We all know the story of the Machinima channel. Otter Media ended up taking over the channel from Warner but now, all videos on that channel have been deleted, leaving the channel officially dead. The internet community stood in shock as over ten years of content and history were just erased in the blink of an eye.
You can see the results for yourself by going here: https://www.youtube.com/user/machinima
For those unfamiliar with the term, Machinima is the act of taking assets from within a video game via its game engine, mainly characters, and manipulating the animation to create movies, shorts, parodies, and other forms of video media.
Machinima Inc. was founded in January 2000 with the sole purpose of providing such content through YouTube. Warner Bros. bought the company in 2016 and Otter Media snatched it from them earlier this year. Machinima Inc. did come under fire over the years, accused of taking other YouTuber’s work but despite that, it became a staple of the YouTube and gaming community.
The hashtag #RIPMachinima began trending worldwide on Twitter. You don’t need to look far down the results of the hashtag search to see just what kind of impact the sudden deletion of their video catalog has had on the community. Otter Media, owned by AT&T, is coming under fire for the move and has, so far, not responded with any comments over their actions. Perhaps we will never know the reason why they did this. All we know is that a big piece of internet history is now gone.
