Dai-2 Nippon Television

» see dai2ntv.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

The front page carried a warning, and the warning is the best description of 2005 anybody wrote. This site is broadband content. If you are on a narrowband connection, PHS or dial-up, the video will not play. The content does not support Macintosh. Your display must be set to 1024 by 768 or larger. That was the entry fee at the door of the first video-on-demand service any Japanese broadcaster ever ran. It opened seven weeks before YouTube did.

Nippon Television launched it on the night of 27 October 2005 with a fifteen-minute live show attached, airing Thursdays at 25:29, which is Japanese broadcast shorthand for 1:29 on Friday morning. The man in charge was Toshio Tsuchiya, who had spent the nineties producing Denpa Shonen, the show that put comedians in rooms and did not let them out. His public line on the name was that the 2 in Dai-2 Nippon Television was not a sequence number. It meant anti, as in against television, as in the place for everything the terrestrial channel would not carry.

Turkish broadcasters in 2005 were not close to this. A channel here had a website with a program schedule on it and maybe a photo gallery, and the idea that Kanal D would build a paid video archive with its own late-night talk show promoting it would have sounded like a translation error. Nippon Television got the important part right seven years before anyone else in the business did, and got almost every detail of how to charge for it wrong.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the points ~

The original economy was strange enough to be worth writing down. You watched commercials on the site, the commercials earned you points, and you spent the points on the paid programs. Money was optional. A single Hitoshi Matsumoto sketch, a piece called Zassa that was his first completed comedy short in five years, went up on 11 June 2006 at 23:26 and cost 210 yen or the equivalent in accumulated advertising.

It did not hold. Free material started crowding in around April 2006, and the site ran two full free-for-everything campaigns, one from 22 December 2005 to 3 January 2006 and another through most of February 2006, both of them timed to the minute at 22:22 and midnight because somebody there enjoyed that sort of thing. In October 2008 Nippon Television gave up on charging at all, relaunched the site on the 20th, and moved the video off Windows Media and onto Flash. That last change is the one that mattered to actual human beings: until then the content played in Internet Explorer and nowhere else, and afterwards it played on a Mac.

~ what was actually on it ~

A shop selling Studio Ghibli films chosen by Ghibli, sitting next to prize winners from Cannes. The complete Denpa Shonen archive, with new material still being added to it. A searchable database of every household trick from Ito-ke no Shokutaku, and news footage going back years filed under a section called the time machine shop. Two separate places to upload video of your own, one of them built around travel footage. The masthead over all of it read welcome to the video shopping street.

There was also a recruiting scheme that would not survive contact with a modern HR department. Dai-2 Nippon Television hired female university students who seriously intended to become broadcast announcers, on roughly three-month contracts, as the site's exclusive announcers. Finalists were put to a public vote, though Tsuchiya overrode the vote when he felt like it, and the winners turned up on the morning program Oha!4. Eight cohorts went through it. Several of them went on to real announcer jobs at regional stations afterward, so as an audition pipeline it worked.

~ what got buried with it ~

The site made money in January 2009 and again in October 2009, single months in the black, which for a broadcaster's web division in 2009 was a genuine result. It was not enough to keep the brand. In October 2012 the name was changed to Nittele On Demand Zero, a demotion dressed as a rename, and on 1 April 2013 whatever was left went into Nittele On Demand proper.

After that the estate scattered. The paid catalog ended up inside Hulu's Japanese operation. The free catch-up piece became Nittele Muryo TADA!, which is the only descendant that survived the decade, and on 30 June 2026 Nippon Television announced that TADA! would stop on 30 September 2026 and move to TVer, the joint platform the Tokyo commercial networks run together. Nittele On Demand itself is now a channel for broadcasting Giants games. Every branch of the family tree grew away from the thing Tsuchiya was actually building, which was a television station with no schedule.

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