Like tiny billboards, sponsored buttons dot the lower landscape of streaming device remotes for the sake of shortcuts and brand awareness.
These little doohickeys have been commonplace on streaming device remotes for more than a decade. For device manufacturers, they provide an additional source of revenue from major streamers willing to pay for prime real estate. Maybe they don’t get much use anymore given the proliferation of voice controls but they still keep popping up in groups of four and now sometimes as many as six.
However, since device replacement cycles vary, particularly among streaming boxes/dongles versus smart TVs, many buttons outlive their assigned services.
This became hilariously evident Thursday when a tweet from Brooklyn-based comedian and writer Harris Mayersohn turned into a lengthy thread filled with pictures of streaming remotes that doubled as relics of bygone eras.
Rdio was an early competitor of Spotify in the ad-supported streaming music space. The service—which was launched by Skype co-founder Janus Friis—even debuted a transactional VOD service called Vdio. Unfortunately, just a few years later Rdio declared bankruptcy and sold its key assets to Pandora for $75 million before shutting down for good on December 22, 2015.
M-Go—a joint venture run by DreamWorks Animation and Technicolor—was a transactional VOD platform that jumped early on into 4K and virtual reality streaming. As Chris Tribbey wrote in his post-mortem for the service, “Part of M-Go’s uniqueness was it was among the few digital services at the time that offered bonus features, and that if M-Go didn’t have a piece of content available, it would direct users to other digital services.” But in 2016, the service was acquired by Fandango and rebranded as FandangoNow, which last year was folded into Vudu.
Target Ticket is yet another transactional VOD service that failed to make much of an impact in a space dominated by Apple, Google and others. When Target Ticket launched in 2013, it was positioned as tightly parental controlled digital hub, but apparently the concept didn’t resonate because Target Ticket was toast less than two years later.
PlayStation Vue was one of the first virtual MVPDs to pop up in the U.S. The service—which launched in 2015—was also one of the first vMVPDs to push past the $40/month price horizon. Still, rising content costs and increasing competition caught up with PS Vue and the service shut down for good in January 2020.
My personal collection of streaming remotes also features some dinosaurs. It’s a bit difficult to tell if one of my Roku remotes has a DirecTV Now or an AT&T TV Now button but it’s a moot point since the service (which has gone by many names) is now DirecTV Stream. And though the CBS News button on my other Roku remote still takes me directly to the app, the network has recently rebranded its streaming new operation as CBS News Streaming Network, which may not even fit on a sponsored button.
For an interesting look at how branded buttons reflect shifting trends in the streaming industry, definitely check out this story from Protocol’s Janko Roettgers. Or for fun, just check out your own remotes and reminisce about the streaming services we lost along the way.