Yandex.Efir

» see yandex.ru/efir as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Yandex launched Эфир in 2018, and what it most resembled at launch was a television set rather than YouTube. More than two hundred thematic channels, programmed rather than uploaded, free to watch without an account. It sat inside yandex.ru and the Yandex app, and later on Smart TV sets and on the Yandex.Station speaker, which meant a Russian household could end up watching it without ever having decided to.

Then it started buying television outright. A League of Legends channel arrived in February 2019 and NHL broadcast rights followed that October, signed for three seasons. It carried Football National League matches from 2018 through to 2021, and it commissioned a new fifty-two episode season of Смешарики that rolled out across 2020 and 2021. That is not a video host's spending. It is a broadcaster's.

In the spring of 2020 it opened the other door as well. Creators could upload their own video and take money from it, which left Yandex running a programmed channel lineup and an open upload platform under one name, against YouTube, in a market where YouTube had already won. Russian trade press spent those years asking whether Эфир could become a Russian YouTube. The question was still being asked in 2020.

There was no version of this that turns up on a screen in Ankara. Sports rights are sold country by country, the speaker it ran on only ever shipped in Russian, and the whole lineup was Russian-language programming made for a Russian-language audience.

~ the record ~

~ the move to dzen ~

The wind-down ran months ahead of the shutdown. Every Эфир creator was moved across to Дзен by the end of spring 2021, and Yandex carried their view statistics over with them. What did not carry were the likes and the subscriber lists, so an account that had spent two years accumulating an audience arrived on the other side with the numbers intact and the audience gone.

The service went dark on 1 September 2021 and its pieces were split up. Дзен took the creators and Кинопоиск took the films. The sport ended up somewhere else again, in a product called Яндекс.Спорт.

~ what still answers ~

yandex.ru/efir loads today. It does not redirect to Дзен and it does not 404. It serves a small static page off Yandex's own CDN, titled Видео переехали из Эфира, the videos have moved out of Эфир, with a button under it for each of the places the content went.

Five years on, that page is the whole estate: a signpost on a road nobody drives, still pointing at the products that outlived it.

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