The other day I felt a sort of nostalgic urge to check on an old favorite of mine: the Machinima Youtube channel.
I know that the company had been on a steady decline for a long time now and that it held a reputation so atrocious that I was honestly not surprised to hear that it was being shelled left and right by a lot of former employees and creators under contract for essentially screwing with them and scamming them out of money... our very own Ross was a major victim of their schemes and several others reported the most absurd kind of mistreatment that I had ever heard of. Still, I was blissfully unaware of all of that while I enjoyed my time with their channel and it was, in fact, the very first thing I had ever binge-watched online, "eating" through hours upon hours of absolutely bangers such as "Sonic For Hire" and "Battlefield Best Friends". My personal experience with the company (as an audience member) was very positive indeed and I just wanted to relive those old feelings one more time, on a drama-free environment.
But then I couldn't.
Last time I had been on the channel, it was clear that it was left adrift and that no-one was actually taking care of it: uploads had stopped altogether and even the newest ones were dated years back and no moderation whatsoever was being done as piles upon piles of nasty comments topped every video... but the videos were still there. That's no longer the case.
For what I could gather, whatever was left of Machinima was sold to and then merged into another, larger company, resulting on a channel that had become "too hot" to handle, both because of its controversial nature and also because it was made up mostly of videos of questionable legal status: most of the things on the channel were likely to infringe the copyright of a big player and the company that bought it decided that it was not worth the risk, so they terminated the channel without notice in or around January of 2019.
I find this to be incredibly disrespectful, not only because they gleefully deleted thousands of hours of video (most of which had been submitted to the channel under contract and thus, had no other copies available), but also because they essentially bought a troubling company that they had no intention of keeping afloat and sunk it the first chance they got. Sure, there are archivists out there who saved and then reuploaded some of their favorite videos, but nowhere near enough of them have resurfaced yet and they likely never will.
And I cannot stress enough how Machinima was NOT a good company, worthy of crying over: there are enough testimonies out there to burn it to the ground several times over, with creators stating multiple times that they were offered a dedicated team of employees to help them make and promote their videos and that, once they had actually signed their contracts, those team members were never heard from again. Some other people complained that Machinima had signed them to inescapable contracts that were also set to auto-renewal without their knowledge or blessings... meaning that what had essentially started as three-to-seven year "trial runs" now stretched out into infinity, with the company ignoring most of the e-mails sent their way and only releasing content creators once the threat of legal action was put on the table. Hell, one guy even told that Machinima went and placed ads over the video made for his ailing dog. And all of this is still on top of Ross Scott finding out that, in a flagrant violation of their own contracts, Machinima had uploaded thousands of videos to their Blip.TV channel without ever informing (or paying) the creators of said videos.
But all of that aside (and yes, it is a lot to brush aside), I still think that the decision to delete the whole channel was a terrible one that robbed us big time. Was it a last middle finger from the company? No, it was mostly defunct by then. It was a final middle finger to those of us who enjoyed it, though.
I know that the company had been on a steady decline for a long time now and that it held a reputation so atrocious that I was honestly not surprised to hear that it was being shelled left and right by a lot of former employees and creators under contract for essentially screwing with them and scamming them out of money... our very own Ross was a major victim of their schemes and several others reported the most absurd kind of mistreatment that I had ever heard of. Still, I was blissfully unaware of all of that while I enjoyed my time with their channel and it was, in fact, the very first thing I had ever binge-watched online, "eating" through hours upon hours of absolutely bangers such as "Sonic For Hire" and "Battlefield Best Friends". My personal experience with the company (as an audience member) was very positive indeed and I just wanted to relive those old feelings one more time, on a drama-free environment.
But then I couldn't.
Last time I had been on the channel, it was clear that it was left adrift and that no-one was actually taking care of it: uploads had stopped altogether and even the newest ones were dated years back and no moderation whatsoever was being done as piles upon piles of nasty comments topped every video... but the videos were still there. That's no longer the case.
For what I could gather, whatever was left of Machinima was sold to and then merged into another, larger company, resulting on a channel that had become "too hot" to handle, both because of its controversial nature and also because it was made up mostly of videos of questionable legal status: most of the things on the channel were likely to infringe the copyright of a big player and the company that bought it decided that it was not worth the risk, so they terminated the channel without notice in or around January of 2019.
I find this to be incredibly disrespectful, not only because they gleefully deleted thousands of hours of video (most of which had been submitted to the channel under contract and thus, had no other copies available), but also because they essentially bought a troubling company that they had no intention of keeping afloat and sunk it the first chance they got. Sure, there are archivists out there who saved and then reuploaded some of their favorite videos, but nowhere near enough of them have resurfaced yet and they likely never will.
And I cannot stress enough how Machinima was NOT a good company, worthy of crying over: there are enough testimonies out there to burn it to the ground several times over, with creators stating multiple times that they were offered a dedicated team of employees to help them make and promote their videos and that, once they had actually signed their contracts, those team members were never heard from again. Some other people complained that Machinima had signed them to inescapable contracts that were also set to auto-renewal without their knowledge or blessings... meaning that what had essentially started as three-to-seven year "trial runs" now stretched out into infinity, with the company ignoring most of the e-mails sent their way and only releasing content creators once the threat of legal action was put on the table. Hell, one guy even told that Machinima went and placed ads over the video made for his ailing dog. And all of this is still on top of Ross Scott finding out that, in a flagrant violation of their own contracts, Machinima had uploaded thousands of videos to their Blip.TV channel without ever informing (or paying) the creators of said videos.
But all of that aside (and yes, it is a lot to brush aside), I still think that the decision to delete the whole channel was a terrible one that robbed us big time. Was it a last middle finger from the company? No, it was mostly defunct by then. It was a final middle finger to those of us who enjoyed it, though.
~~Powered by C8H10N4O2~~