YouAre.TV

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

~ the obituary ~

January 2006 was a crowded month to launch a video site. YouTube was about ten months old and had not yet been bought, and anyone with a Flash player and some storage could put a competitor up against it. YouAre.TV came out of a company called You Are Media, ran its own ad server at ads.youaremedia.com, and carried a line across the top of every page claiming the best independent film and video on the internet. Its blog called itself The Independent Online Video Blog. The logo said two words under the wordmark: be seen.

The navigation was four tabs. Watch Video, My Friends, Upload Video, My TV. That second one is the tell: in 2006 nobody had decided yet whether a video site was a library or a social network, so almost all of them shipped both and let the users decide. The users picked the library in every market at once, and the friends lists quietly came off the navigation bars over the next three years.

~ the case file ~

~ the front page ~

Turkey got broadband in my house around 2006, which is the first year I could watch online video without planning for it, and the only name in this whole category that ever reached me was YouTube. Everything else here was an American site with an American sidebar, and the shows in that sidebar were being made in New York and San Francisco for people who already knew the hosts by name.

What makes this one worth a grave is the front page, which was edited rather than ranked. The slots had names: Featured Indie Film, Featured Indie Filmmaker, Featured Music News Video, Featured Machinima, Featured Comedy Short, Featured Commercial, Featured VideoGame Trailer. Somebody sat down every week and picked a machinima episode, and then went and found an advertisement worth watching on purpose.

Down the right side ran a list headed Internet Shows, which in 2007 and 2008 meant Four Eyed Monsters, Lab Rats, Binside TV, The One Minute Show and about seven more. Under that sat a box reading "YATV Initiative: Content for a Cause". Under that, a channel list that ran from Action/Adventure down through Mockumentary and off the bottom of the page. It is the architecture of a television station, built by people who believed the thing being born in 2006 was going to be television with more channels.

~ parked ~

The capture record is the whole obituary, because no publication ever covered the ending. First crawl 10 January 2006, a 3.6 KB page. The site settles at around 5 KB and stays there for four years with the featured slots rotating. Last working capture 24 February 2010. On 11 June 2010 the same address returns 7.8 KB of GoDaddy parking page, complete with a domain search box and a sponsored links block. By November the host was answering with a redirect instead.

The channel list did carry a Foreign category, sitting between Family and Horror. That was the whole of its provision for everybody outside the United States.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »