BlogTV.ca, the video streaming experiment from Alliance
Atlantis launched with much fanfare in March (well, a big fancy party
at least).
And now it’s getting the chop… so let’s have another party.
I don’t want to spend a huge amount of time on it,
because frankly
it isn’t worth it, but I thought I should take note of the
fact that it’s gone, and about time too.
A Steady Decline In Traffic
According to an internal memo from CanWest, its new part-owner:
“When the site first launched back in March,
initial
traffic surged, but then declined and over the past quarter
we’ve seen
a steady decline, indicating that high usage is not likely.Moreover, the site has not produced the sales interest we
expected,
and as such we felt that winding the site down was the most fiscally
responsible option.”
In other words, it tanked. I don’t want to be
accused of saying “I told you so,” but
well… I
told you so.
It was Never Going To Work
Before the site was even out of beta, it seemed clear to me
that it
wasn’t going to work — primarily because it was
restricted to Canadians
only (in part because of a licensing agreement with the Israeli company
that developed the platform).
As much as spokespeople for BlogTV and Alliance tried to argue
(which they did in the comments
on my original post) that the restrictions were a feature rather than a
bug, and
that Canadians wanted a kind of playpen/ghetto where they could share
with other Canadians, that just never proved to be the case.
Written by Mathew Ingram, a technology journalist. Catch his views on the intersection between media and the web at MathewIngram.com. This post is licensed under the Creative Commons.
