DMMポータブル (DMM Portable)

» see psp.dmm.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

The pitch was that you did not need a computer. You typed an address into the PlayStation Portable's own web browser, over your home Wi-Fi, bought an episode of something, and it downloaded onto the Memory Stick that was already in the slot. In April 2009 that was a strange thing to be able to do, and DMM built the store's whole layout around the handheld's screen so that you would not have to scroll sideways to use it.

There were two front doors onto one catalog. psp.dmm.com was DMMポータブル, the handheld version, and www.dmm.com/digital/psp was the PC floor where you bought on a desktop and copied across. The catalog was anime and idol videos, with a small martial-arts section, and Bandai Channel supplied the largest block of it. Anime ran from about 210 yen an episode. AKB48's theater performances arrived in December 2009 at 525 yen each.

Digital Media Mart ran it. The same company was running a set-top box at the time and would launch a Blu-ray disc store three and a half months later, which makes 2009 the year DMM tried to get its video onto every screen in a Japanese house at once. This was the one for the screen you carried.

~ the case file ~

~ the container was the lock ~

The files came down as MGV, Sony's Memory Stick Video format, and that choice is the whole character of the product. You needed a Memory Stick PRO Duo, not any other card. The video was H.264 at a megabit, 320 by 240 or 480 by 270, with AAC audio. You had seven days from purchase to actually download the thing, and a separate viewing window that varied by title.

And the file would not play on a PC. Impress spelled it out at launch: video bought on the PSP cannot be watched on a computer. There was no license server deciding this and no activation to revoke. The format itself only existed on Sony's handheld, so the lock and the delivery mechanism were the same object. By 2010 the store had added PSP go support and the legal footer had grown to name Memory Stick Micro as well.

~ nine days, four doors ~

The wind-down notice is unusually precise for something nobody was going to read. It gives four deadlines, each at twelve noon, and they do not all fall on the same day. AKB48 sales stopped on Wednesday 11 August. The martial-arts and music sections went on Tuesday the 17th, taking the idol videos with them. Bandai Channel sales stopped on Friday the 20th, and the general portable floor closed at the same moment. Anything already downloaded kept working afterward, which the notice says in a footnote.

The reason given is 「まことに勝手ながら」, a set phrase that lands somewhere near "presumptuous though this is of us" and does the work of declining to supply one. No publication covered the closure, as far as I can find. The catalog at the end came to 5,605 titles, a number the site printed on its own front page, and Bandai Channel's 3,400 was the largest single block in it against 2,073 idol videos.

One line in the tombstone is worth reading twice. After thanking everyone, it notes that the adult video service continues. That was not a courtesy. The general floor shut in August 2010 and the R18 floor on the dmm.co.jp side went on serving until somewhere between New Year's Day and early February 2011, so the half of the business DMM is actually known for outlasted this one by roughly five months. The handheld store itself left almost nothing behind: psp.dmm.com has no DNS today, and the archive holds two captures of it, both redirects, with no page content from the handheld site at all.

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