acTVila

» see actvila.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

In July 2006 five Japanese electronics makers incorporated a company together to solve a problem none of them wanted to solve alone. Panasonic had a portal called T-Navi on its Viera sets, Sony had one called TV Home on Bravia, and neither was going anywhere by itself. Panasonic and Sony took 35 percent of the new venture each. Sharp took ten, and so did Toshiba and Hitachi. The two portals were merged and the result switched on as acTVila on 1 February 2007. The Japanese reading was spelled out on the logo in katakana, five syllables, in case the capital letters buried in the middle confused anybody.

To use it you had to have bought a Japanese television in Japan. It lived in the firmware of a domestic-market set and opened from a button on the remote, and no version of it existed for anyone else. That is a particular kind of unreachable. Not a service I passed on, but one that could only be switched on by owning a specific object sold in a specific country, which is also exactly why it worked there for fifteen years.

The real product arrived on 1 September 2007, when the company renamed itself acTVila and launched two streaming tiers: acTVila Video at 2 to 4 Mbps of MPEG-2, and acTVila Video Full in H.264 at 4 to 8. September and October were free as a trial. Download rental and download purchase followed, NHK On Demand came aboard on 1 December 2008, and a 4K tier opened on 11 December 2014.

~ the dossier ~

~ the catalog ~

More than you would guess. TSUTAYA TV brought Hollywood in from June 2008. The big five Japanese film studios launched a joint channel on it in March 2009. NHK put its on-demand archive there. By December 2013 the catalog stood at about 82,000 titles, with films renting for 300 to 600 yen and television or anime episodes for 100 to 200.

The payment plumbing is the part that dates it hardest. Credit card was the default and some titles took BitCash. On Bravia sets whose remote control had a FeliCa reader built into it, you could pay by tapping a Rakuten Edy card against the remote. In March 2009 it also did something genuinely first: high-definition downloads licensed to be burned onto a Blu-ray disc you kept, about 580 titles at launch including films from four Hollywood studios. You bought a movie by pressing a button on a TV remote and a physical disc came out of it.

~ the slow subtraction ~

WOWOW bought control on 24 February 2017 through a share purchase and a third-party allotment, and from there the service came apart one layer at a time. acTVila Basic, the original weather-and-listings portal, ended on 27 September 2017, which killed the acTVila button on older sets outright. On 30 September 2020 the video tiers went, including 4K, leaving only NHK On Demand running on the platform. That last piece closed on 31 May 2021.

What remained was Chips!TV, started in February 2020, a shop window that pointed at paid video services on other platforms and carried a little original programming of its own. A portal for portals, running on hardware that had shipped a decade earlier.

~ the dissolution ~

The end was announced on 2 November 2021, five months out. Chips!TV stopped on 31 March 2022 and with it every acTVila service. An extraordinary shareholders meeting was called for 31 August 2022 to pass a resolution to dissolve the company, with liquidation expected to run into December, and the stated reason was that recovery was not foreseeable. Sets built to reach it now open to nothing, which is the ordinary fate of a service that shipped inside a television instead of on it.

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