ABEMA RADIO

» see abema.tv/now-on-air/abema-radio as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

ABEMA is built like a television. You do not browse it, you pick a channel. In 2017 there were about twenty-five of them sorted by genre, with news and anime each holding a number of their own. On Friday 1 December 2017 CyberAgent added one more, and this one had nothing to show you. It was a radio channel, which meant a video app spent the next five years filling a rectangle that was never going to carry any video.

The answer was the song. The screen carried the title and the artist of whatever was playing, updating as the broadcast moved. A handful of programs shipped actual pictures. Everything else came in live from somebody else's transmitter. ABEMA had not made a radio station. It had signed nine of them, including AIR-G' in Hokkaido, FM802 in Osaka, J-WAVE in Tokyo, ZIP-FM in Nagoya, KBC and LOVE FM in Fukuoka, plus Nippon Cultural Broadcasting arriving on opening day. It was free to listen to and the stations' own commercials went out through it exactly as they aired.

What ABEMA added was its comment column. You could sit inside a live radio broadcast and type at the other listeners while the DJ talked. A medium that had spent a century taking its audience's reactions by postcard and then by email got a scrolling live chat running down one side, which is not something radiko, the Japanese industry's own simulcast platform, offers.

Nothing about this was within reach of a listener in Turkey. Japanese broadcast rights are cut by region, and the simulcast platforms enforce that on the listener's address, so the channel was fenced a layer below the language barrier. That fence is also what made the thing possible. A free national audio channel built on top of regional broadcasters' own licenses exists only inside the territory those licenses cover.

~ the dossier ~

~ the nine stations ~

AV Watch carried the announcement on 16 November 2017, two weeks ahead, with eight stations attached. The ninth signed in time for the opening broadcast. In April 2018 CyberAgent widened it to run the length of the country, from Hokkaido down to Kyushu, and over the following years picked up Hiroshima FM, bayfm, Ibaraki Broadcasting and Shibuya no Radio, a community station operating out of a single Tokyo ward.

The channel also commissioned a little of its own. Aこえ ran from the launch month to March 2019, and 2018 brought a show fronted by the comedian Naomi Watanabe alongside a program built around ABEMA's own trainee announcers. An anime tie-in lasted until September 2020. Every one of those originals died before the channel did, and what survived to the end was the licensed material.

~ five years and one month ~

Fukuyama Masaharu and Shoguchi Akihisa's 地底人ラジオ went out on ABEMA on 3 December 2017, two days after the channel opened, and it was still going out on 31 December 2022, the day the channel closed. The simulcast and the channel have almost exactly the same lifespan. Beside it at the end sat TOKIO HOT 100, STEP ONE, an HKT48 show and music×serendipity, whose host station in Kagawa posted on 30 December that this would be the last airing on ABEMA RADIO.

That is a closing roster of borrowed programs. The channel's own commissions had been retired one by one over five years, so what finally got switched off was a relay.

~ twenty eight days of notice ~

The notice went up in ABEMA's help center at 04:18 on 3 December 2022, headed 「RADIOチャンネル」クローズのお知らせ, and ran to two sentences. Broadcasting on the RADIO channel would end on Saturday 31 December 2022. Thank you for having enjoyed the RADIO channel until now. There is no third sentence. No cause is offered and no replacement is named anywhere on the page.

The name had form for disappearing. Japanese Wikipedia records an earlier and unrelated ABEMA RADIO on the AmebaFRESH! service in spring 2016, which ran for about six weeks before vanishing. CyberAgent used the word twice and got five years out of the second attempt. Today the channel path returns a 404, and a nonsense path returns a 404 of identical length, so the channel is not sitting behind a redirect anywhere in the app.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »