A furtive farewell and a final black screen. In April 2018, the French streaming landscape lost one of its pioneers: after six years of existence and the last chaotic moments, the very popular Web TV Eclypsia closed its doors. The company is placed in compulsory liquidation two years later, after a time to officiate in the form of a video game information site.
ZeratoR, Kameto, Jeel, Ponce… With an impressive reputation in the 2010s, Eclypsia has seen many videographers who are now famous on the Twitch platform. Above all, this project was, in a sector where everything had to be invented, the scene of the first experiments in terms of live entertainment content, economic models and professionalization. If the streaming ecosystem has now turned away from the collective Web TV model, an authentic French exception, streamers and viewers still regularly call on memories, precursors although ambivalent, of Eclypsia.
“The best concepts, the best streamers”
We are at the end of 2011: the Twitch platform is slowly growing in the shadow of its parent Justin.tv and, in France, Dailymotion can still compete with the rise of YouTube. Only a few quidams, motivated much more by passion than by the lure of a hypothetical and meager gain, broadcast their games live online. Barely 25 years old, Julien Thierry manages several businesses abroad in the online affiliation sector and seeks, as an amateur license Starcraft, to invest in video game streaming. After failing to buy Millenium, a structure set up in 2002 and bringing together professional players, videographers and web editors, he launched Eclypsia in Bordeaux on 1is avril 2012.
“It was like a summer camp”, remembers with a smile the one who has now moved away from the world of influence. At the time, he wanted to capitalize on the idea of a group of stars who take turns to provide entertaining live programming: one takes care of the lunch slot, replaced at 2 p.m. by one of his colleagues, before a discussion program on set, bringing together a few individuals, is played in prime time, at 8 p.m.
With the first steps of Eclypsia, it is the beginning of the live products – technicians and cameras in support – and the arrival of almost anachronistic means for such an industry in its infancy. “Outside of esports competitions, we were the first in the world to stream five computers at the same time”says Julien Thierry.
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