BEAT☆Net Radio!

» see dbeat.bandaivisual.co.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Bandai Visual said why it was doing this in the first line of the press release. The company put the station up for the purpose of promoting sales of its DVD and video products. That is the stated purpose, in those words, in April 2004.

The mechanism was neater than the motive. Bandai Visual sponsored anime radio programs that went out on terrestrial stations serving the middle of the country, which left most of Japan unable to hear shows that existed to advertise discs sold nationally. So the company cut the commercials out of the broadcasts and put them up as streams about a week behind the air date, aimed at the listeners the transmitters had never covered.

What you got was free and unglamorous: thirty-two kilobits of mono Windows Media, updated on Fridays. Episodes ran fifteen to thirty minutes. The archive held four weeks and deleted the oldest episode when a new one landed, so the thing was designed from the start to not keep anything. Seven programs at the opening and something like forty-four across the whole life of it, hosted by voice actors and tied to whatever Bandai Visual was shipping that season.

~ the chronicle ~

~ who the signal was for ~

The interesting part of a regional broadcast is everyone standing outside it. This station was built entirely for those people, and the definition it worked from was narrow: Japanese, and inside the licensing. A show cut for rebroadcast to a listener in Kyushu was not cut for anybody further out than that.

That was the ordinary shape of Japanese anime radio, and it explains why so little of the genre ever traveled. The programs were free and the archive was open to anyone who found it, and the thing still only ever addressed one country, because the discs it existed to sell were on sale in one country.

~ the notice it wrote six years early ~

On 18 August 2006 the station was renewed and moved up a level, out of its own subdirectory and onto the top page of the parent site. The old address started serving a farewell: the specified site has been closed, thank you for your use until now. Its own news feed said the opposite thing on the same day, cheerfully, that from today the net radio is renewed and you can now listen from the top page as well.

So the closure notice was for a move. By a capture in December 2008 somebody had gone back and rewritten the body of that page to explain that BEAT Net Radio could now be heard from the Digital Beat top page, and had left the old headline sitting in the title bar above it. It stayed there for years, a closure announcement hanging over a page explaining where to listen instead.

~ the notice it never wrote ~

On 30 July 2012 Digital Beat was merged into the Bandai Visual corporate site and the station went with it. There is no farewell page for this one. The site's own news feed, in its last living capture nineteen days before the end, has nothing about it, and the most recent item in the apology box concerns revised Blu-ray specifications. The parent's press index for 2012 is complete and carries releases on 11 July and 25 July, straddling the date, neither of them about the radio. The trade press wrote up the website redesign the day after and never mentioned that a radio station had been inside it.

The archive closes the gap the announcement left open. The last successful capture of the station is 11 July 2012; by 4 October every request redirects to the corporate homepage, and it never comes back. A company that had once published a closing notice for a change of address could not produce one for the actual closing.

~ episode 288 ~

By July 2012 one program was left on the entire station, a Super Robot Wars show called Umasugi Wave, and the final capture catches it at episode 288 dated the tenth. It had been going out on two stations at once since January 2007, this one and a rival run by the anime music label Lantis, and that overlap is what makes the next sentence checkable at all.

Episode 300 is dated 2 October 2012. Count the weeks forward from 288 and they arrive exactly, with nothing missing. The station underneath the show was absorbed and switched off somewhere in that run of numbers, and the show did not skip a week.

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