Yahoo Screen

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

~ the obit ~

i missed yahoo screen. by 2015 i was streaming through better-established channels, and the idea of going to yahoo.com to watch original american comedy did not occur to anyone i knew. yahoo as a brand in turkey was email and search; the video side was something you bumped into accidentally on the homepage.

the service started life as yahoo video in june 2006 and got rebranded yahoo screen in october 2011 as yahoo tried to position itself as a streaming-original publisher rather than a youtube-clone host. the bet was simple: spend money like netflix to attract eyes to yahoo. marissa mayer was at the top of yahoo wanting big swings, and original tv looked like a big swing.

the headline buy was community, which sony had just lost when nbc cancelled the show after season five. yahoo paid for a thirteen-episode sixth season that ran on yahoo screen between march 17 and june 2 of 2015. it was the highest-prestige thing yahoo had ever streamed. it also did not move enough audience to justify the original slate, and by q3 2015 yahoo had taken a 42-million-dollar writedown on its video originals. on january 4 2016 the yahoo screen brand was shut down and the player redirected to a stripped-down yahoo view that lingered until june 2019.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the community problem ~

community was both yahoo screen's biggest asset and its problem. dan harmon's show had a fanbase that was passionate and online but not large. the people who would migrate from nbc broadcast to logging into a yahoo account to watch streaming video were a small intersection of a small fanbase. the season got made and the show finally hit "six seasons and a movie," but almost nobody outside the fandom noticed.

~ the writedown ~

sin city saints (a sports comedy with malin akerman) and other space (a paul feig sci-fi sitcom) launched alongside community and got even less traction. across the originals slate the bill hit a 42-million-dollar number, which landed in yahoo's q3 2015 earnings call as a single line. five months later the brand was gone. yahoo's later attempts at original video carried no original ambition, only catalog licensing through the yahoo view partnership with hulu.

~ the long tail ~

the season-six episodes of community are still streamable through other deals; netflix and hulu have rotated them over the years. yahoo screen as a brand has nothing to point to. nobody made a t-shirt for it. it sits in the same shape as quibi and cnn+ later: a streaming swing taken by a portal company with no programming muscle, killed by a writedown nobody inside the company wanted to defend in a follow-up earnings call.

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