Nolife (2007)

Nolife is a French TV network. It describes itself as the TV "for geeks, nerds and otakus". It mainly deals with videogames, Japanese culture, technology and various other topics. Its catchline is "Il n'y a pas que la vraie vie dans la vie" (which could be translated as "Life is more than real life only").

Nolife was originally created as an independent TV network by Sébastien Ruchet and Alexandre Pilot, both of them having previously worked for other French TV channels through their production company Pocket Shami. Later, Alexandre Pilot said that they wanted to create Nolife because a lot of their projects were refused by other TV networks. They took advantage of the possibility to open a TV channel for a vey limited cost on the IPTV network of Free.

In 2008, despite being well known in the videogame and anime/manga French audience, Nolife went through major financial difficulties and looked for new investors. Then a company they previously worked with, Ankama Games, offered to massively invest into Nolife without taking control over the company. This was announced during a fake farewell show on 13 June 2008, less than two weeks after the first birthday of the channel (the audience wasn't aware it was fake).

As of September 2009 the audience share is unknown, but an official Médiamétrie survey said that 12% of the people receiving TV by cable and satellite was interested in receiving this channel.

Despite those results, Nolife announced in June of the same year that the channel won't be broadcast on CanalSat due to huge transmission costs, nor on the French cable network Numericable for "technical reasons". A member of Nolife explained that this actually cut off advertising incomes for Nolife because of a market lock-down: Médiamétrie is the only recognized source for audience figures but it doesn't evaluate DSL IPTV audience despite the fact that at least as much French households receive IPTV as Satellite TV.

Consequently, following a business model used in open source software, a pay catch-up TV service named Nolife Online was launched on 26th, August 2009 on the main site of Nolife. It hosts the archive of most of the shows of Nolife except TV series, anime and J-music-related shows. It is available worldwide while the French IPTV channel remains free of charge.