BeeTV

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

~ the goodbye ~

On 1 May 2009 a television channel opened in Japan that you could not watch on a television. BeeTV ran on phones and nowhere else, and everything on it was commissioned for that screen. Avex and NTT Docomo built a company between them, Avex Broadcasting & Communications, and that company commissioned original drama and music programming for a screen a few centimeters across.

The fee was ¥315 a month for everything, which by the standards of Japanese mobile content in 2009 was cheap enough to be an impulse. What you got for it was more than fifty programs across seven genres, running to schedule the way a channel does, with real actors in the drama slots. The episodes were short because the viewing was short. This was television sized for the minutes between a station and an office.

It worked immediately. A million registered members by 16 March 2010, ten months after opening, at a time when a million paying subscribers to anything online was a serious number anywhere in the world.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the breakout ~

Docomo had something nobody else had, which was the carrier billing relationship with most of Japan. BeeTV needed no card and no separate account. It appeared on the phone bill, and that removed the only step where services like it usually lost people. The content was Avex's job and the distribution was docomo's, and for about four years the split worked.

The top came on 31 July 2013, at 5.62 million members. By then most of that number was really dビデオ, the larger video store docomo had wrapped around BeeTV in November 2011 and renamed in January 2013. The original channel had become an ingredient in a bigger product, still carrying its own name in the branding as "powered by BeeTV" while the audience increasingly thought of the thing they were paying for as docomo's.

None of it was ever reachable from where I was. Turkish carriers ran their own mobile portals in the same years and sold ringtones and clips through the same billing trick, but nobody here commissioned a drama series for a phone screen and then hired working television actors to be in it. That took a carrier with docomo's share of a country and a record label willing to spend against it. From Ankara, BeeTV was a thing you could read about in the specification of a Japanese handset and never open.

~ the decline ~

Smartphones took the premise apart. A channel designed for a 2009 feature phone had been solving a hardware problem, and once everyone had a screen that could run Hulu Japan or GYAO!, short original programming at ¥315 was competing in a category it had not been built for. The price drifted to ¥540 by the end of 2014, and membership fell from the 2013 peak every year after that.

The retreat happened one platform at a time and took years. Docomo kept renaming the thing above BeeTV's head, dビデオ becoming dTV and dTV becoming Lemino in April 2023, while BeeTV itself sat underneath as a legacy brand that some subscribers were still attached to.

~ the day it died ~

The i-mode version closed on 30 November 2021, which for a service born on i-mode phones was the real end of the original idea. The PC site went on 31 December 2022. That left only the Android app, and on 30 September 2023 it was folded into Lemino, closing fourteen years and five months of a channel that had outlived the phones it was invented for by about a decade.

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