It’s been a bad day for the Internet’s old guard. This morning we reported that Yahoo was pulling the plug on Geocities. Now we’ve learned that Lycos Cinema, one of the social media projects created by the once-massively popular web portal, is closing its doors. Granted, Lycos has been under new ownership for years and has been trying to get a foothold in markets unrelated to the web portal/search engine that made its famous, but it’s still a name many of us associate with the late 90’s, when it was among the most trafficked sites in the world.
Lycos Cinema launched over two years ago, with the promise of letting friends watch videos from different computers at the same time using ‘simulstream’ technology, which was supposed to mimic the social experience of watching a movie in a movie theatre or over at a friend’s house. The site got a big upgrade last May, when it launched a new chat client and a revamped interface.
Unfortunately, it looks like Lycos Cinema never got over its biggest obstacle: a lack of content. We wrote last year that the site hadn’t signed any of the major studios, and by the looks of the current library this never changed. The only studio listed is ‘National Lampoon’, and I can honestly say that I haven’t heard of 90% of the movies featured on the site’s homepage. That may have flown a few years ago, but with sites like Hulu and TV.com offering recent movies and TV shows, there just wasn’t much of a reason to head to Lycos Cinema.
According to the notice at the top of the site, Lycos Cinema will close on April 29th.
