Watchever

» see watchever.de as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

watchever was germany-only at the licensing layer. it launched in january 2013 and ran until 31 december 2016, never with a story worth telling outside the DACH region. i was on ttnet in ankara in that window, occasionally paying attention to what netflix would license into turkey and what it would not. really though, the german svod market did not touch me. still, the shape of watchever's death mattered because it was the first time a big european media company tried to preempt netflix's local launch and lost the market inside one calendar year.

vivendi was the parent. paris-based, the actual product team was a hundred people split between paris and marseille building the platform, with a seventeen-person berlin office handling german marketing and licensing. for whatever reason vivendi treated germany as a lab: strong broadband, high consumer spending, no dominant local svod incumbent, and a rights market that was more open than france. the pitch to management was that watchever would establish itself before netflix could arrive.

watchever went live in january 2013 at 8.99 euros a month. the catalog was decent by early 2013 standards, some hbo output including boardwalk empire, universal and lionsgate films, a handful of german-language originals. either way, twelve months of marketing were burned before netflix germany officially launched in september 2014 at exactly the same 8.99 price point. by then, watchever's twelve million euros of revenue had cost sixty six million euros to earn.

~ the case file ~

~ what it was ~

the app worked. it had web, ios, android, smart tv, chromecast within a year, plus ps3 and ps4 apps by 2015. the product itself was not the problem. really though, german consumer surveys in 2014 and 2015 kept putting watchever in one of the last slots on the svod list, sitting behind amazon and netflix and maxdome and even google play as a rental storefront. anyway, watchever's marketing budget was smaller than netflix's and its catalog was smaller than netflix's, on top of a weaker recommendation loop. that turned out to be enough.

~ the losses ~

by june 2014, les echos was reporting that vivendi had put merrill lynch on a mandate to find a buyer for watchever. no buyer showed up. really though, in an svod market where the two rising powers were amazon and netflix, no european incumbent wanted to inherit vivendi's sunk marketing spend. still, watchever kept operating for another two and a half years while the losses continued. either way, by mid-2016 someone in paris finally decided to stop.

on 22 july 2016 vivendi confirmed the shutdown for 31 december. the seventeen berlin employees were told individually, the hundred paris and marseille developers kept their jobs because the platform tech would fold back into vivendi's other bets. for whatever reason the timing was set to the last minute of the calendar year, arguably so vivendi's annual report would show the full close-out inside one fiscal cycle.

~ the next chapter ~

the watchever team's engineering work quietly informed vivendi's later dailymotion and canal plus streaming platforms. the licensing library got picked apart by other services or lapsed. maxdome, the german svod that watchever had chased, was killed by prosiebensat.1 in july 2020 after the same competitive pressure watchever had lost to. for whatever reason, netflix germany kept winning in every survey after 2015 and amazon prime video sat comfortably in second. really though, the whole watchever episode is now a case study inside european media companies for what happens when you try to build a netflix competitor with less than a netflix budget.

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