字幕.in

» see jimaku.in as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Satoru Yano was 25 and out of work when he put 字幕.in online in January 2007. It did one thing. You gave it the address of a YouTube video, it played the video in your browser with a text box under it, and you typed captions against the timeline as the thing ran. What came out was a page where that video played with your subtitles burned over the top, and where anybody else could leave a comment. He has said the idea came from Niconico Douga, which had already taught Japan that text belonged over the picture rather than in a box beneath it.

On 22 February 2007 Niconico suspended its service. Traffic that had nowhere else to go arrived here, and by the end of that month 字幕.in was approaching two million page views a day, which is an absurd number for a side project run by one unemployed person. When Niconico came back the numbers went back to what they had been. That is the whole shape of the site in one month: a real idea, and an audience that was only ever on loan.

The rest of 2007 was busy anyway. On 5 March a video upload feature arrived through a tie-up with a sharing service called RAGUUN. Between 27 and 29 April the site fell over from a server fault compounded by human error, and subtitles people had written were lost, with most of them recovered by the 30th. On 24 May it became a company, 字幕in株式会社, capitalized at 500,000 yen, with Yano holding 93 percent of it.

~ the dossier ~

~ typing under somebody else's video ~

In 2007 I was watching YouTube on a TTNet line like everyone else in Turkey, with the comments sitting below the player, where they have stayed here ever since. For most of this site's remaining life I could not have reached the source material anyway, since YouTube was blocked in Turkey from May 2008 until October 2010, which covers almost exactly the window in which 字幕.in went quiet. The Japanese habit of putting the text on top of the video never crossed over, and neither did the idea that a viewer would spend an evening captioning a stranger's clip for free. This one belongs to a video culture that developed separately.

What the site turned out to be good for surprised its author. He told ITmedia that around 50 organizations had approached him, among them groups working with deaf audiences and language schools that wanted subtitle exercises. The first paid deployment was a film subtitling contest for a Tokyo language-school group, judged by Natsuko Toda, whose name is on the Japanese subtitles of a very large share of Hollywood. A hobby page had become accessibility infrastructure and a teaching tool inside six months.

~ what YouTube did next ~

In 2008 YouTube added captions of its own, and later a system where viewers could submit subtitles for other people's videos, which is the same idea absorbed into the platform that hosted the videos in the first place. Google shut that down in 2020. There is a pattern here that is older than either site: a third party demonstrates a missing feature, the platform builds it, then the platform gets bored and removes it, and nobody is left doing the job at all.

~ the bracket ~

There is no shutdown announcement to point at. The Japanese Wikipedia entry says only that as of 2011 the site could not be reached, and the external links it keeps are all archive copies: the site as it stood on 10 May 2010, and the English version eighteen days after that. The company page was last caught alive in April of the same year. Everything usable stops in the first half of 2010.

The domain does not resolve today. Yano had a habit of shipping small web services one after another, 2ch2.net and a video toy called モザモザ動画 among them, and this was the one that briefly got away from him. He told ITmedia he wanted to keep the nimbleness of building alone, and put it more bluntly than that: the plan was to keep the spirit of unemployment inside the company.

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