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On Monday afternoon I was on my computer, impulsively refreshing DramaFever’s landing page for 100 Days My Prince — a historical drama produced by Korean cable network tvN — between my usually scheduled work and home tasks. Episode 11 had aired that morning in South Korea, and was set to drop to DramaFever’s streaming platform sometime in the afternoon Pacific Time. I was wrapping up my work early for the day, hoping I could get my viewing in before picking my daughter up from preschool and running to an evening meeting, grabbing a little “me” time with my current TV obsession. Instead I was greeted by a nebulous message at the top of the episode list: “New episodes have been postponed until a later date. Thank you for your patience.”

What at first looked like a preemption notice (broadcasts sometimes get delayed in Korea due to holidays or large sporting events) quickly turned out to be anything but. For one thing, 100 Days had definitely aired in its usual time slot, and clips were available via tvN’s YouTube Channel. But even more than that, the same message was propagating across the entire DramaFever site. None of the shows slated for a Monday release were coming out, and they all had the same message scrawled at the top of their episode lists.

A pit began to form in the bottom of my stomach. At one point I turned to my husband and said, “I just hope DramaFever isn’t gone within 24 hours.” But of course by Tuesday afternoon the entire site had disappeared, replaced by a “Thank you for 9 great years” message from the company and a promise to process refunds for subscribers soon.

It’s hard to describe what a huge blow the sudden execution of DramaFever is to the Asian drama–loving community in the US. There are many reasons why Korean and other Asian media have caught on with American audiences, and what might sound like an extremely niche market was actually a fairly big business. A 2014 consumer research report by Korea Creative Content Agency USA indicated that approximately 18 million people were watching Korean dramas in the US through the DramaFever platform, and in 2015 DramaFever reported that their website had 8 million monthly active viewers — a number that can only have grown in light of the ongoing “Korean Wave” in international media. Many of those viewers were premium subscribers, paying a monthly or yearly fee to access television shows on their devices and TVs ad free and on the same schedule they were airing in Asia. And while DramaFever was small, it was influential in South Korea, routinely scoring exclusive content deals and even being a sponsor, partner, or co-producer on several major drama productions, including 2013’s Heirs and this year’s 100 Days My Prince. And while there are multiple sites that stream Korean and other Asian dramas, DramaFever is one of the oldest, having built its loyal customer base over nine years. It is insane to imagine that such a successful business would suddenly shutter overnight with no warning or real explanation beyond “business decisions.”

Insane, but also very predictable.

In mid-2016 DramaFever was sold to Warner Bros. Entertainment (now under the AT&T umbrella), a move greeted with suspicion and fear by many longtime subscribers. It wasn’t the first time DramaFever had been sold — Warner Bros. purchased the company from SoftBank, a large Japanese conglomerate, which had acquired it in 2014 — but the previous sale had had American fans hopeful that a Japanese parent company could bring more varied content to the platform, deepening their viewing experience over time. Under SoftBank’s umbrella, the nature of DramaFever’s business was unlikely to change, remaining primarily a vehicle for delivering Asian media into the hands of enthusiastic American (and other) consumers overseas. But Warner Bros.’ intentions weren’t so clear, and many fans feared whether their beloved Asian streaming service would survive at all.

Corporate buyouts are hardly a new phenomenon in America, and it is universally understood that they rarely mean good things for small media companies and their products. Large corporations and their billionaire owner-investors snatch up profitable businesses all the time, cannibalizing those aspects that “work” for their larger bottom line and discarding the rest (including employees, niche and specialty media, products, and markets) as chaff. It’s no secret that Warner Bros. has been looking to get into the streaming market for years, and it is probably no accident that this shuttering comes less than a week after AT&T announced a new WarnerMedia streaming service to be unveiled next year. Acquiring DramaFever gave them access to a trusted and tested content delivery platform. Whether they cared at all about the content being delivered by that platform or the customer base that enthusiastically consumed it was a question we have finally seen answered this week. Why reinvent the wheel when you can buy it from someone else — even if it does upend the cart those wheels were carrying?

Echoing many recent high-profile media shutterings, DramaFever’s sudden death has been abrupt and traumatizing. No doubt the 20% of employees who just learned of their layoffs this week are devastated, and the DramaFever community is still reeling. In a show of just how little thought went into this closure, premium subscribers began reporting on Twitter Tuesday night that they were receiving automatically generated emails featuring DramaFever’s mascot crying “Sorry to see you go…” over a message stating that their premium memberships had been canceled but they could still watch their favorite dramas with ads via their “free membership” — a membership on a website that no longer exists.

As a millennial I’ve spent my entire life being told that the “free market” is the fairest and best economic system, a system that strives for efficiency and is held accountable by consumers who can choose whether to take or leave the products it produces. But more and more, experience shows that in our system consumers live at the whim of billionaires and giant corporations — not always themselves content-creators, but always gatekeepers to what we may and may not consume. Yes, there are other drama streaming sites out there, but AT&T/Warner Bros. still owns the rights to the exclusive content DramaFever was releasing faithfully to its users until Monday. For now, there is no legal option for viewers of those shows (including 100 Days) to continue watching. They can either risk prosecution and “steal” the content by downloading it elsewhere, or give up on the stories they have been following (and obsessing over) for months or even years .

DramaFever users are hardly the only digital media consumers who might find themselves resorting to piracy in this climate, however. According to a recent Vice Motherboard article, the continued fracturing of media onto more and more streaming platforms along brand lines has resulted in an overall uptick in online piracy, as consumers find they don’t have the time or the money to invest in multiple subscriptions to streaming sites just to get everything they want to watch.

For those of us who have been Asian drama nerds for over a decade it feels like coming full circle. Before 2009, there weren’t any options other than pirating the content we wanted to see, though many of us welcomed with open arms the chance to directly support the television, variety programs and movies we so desperately love. Now, thanks to the greed of a giant American corporation that does not care about us or even our money, we are right back where we started.

RIP DramaFever. You are sorely missed.