DMM.TV for STB

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

~ the eulogy ~

The box was not DMM's. It was an I-O Data AVeL LinkPlayer AV-LS500V, a network media player that I-O Data also sold at retail as the AV-LS500VX, and DMM rented it out for 680 yen a month on a credit card. Plugged into a television over HDMI and into a router over wired Ethernet, it turned DMM.com's pay-per-title video store into something you watched from a sofa.

DMM.TV for STB opened on 15 December 2008, having slipped from an announced launch in late July that year, which the company put down to system adjustments. The catalog at launch was more than 37,000 titles pulled from DMM.com's existing library. Video ran between 300 kbps and 3 Mbps, and the player handled thirteen file formats.

The 680 yen bought the hardware rental and nothing else. Every title was charged separately at DMM.com's normal per-title prices, so the monthly fee was rent on a device rather than a subscription to anything. It was also a promotional rate, set for the company's tenth anniversary and planned to run about a year. No source records what it was supposed to cost after that.

On 20 January 2010 DMM announced the service would stop, and at 15:00 on 26 February it did. Impress reported the company's explanation plainly: the number of set-top box rentals had not grown the way DMM wanted. Fourteen months was the whole run.

~ the dossier ~

~ the rented box ~

The ending had an unusual courtesy in it. Subscribers who had rented the AV-LS500V were not asked to send it back, and every function the player had other than DMM.TV for STB kept working. The hardware was a general purpose network media player, so what customers kept was a perfectly good device with one dead feature.

That is worth noting because the launch terms carried a 3,150 yen return fee on the rental. I cannot establish which rule actually applied once the service closed, and the two statements sit beside each other unreconciled.

~ what never shipped ~

The launch coverage listed things DMM said were coming. There was supposed to be a monthly flat rate video tier, rental of DVDs and CDs through the box, high definition video and a web browser. As far as I can establish, none of it arrived in the fourteen months the service had.

What DMM did instead was move its television strategy onto a Blu-ray disc. DMM.TV for Blu-ray Disc had launched on 5 August 2009, using the PS3's BD-Live function to load the store off a free disc the company mailed out, and the shutdown announcement explicitly handed the living room over to it. A third sibling, DMMポータブル, had opened on 23 December 2009 to sell video onto a PSP Memory Stick.

~ the brand came back without it ~

DMM.TV exists today. It launched on 1 December 2022 as an anime and video subscription, it is live, and it is a different thing entirely. DMM says as much itself, in a notice describing the 2022 service as separate from both the set-top box product and an earlier adult video streaming service that had also used the name.

So the record holds at least three DMM.TVs, and only the middle one rented you a box. The Blu-ray service outlived it by more than two years, if the September 2012 end date on ja.wikipedia is right. The PSP one has no recorded ending at all.

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