LEGO Vidiyo

» see lego.com/vidiyo as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

LEGO announced this on 16 february 2021 and had it in shops by 1 march. The pitch was a music video studio you assembled. You built a stage called a BeatBox and stood a minifigure Bandmate on it, then held a phone over the whole arrangement so an augmented reality layer could turn it into a clip you posted to a moderated feed. Universal Music supplied the songs. There was even a record deal attached, a single called Shake credited to a virtual DJ named L.L.A.M.A with Ne-Yo and Carmen DeLeon on it.

The second wave landed on 1 june 2021. By july LEGO was already publishing the kind of statement companies write when a line is finished, saying it would take the feedback on board and pilot new ideas with Universal in 2022. Retailers in Australia were at fifty percent off around then. The sets came off sale on 31 january 2022, eleven months after they went on.

i have no personal stake in this one, i was thirty seven when it shipped and nowhere near the aisle it sat in. What pulled me to it is something i think about at work. i write software that runs on hardware out in the field, so the question of what a device does when the thing it phones home to is gone is not abstract to me. Vidiyo is that question answered small, at retail, in plastic.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what a beatbit was ~

A BeatBit was a 2x2 tile with a picture printed on it. That was the whole object. You clipped it onto the stage and the camera read the pattern, then the app applied whatever effect the tile stood for. the tile itself held nothing. It was a physical token pointing at a row in someone else's database.

This is the part worth writing down. A brick from 1978 still connects to a brick made this year, which is the closest thing the toy industry has to a promise. a BeatBit made in 2021 stopped meaning anything in january 2024. The plastic is fine and will outlast all of us in a landfill without ever doing its one job again.

~ the app itself ~

People who used it were blunt about it. It was slow and it crashed on current flagship phones, a Pixel 5 included. There was no way to download what you made or send it anywhere outside the feed. for a product where the app is the toy, that is fatal on its own.

The strategy did not help. The early releases leaned on minifigures and small stages rather than anything substantial to build, so the people most likely to buy LEGO were being sold the least LEGO-shaped thing in the catalog. And a set that requires a compatible smartphone to do anything excludes a good number of the families it was aimed at, which is a strange constraint to build into a toy whose main selling point has always been that it needs no battery.

~ what really happened ~

Quietly, and with more care than most. The line was canceled in january 2022 but LEGO kept the servers up for another two full years specifically so that people who had already bought the things could keep using them. back then. that is a better deathbed than almost anything else on this site got, and it still ends the same way.

lego.com/vidiyo bounces you to the LEGO front page now. The app is out of both stores. What remains is a quantity of printed 2x2 tiles in cupboards and secondhand bins, sorted in with everything else, indistinguishable from working parts, doing nothing at all.

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