Nolife (TV channel)


Nolife was 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 "Y a pas que la vraie vie dans la vie !".
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 very 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.
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 26 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.
During the following year, Médiamétrie started to include IPTV in their measurements. Thanks to official audience figures, Nolife was finally able to enter the advertising market on equal footing with other niche channels.
The situation was stable until mid-2014 ; the advertising market being at an historical low meant the income of the channel suddenly dropped, making it more dependent on its still-existing catch-up service.
On April 1st, 2018, after a special edition of 101% where new projects were announced like live events or a brand new esports channel, Sébastien Ruchet announced that it was a joke: Nolife failed to find new investors and was going to close 7 days later.
On April 8th, after 10 years and 10 months of broadcasting, the final farewell show named "the end of olife" was shown live on TV and on Twitch. It was followed by days of re-runs of the best shows produced since 2007, while the signal was being cut off by the various broadcasters.

Programming

Nolife broadcast a lot of J-music video clips between the regular shows.

Daily

101% is the main daily show with news, game reviews and reports.
It also hosts many sequences that are individual shows, repeated between main shows :

Anime

Anime are aired in Japanese with French subtitles.