.

the we-are-talented part did not hold. real people did upload, but a broadcaster is not built to run an open video free-for-all, and the audience that wanted an endless wall of user clips was already on the actual YouTube. so Wat.tv drifted toward what TF1 actually had, which was television. it became a replay service, the place you went to catch last night's TF1 show you had missed. the talent portal had quietly turned into the channel's own catch-up window.

for a while it worked at that. by 2013 and 2014 Wat.tv was the third video site in France behind YouTube and Dailymotion, north of eight million visitors a month. but third place in one country is a hard spot to hold, and TF1 kept reshuffling its digital plans. it announced the end by email in late 2015 and pulled the plug on the 17th of February 2016, moving everything to a newer in-house platform that would itself get renamed more than once in the years after. the we-are-talented experiment closed as a footnote to a broadcaster's streaming strategy.

~ the record ~

~ the fall ~

the trouble with a broadcaster building YouTube is that the two things want opposite lives. YouTube wants everything, every clip from everyone, and it makes its money by sorting that flood with software. a TV channel wants the opposite, control and rights it can defend. Wat.tv was pulled between those the whole time, and it resolved the tension the only way it could, by becoming more like television and less like the web. that made it safer and smaller at once. a national replay service is a real thing to be, just not the thing the name promised.

~ what it became ~

the machinery did not vanish, only the address. TF1 folded the useful parts into its main streaming property, the catch-up service it still runs, which has since been rebranded again as it chases Netflix and the rest. Wat.tv is the discarded first name on a service that is still, in some form, alive. from Turkey it was always somebody else's channel talking to its own country. i came looking because a broadcaster promising talent and delivering reruns is a small, honest kind of failure worth marking.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »