Mobuzz.tv is officially closed down. The daily vid-cast startup, who recently gained a great deal of publicity after publicly begging for money from their users, is no more. Although they did not find the total amount of money needed from their viewers, they did claim they had found enough to keep them running – alas, it appears, only for two weeks.
You’ll see in their original video, they promised that should they not survive – they would return every penny to the viewers who sent in their donations – I’d be very interested to hear if that is the case.
A notice on their website says:
It is with deep regret that we inform our friends and fans that MobuzzTV has closed officially today. We need to take some time to see how best to reorganise our project. We have been talking with many interested parties but unfortunately we have not been able to financially sustain our operations until the agreements were closed. We would like to take this opportunity to thank all of you who have donated to save Mobuzz, and let you know that as we shall not be continuing we will be returning all the donations to you.
We are tremendously proud of all the shows we have produced over the last 4 years and we remain convince that online video has a great potential. When we started working on Mobuzz, we knew that it was an ambitious project. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Although we are deeply disappointed with the way this adventure has ended, we hope that it will not stop us from daring to act on inspiration.
The past few years have been an amazing journey. We would like to thank all of the fantastic people who have helped us along the way. All of our friends who provided us with valuable feedback about how to improve our shows; the blogging community, who has proven to us that “community” is more than just a word; and the friends and family who have supported us as we pursued what undoubtedly seemed like a crazy dream back in 2004.
We have met many incredible new people thanks to Mobuzz. We hope you will stay in touch as we move on to a new future.
See you in our next year!
The Mobuzz Team
Business plan= FAIL
Wow, I knew they didn’t raise enough money but when they continued anyway I thought they were going to make it. Surprised…
Too bad. I at least hope my Mobuzz stickers and pins will be worth someone in the future :)
So, Mobuzz TV is history, after nearly 4 years of trying to produce daily tech lifestyle shows, about 4-5 minutes, Mon-Fri in 3 languages. The clue to their failure likes in the slogan at the top – Television 2.0. After the initial enthusiasm died down, they turned it into a studio based compilation of stuff found out on the web. So there didn’t seem much added value when compared with the shows coming out of Silicon Valley. They didn’t succeed in empowering their audience and when things went bad (like presenters resigning) they made classic communication mistakes in going dark and into a wall of silence. So the fans realised they were being broadcast at (like TV 1.0) and the community on the site shrank to a handful. Conclusions – studio based stuff with “presenters” making mash-ups of stuff the audience probably already has access to is not going to work, especially if the production costs are so high (50,000 Euro a month towards the end). There are clearly formats that will work on these new platforms. But learn from Mobuzz what not to do. Their own routine killed it in the end. Oh, and a weak business plan.
@jonathan I agree with you, but curious about what model you think does work…
unfortunately, our (financial) support was not sufficient.
these guys will definitively find another great channel!
that’s real entrepreneurial spirit, next year better.
keep up the good work.