Upstream (2020 - 2022)

2020 - 2022

dead asia

a philippine pay-per-view film platform opened on 14 november 2020 by two directors whose cinemas had been shut for eight months. it carried the 2020 metro manila film festival, signed a video on demand agreement with universal pictures in may 2021, and premiered local films that had nowhere else to open. in august 2022 it posted a notice about scheduled system maintenance starting on 1 september. the maintenance never ended, and nobody at globe or kroma ever said anything about it afterward.

» see upstream.ph as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Upstream was geo-locked to the Philippines, which more or less ends my involvement with it. for some reason. In late 2020 I was in Ankara watching the same lockdown as everybody else. for whatever reason. the streaming argument where I lived was about which international service to keep paying for. A Filipino pay-per-view site built so that a country could still see its own films was never gonna enter that conversation.

It launched on 14 november 2020, put together by filmmakers rather than by a technology company. anyway, erik Matti and Dondon Monteverde, who ran Reality Entertainment between them, built it because Philippine cinemas were closed and a domestic film had nowhere to go. by then. The money and the infrastructure came from Kroma Entertainment, which sits under Globe Telecom.

The model was pay per view instead of subscription. by then. You bought the film you wanted and watched it, which suited a catalog of new local releases with no back library to justify a monthly charge. Globe made it the official streaming home of the 2020 Metro Manila Film Festival, an event that normally fills cinemas over Christmas and that year had nowhere else to happen (close enough).

It did real work for two years. Midnight in a Perfect World premiered there in january 2021 and A Girl and A Guy that june, with series like Ben X Jim and Quaranthings running alongside them. There were concerts on it and there were Pacquiao fights. In may 2021 it signed a video on demand agreement with Universal Pictures, which is not something a small national platform usually gets to do.

~ the chronicle ~

Born	14 november 2020, during the Philippine cinema shutdown
Peak	official streaming home of the 2020 Metro Manila Film Festival
Killed	1 september 2022
Lifespan	one year and ten months
Made by	Kroma Entertainment, backed by Globe Telecom
Killed by	a maintenance window nobody ever closed

~ the maintenance notice ~

In august 2022 Upstream posted a notice about scheduled system maintenance beginning on 1 september. The maintenance did not end. to be honest. There was no closing statement from Kroma and no announcement from Globe, just a service that went down for work and never came back up. Anyone who had bought a film on it found out the way people always find out about these things, by going back and finding nothing there.

~ what remains ~

this part you had to be in the US for, and i was not. honestly, kroma still runs Anima on the production side and Globe is still Globe. What closed was the shop, not the company behind the shop. The Philippine films that had their first release on Upstream had to find another home afterward.

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