Streaming
Business
13 rabbit holes · 11 people exploring
Common starting questions
- Did Blockbuster really turn down buying Netflix?
- How much of the internet is bots?
- Did Twitch chat really beat Pokémon Red?
- What was the first YouTube video?
- Is streaming just cable again?
Rabbit holes
- Blockbuster could have bought Netflix for $50 million
In 2000 Netflix's founders flew to Dallas and offered to sell for $50 million. Blockbuster passed. Ten years later Blockbuster was bankrupt and the last store standing ended up in Bend, Oregon.
Daniela Ruiz · 6 sources
- YouTube engineers once worried about 'the Inversion'
Apparently for a while around 2013, so much of YouTube's traffic was bots that employees worried the fraud detection would flip and start treating bot traffic as normal and human traffic as suspicious. They called that hypothetical 'the Inversion.'
Tobi Adeyemi · 5 sources
- Twitch Plays Pokémon: a million people, one Game Boy
February 2014: an anonymous Australian programmer hooked Pokémon Red up to a Twitch chat, so every 'up' or 'a' typed by anyone became a button press. Over a million people took part and they beat it in a little over 16 days.
Hazel Park · 6 sources
- the first YouTube video is 19 seconds about elephant trunks
April 23, 2005. Jawed Karim stands in front of the elephants and says their trunks are really long. That's it. Hundreds of millions of views.
Ben Adler · 6 sources
- streaming slowly turned back into cable
Cut the cord to save money, ended up with six subscriptions, ads, and bundles. I wanted to know if that was inevitable. The bundling/unbundling quote pretty much explains it.
Daniela Ruiz · 6 sources
- Batgirl was basically finished and got shelved anyway
Dev Malhotra · 5 sources
- Netflix paid $1M for an algorithm and never fully used it
The winning team tied a rival on score and won by submitting about 20 minutes earlier. Then Netflix said the full winning ensemble wasn't worth the engineering effort, especially since they were moving to streaming, where what you actually watch says more than star ratings.
Arjun Pillai · 5 sources
- why WKRP in Cincinnati sounds different on DVD
Tess Quinlan · 5 sources
- Games Done Quick started at someone's mom's house
The first one in 2010 was meant to run at MAGFest, but the hotel internet was so bad the organizer moved it to his mother's house. Now it's two week-long marathons a year (AGDQ usually for the Prevent Cancer Foundation, SGDQ for Doctors Without Borders) that have raised tens of millions. The name is a nod to Quake Done Quick.
Ethan Cole · 6 sources
- the Star Wars Holiday Special aired once and survives because people taped it
Two hours of Chewbacca's family, a Jefferson Starship performance, and Bea Arthur running a cantina. It aired in full exactly once in the US, on CBS in November 1978, and has never been officially released in full. Everything people watch comes from viewers' VHS recordings.
Elif Şahin · 5 sources
- Quibi raised $1.75 billion and lasted eight months
Ten-minute 'quick bites' of premium TV for your phone, launched in April 2020, right when nobody was commuting anywhere. It shut down that December after missing its subscriber targets.
Ayodele Bankole · 6 sources
- how Spotify actually pays artists (it isn't per stream)
Daniela Ruiz · 6 sources
- there's one Blockbuster left, in Bend, Oregon
Blockbuster had thousands of stores. One franchise in Oregon outlasted all of them and now runs on nostalgia, tourism, and people renting movies to keep it alive.
Lou Tremblay · 6 sources