DMM LIVEcommune

~ the goodbye ~

Japanese live streaming in 2017 already ran on gifts. You watched for free, and when somebody was worth it you bought a small cartoon object and threw it at the screen, and the object became money in their account. The mechanic was ordinary in Japan years before it turned up anywhere I was looking, and the market for it was crowded by the time DMM decided it wanted a share.

LIVEcommune opened on 28 September 2017 as an iPhone app, free to install with purchases inside it. An Android build was promised for October, and a desktop version by December. At launch it advertised more than twenty kinds of items and stamps, which grew to around forty, along with a beauty filter and effects that took over the whole screen. Viewers could comment or hit reaction buttons, and the part that mattered to everyone involved was the tipping.

DMM.com is worth a sentence here because the breadth of it explains the attempt. The same company has sold adult video, English lessons, online games, 3D printing, used farm machinery, bottled water from Mount Fuji and shaved ice. A live streaming app is nothing unusual for a firm that will try almost any consumer business once. It closed this one on 31 May 2018, eight months and three days after opening it.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what a mirror ball cost ~

The price list is the most legible thing LIVEcommune left behind. A party popper cost 500 points and a camera 700. A shooting star ran to 1,500, and the mirror ball, the big one, was 3,000. Buy one, throw it, and the broadcaster's side of the ledger filled with commune points.

Commune points went out two ways. You could take them in iTunes credit, or you could take them in money, at one point to one yen. That exchange rate is unusually honest for the genre. It means the whole economy was readable in both directions at once: a viewer could work out exactly what their affection was worth in yen, and so could the person receiving it.

~ the pitch was safety ~

Every live platform in 2017 was competing on the same three or four features, so DMM led with something else. Its launch material talked about the operational experience it had built up running live video, and promised monitoring 24 hours a day and 365 days a year to protect the people broadcasting. The phrase it used was a safe broadcasting environment.

That is a real differentiator and a strange one to lead with, because it sells to the supply side rather than the audience. It tells a prospective broadcaster that nothing awful will happen to them on camera. It tells a viewer nothing at all about why they should open this app instead of the one they already have.

~ who already had the audience ~

TwitCasting had been running since 2010. Fuwacch was smaller but established. Both of them already held the users DMM needed, and the Japanese coverage of the shutdown put the failure exactly there: it could not pull an audience off the incumbents. That is a reading by the trade press rather than a statement from the company, and DMM never published a reason of its own that I could find.

The end was reported on 19 April 2018, six weeks before the app stopped. Whatever points were still sitting in broadcaster accounts had that long to become iTunes credit or yen. For a product with a cash-out rate printed on it that was the deadline that actually mattered, and it is the only instruction the closure needed to carry.

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