Part Nine: Streaming Leaving Los Angeles or, Life in the Woods

Note: This post, this website in general, does not represent the views of anyone. Including myself. Especially this post! This is a naughty post and should be disregarded at all costs. I LOVE YOU CHICKEN SOUP. YOU GOT THE POWA! Of Soup!

Remember back to my earlier post about the early days of streaming? How early streaming adopters like YouTube and Grouper grew into the millions of subscribers range before being bought out by Google and Sony respectively? If not go have a peeksie! I'll wait! Sports Jeopardy theme plays

So let's dive back into those early days of Grouper. Back in 2004 Grouper was launched as a Napster or Limewire or KaZaA style Peer to Peer (p2p) file sharing application. And it was good at what it did. It even won a PC Magazine Award for its p2p prowess less than a year after launch. But what got the attention specifically of Hollywood was how that p2p software was planning on being implemented. Its core programming was to set up small Groups (GET IT) of no more than 30 or so people who would use the p2p software to legally share legally owned copyrighted audio visual material, a virtual "home" media server if you will. But as copyright owners in 2005 were less-than-enthusiastic about releasing onto the web official digital, shareable versions of their content, Grouper implemented two key features that would veer it off its p2p route and cement it into the history of the early days of streaming.

The Grouper development team, in an anti-piracy measure, integrated a streaming audio feature. If you had access to the app and a group, you could access any user's audio files but only (easily) as streaming media. This pushed users towards immediate use and discarding of content. The developers also created a very rudimentary video editor subapplication called Groovie. This heavily encouraged user-created content, instead of relying on copyright holders to agree to (what they believed to be) loosely regulated online distribution, and brought with it the rapid user-base expansion that comes along with amateur-created content. As these two features rocketed in popularity, by the middle of 2005 the future path became clear: drop out of the decentralized p2p sharing game and create a centralized server-based, user-content hosting platform of video files. They integrated a series of new features that rapidly became streaming industry standards like thumbnail preview walls, content filtering, and most importantly they published viewership data to RSS feeds and their API (HEY NERDS). By doing the latter, search engines began redirecting users in droves to Grouper. When Yahoo! launched their video search, half of the results were links to Grouper videos.

2005 was a great year for Grouper.  And Hollywood took notice.

In August of 2006, Sony Pictures bought Grouper whole for 65 million dollars. Less than a year later Grouper was re-branded Crackle, pivoted away from user-created content (while hoping the user-base would remain faithful), and became the first Major Film studio Direct-to-Consumer Video on Demand service.

At the time of Crackle's rebranding, Sony Pictures was experimenting around with ways to distribute streaming video online. Again remember in the mid 2000s, feature length films and television series were deemed too large for much consumer bandwidth speeds and the fear of piracy kept studios hesitant from releasing that content online. Inspired by a Seven Minute cut down of the entire Sopranos series, Sony executives announced a new "network". Well a MySpace page sponsored by Honda...

The Minisode Network! Sony Pictures would make officially licensed five minute cut downs of dozens of Sony Pictures and Columbia Television content and release them onto MySpace. This solved both the bandwidth and piracy problem, as these shorts essentially acted as promotional material for the full-length original content. (And brought in some advertising dollars to boot!)

With the rebranding of Crackle to a studio-content service, The Minisode Network was pushed over onto Crackle not-long-after as a channel / category. A few original shorts were produced (Rescue Me and Breaking Bad) to fill in space between seasons. (Tracking them down as DVD bonus features are a must for completionists.) But with wired and wireless internet speeds increasing and Netflix demonstrating the viability of legal streaming content, by 2009 The Minisode Network had completely folded into Crackle, being replaced by full length Sony Pictures Films and Television Shows. But it did bring with it one very important thing to the Crackle team: its close ties to the Film and Television Production wings of Sony Pictures.

So in 2009 Sony Pictures began producing its first bits of original content for Crackle. Shows like Trenches, Angel of Death, and Star-ving began rolling over during the first half of the year. Over the course of the next decade, Sony Pictures allowed Hollywood Stars to produce their passion projects on Crackle. The core idea here was to let the Original Programming do the majority of the Marketing, Advertising, and Sales work for them. Why spend money on a temporary cross-channel television marketing campaign or internet banner ads or the like when you could hope that one of your original programs became a massive hit and flocked users to your service? That way, your investment will live forever as permanent content instead of temporary advertising.

Such examples would be:

• Dennis Quaid in The Art of More
• Adam Brody, Martin Freeman, and Ron Perlman in StartUp
• Sean Bean in The Oath
• Rupert Grint in Snatch
• Rob Riggle in Rob Riggle's Ski Master Academy

You can see in that final one the example of SENPAI NOTICE ME when you start dropping the star's name into the title. Despite that star power and high quality of the productions, the Crackle service never rose on the Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon Video wave. I hypothesize this for four reasons: because Crackle only offered the library content of one of the (at the time) six studios, because by removing all user-made content from the service it alienated its original fanbase, because more money streamed into Original Programming than into Web and Television Advertising and Marketing, and lastly because the larger Sony Corporation was spreading its streaming ventures a bit thin, also producing Original Programming like The Tester and Powers for the online video game store the PlayStation Network (only available on PlayStation consoles) instead of focusing solely on Crackle. Ironically, Crackle's standout hit that garnished wider attention, Jerry Seinfeld's Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee had its distribution contract written to favor Seinfeld. Once CiCGC was a hit, Jerry took that ball over to Netflix.

By 2019, Sony Pictures began looking for investors and / or buyers and struck a deal with

Chicken Soup for the Soul, LLC from Cos Cob, Connecticut.

Realizing that books had more in common with films and television series than broth (they do sell officially licensed Chicken Soup for the Soul chicken soup), beginning in 2017 print publishing company CSS LLC began buying up media content creators and distributors. Their first notable purchase was Screen Media Ventures, a small production studio and (more importantly) a rights aggregator of other independent films. While Screen Media Ventures had its own streaming service built in, Popcornflix, CSS knew they had to grow the brand to stand out in a quickly crowding space. They followed that purchase up with Truli Media (another content aggregator) and Pivotshare (a content distributor). Their March 2019 purchase of the controlling shares of Crackle was their crown jewel. Sony in turn received about 32 million dollars of Chicken Soup stock (ba-dum-tish!) and Crackle was no longer a Hollywood-owned business.

As it stands today, Sony Pictures is the only Major Film Studio without a Direct-to-Consumer streaming service, despite launching the first one way back in 2006. But Sony Pictures still has a distribution deal with CSS, so you will still find much of Crackle's content remains Sony Pictures'. Though as these deals expire and Crackle loses its connection to one of the five deep studio content archives, expect even more of Popcornflix, Truli, and Pivotshare's content to migrate onto Crackle's front pages.

As for all that Sony Pictures content that's leaving Crackle...
Well...
What can I say?

...Stay Tuned for What I got to Say!

• OK Yes! I'll do my third and fffffffffffinal "Where Are They Now?" post about Fox.
• Why did Netflix succeed a decade ago but would struggle launching now: a POST
• Still trafficking! (Still not that kind!)
• Anime!
• And as always... more!