nnov.tv was the website of Informservice, a Nizhny Novgorod company operating a cable television network. The home page presented the network, which broadcast in the Sovetsky and Nizhegorodsky districts of the city, and gave the city phone numbers 19-80-02 and 19-86-41 for reference[1]. In the nn.ru directory, on which this census of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet is based, the site was listed under the name "Informservice — Cable TV in Nizhny," and the company itself was described as founded in early 2001 and the first in Nizhny Novgorod to offer a multiservice system — cable television, high-speed internet access, telemetry, and a security system; this claim from the directory listing, compiled by the company itself, is not confirmed by any other source in our material.

What the site looked like

The surviving snapshot of the home page is dated August 8, 2003. The navigation consisted of short sections: "Provider," "Splash Screen," "Informservice," "Frequency Plan," "Connection Map," "Viewer Survey," "For Investors," "For Partners"[1]. The set of sections shows that the site was built not as a showcase of services but as a network reference: a subscriber came here to see which channels ran on which frequencies, whether their street was connected, and could also take the viewer survey while at it.

The center of the page held a news feed with dates and a "News Archive" link, and at the bottom stood an "Our Partners" block[1]. No visitor counters are visible in the surviving text of the home page.

What the network offered

Three news items caught in the snapshot date to July 2003 and give a sense of the network's everyday work. On July 8, a promotional campaign was announced: as the home page reported, "the Informservice cable television network, together with the Discovery and Hollmark channels and the newspaper Gorod i Gorozhane, is running a promotional campaign" in the Sovetsky and Nizhegorodsky districts, under which those who signed up between July 8 and September 1, 2003 received a 50% discount on standard connection and 15% off in-apartment wiring installation[1]. The spelling "Hollmark" is given as it appeared on the page.

The same day carries a technical notice: the "Frequency Plan" and "List of Connected Streets" had been updated[1]. Starting July 1, 2003, the site reported, the newspaper Gorod i Gorozhane began printing the program guide for channels broadcast on the Informservice network, and on July 24 it was announced that network subscribers could subscribe to that same newspaper — subscription invoices were mailed together with the July television bills, with instructions for filling them out printed on the bills themselves[1]. The pairing of a cable operator with a city newspaper — a printed program guide, a joint promotion, subscription through subscriber bills — was a characteristic early-2000s arrangement, when a network and a publication shared the same district audience.

Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet

The site was listed in the nn.ru directory; in our sample of Counter.nn.ru ranking data it is associated with a score of 332 — for more on how this sample is constructed, see the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating. No votes for nnov.tv are recorded in our data; the results table of the 2004 Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day does not mention the domain nnov.tv or the name "Informservice"[2]. Judging by the surviving content, the site was not aiming for a wide audience: it addressed subscribers of specific districts and handled their everyday matters — frequencies, streets, bills.

How it closed

The material does not extend past August 2003: in our sample of archived snapshots, home page text survives only for that date[1]. At the time this census was compiled, the domain nnov.tv was not listed as active — there is no site at http://nnov.tv/. The available material contains neither a closing date nor any information about what became of the Informservice network and its subscribers, and this cannot be reconstructed from it.

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 2003 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — Results of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day vote, 2004 (archive)