DMM.TV for Blu-ray Disc

» see dmm.com/tv/bluray as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

You filled in a form and a Blu-ray disc arrived in the post. It cost nothing, you did not need to be a DMM member to ask for one, and when you put it into a PlayStation 3 it used the BD-Live function to reach the internet and draw a video shop onto your television. The company's own marketing line for it was 魔法のディスク, the magic disc: one disc that summons infinite video.

There was no video on the disc. DMM said so on the page, in the slightly defensive tone of a company that had been asked a lot: this is not a Blu-ray with movies inside it, it is a service you watch over the internet line, which is why the catalog keeps growing. Mostly it streamed, with some titles offered as downloads. Video was H.264, standard definition from two megabits and high definition from six.

Blu-ray players had been given a network stack by the BD-Live spec, Profile 2.0, and almost nobody used it for anything beyond downloadable trailers and bonus features. DMM used it to put a storefront in the slot where a film should be. At launch the only machine supported was the PS3, with other Blu-ray recorders promised later and quietly delivered at some point before 2012.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the disc was the credential ~

The interesting engineering is in the copy protection. On top of AACS, which Blu-ray gave them, DMM layered something of its own called DM-Live, and the policy it enforced was one disc, one ID. Your free disc got married to a single MyDMM account on first use. After that, starting the service logged you in automatically, because the machine could see which disc was in the tray. The same binding stopped anything you had bought from playing on a second device.

Turn that around and the shape of it is clear. The company mailed you a physical object, for free, and the object was your password. Lose the disc and you lose the automatic login to the account it was welded to. The pressing was contracted out to a Shinjuku firm called Picohouse, which means somebody was running a disc plant whose output was account tokens.

~ the box it replaced ~

DMM had been renting a set-top box for television video since December 2008, and it killed that box in February 2010. The reason it gave Impress at the time had two halves. Box rentals were coming in below what the company had hoped for, and on the television side it meant to put its effort behind DMM.TV for Blu-ray Disc instead. So this service has a sibling it displaced, and it outlived that sibling by thirty-one months before going the same way.

Its own ending has no explanation attached. The notice posted at the end says only that as of 28 September 2012 the service has ended, thanks you for your long patronage, and points out that the PC and mobile products are still available. No publication wrote about it, as far as I can find, and the trade press that had covered both the launch and the set-top box's death let this one pass without a line.

~ sixteen thousand ~

It launched with more than 1,500 titles, heavy on anime, with Gundam and Macross named in the release. Then it went and got rights. November 2009 brought both of the deals that mattered: TBS On Demand put around 850 television programs on the disc at 105 to 1,050 yen with a seven-day window, and from the 20th Universal added seven films, Jurassic Park and Frost/Nixon among them, at 480 yen for new releases and 350 for older ones, with forty-eight hours to watch.

The front page on 4 September 2012, twenty-four days before the end, was advertising that the total had passed sixteen thousand. That is better than tenfold growth on the launch catalog, on a service that was dead within the month, and it is the only size anybody ever recorded. No subscriber count was published, and no count of discs mailed.

~ three days after the switch ~

The address is a hard 404 now. The archive has the service page serving normally on 4 September 2012 and redirecting by mid-November, with the post-mortem notice caught in between on 1 October, three days after the switch. That notice page is the entire estate.

A free disc in the post only works if the post office is in Japan. Mine was not. The machine it wanted was a PS3, which in Turkey in 2009 was a games console you put under a television, and nobody here expected one to deliver a video shop off a coaster that turned up in the mail. I like the idea a great deal. Eligibility came down to which country collected your post.

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