Were you a fan of the streaming service DramaFever? If you were, then you’re probably right there with thousands of other people, wondering what on Earth happened to cause it to shut down in October. If you haven’t ever used it, you certainly won’t have the opportunity to do that now but you still might like to know more about it. Suffice it to say that it was a streaming company run by Warner Brothers, available on virtually every type of electronic device. You might think of it as the Netflix for Asian-born documentaries, movies and other types of entertainment. There were actually a number of different things that you could access on the site, most of it with English or Spanish subtitles. As long as you had a good internet connection, you could do that on your laptop, desktop, tablet or smartphone. It was even available on Roku TV.
The company first came into existence nine years ago and at the time, it was a company in its own rite. It had about 15,000 titles that were offered in both English and Spanish languages and you could access any of those for free (with ads) or by paying a small subscription fee each month and then downloading the app onto your electronic device. A few years ago, they started producing some shows of their own as opposed to merely making other people’s work available on their site. Of course, you could still access everything you had in the past but then you could also have access to the work they were producing, which was really quite unique. By all accounts, it looked like everything was going well for the company because they were starting to do more and more things and they were expanding into niche areas that they hadn’t had anything to do with in the past.
Obviously, somebody was paying attention to the fact that they were growing by leaps and bounds because right about that time, Warner Brothers made an offer to purchase the company. They obliged and DramaFever officially became an offshoot of the Warner Brothers company a few years ago. On the surface, it didn’t really seem like a lot of things changed but clearly, there were plenty of changes going on in the background because in October of this year, the company abruptly shut down and ceased all operations. It did this without providing much of a warning to its customers, which was clearly not a popular decision. One day it was there, and the next day it was gone. This left a lot of people fuming who paid subscription services, not to mention forcing them to wonder what had caused all of this in the first place.
The truth is, there isn’t really that much known about why Warner Brothers made the decision to shut the service down. Perhaps it wasn’t performing as they had hoped it would from a financial standpoint. There is no way to tell exactly what their reasons were because they’ve been very tight-lipped about the situation. It’s like they wanted to erase all traces that they were ever involved with the company at all. Not only did they shut down without individually notifying the people who had signed up for the service, they still haven’t refunded those who were paying subscriptions for it. To make matters even more frustrating, they deleted all of the social media accounts that DramaFever had almost immediately, virtually erasing any trace of the company from existence.
Many people speculate that it could have had something to do with licensing issues related to some of the content on their site but if that’s the case, why wouldn’t they just remove that particular content? So far, they haven’t really offered any in-depth reasons why they chose to abruptly end the service and close it down entirely. Perhaps the more troubling thing here is that they’re taking so long to get back to people who were paying subscriptions for it. If they had been in communication with them, things might be different but the fact that they’re virtually ignoring everyone that had a subscription makes a lot of people wonder if they’ll ever see that money without forcing Warner Brothers into court in order to make them pay it back. Right now, only time will tell but at the moment, there are many confused and angry fans out there that don’t understand why Warner Brothers did what they did or what they plan on doing with the money they received for subscription fees.
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