What was the first streaming service for movies?
These days, Netflix is the undisputed king of the streaming wars.
A few years ago, though, a spate of rival services launched an offensive to try to knock the giant off its perch, but while some of them have been fairly successful, none have been able to come within a country mile of Netflix’s astonishing 301 million subscribers.
When the likes of Disney+, Amazon Prime Video, and AppleTV+ took on Netflix with an army of original content and recognised properties (Marvel, Star Wars etc), yet failed to even cause the house that Ted Sarandos built to wobble, many so-called experts put it down to the fact that Netflix was the first outfit to bring streaming movies and television to the masses. To many people, Netflix is streaming, and its brand is so strong that most don’t see the need to sign up for any of its competitors.
Here’s the thing, though: Netflix wasn’t the first streaming service for movies. Sure, it launched in 2007, more than a decade before most of its supposed rival services, and therefore had a long runway to corner the market. Netflix’s marketing team also loves pushing the idea that it was a pioneer, and it completely revolutionised the way the world views ‘content’, much as it feels physically painful to write that word when referring to cinema.
In many ways, the streaming giant isn’t really lying, because it was the first service to bring a working streaming platform to market. It figured out the technology that allowed customers to instantly watch movies in high quality on the internet, and it debuted with a strong enough library that people were tickled pink to suddenly have so many options at their fingertips.
So, who was first?
Amazingly, though, in 1998, a full nine years before Netflix established its streaming service, Hong Kong Telecom launched the world’s first streamer. Incredibly, it even beat Netflix’s DVD rental service, which was pioneering in and of itself, to market by three weeks. The platform, iTV, or Interactive TV, cost the telecom company an eye-watering $1.5 billion, as it had to blanket the region in fibre-optic cable and pay through the nose for a host of licensing deals to make the service tempting for consumers.
The vision for the service was incredibly ambitious, right from the start. It wasn’t only a place to watch movies from the comfort of your own home. Instead, its set-top box would allow customers to watch 780 hours of films, listen to 95 hours of music, and 150 hours of radio, and even do some online shopping. In essence, it was Netflix, Spotify, and Amazon all rolled into one, and it only cost $188 Hong Kong dollars ($24 American) for the first three months.
If you happen to think that all of this sounds wildly ahead of its time and absolutely unfeasible in 1998, well, you’d be correct. Despite the best intentions, iTV only lasted four years, but the writing was on the wall almost immediately, thanks to a launch plagued by technical difficulties and customer confusion. In 1999, a disgruntled subscriber named Dennis Leung told the Wall Street Journal, “Saturday, between five and six, I was trying to pick a movie. I had my beer, my snacks in front of me, the movie all picked out—and it took me 45 minutes to get the movie loaded.”
That was bad enough, but other customers were also wary of using the box to shop online, as that was still a relatively new concept in 1998. This reticence stuck, despite Hong Kong Telecom’s William Lo telling Varsity magazine of an amusingly specific scenario in which having that convenience would be a lifesaver.
“Imagine you are extremely tired after a full schedule of work,” he explained, setting the scene perfectly. “You suddenly remember you have to serve dinner for 20 people tomorrow. You find that there is no food left and the supermarket is closed. Desperately, you just want to watch a good movie to ease your nerves. This annoying experience may occur every day in modern people’s lives, and iTV’s services provide a solution.”
Regardless of how unlikely it is that anyone would be so forgetful that organising a banquet for that many people would slip their mind, or how preposterous it seems that watching a film would calm them down in that situation, Lo’s theory that people would watch films and buy food online was incredibly prescient. Unfortunately for Hong Kong Telecom, it just happened to come along too early, with a product that hadn’t quite ironed out the kinks yet.
