Milanca

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

~ the obituary ~

Milanca opened in October 2006 with a business model that looked strange on the day it launched. Japanese web video that season was a giveaway: GyaO was streaming full television programs with advertising and no charge at all, and YouTube had been open for a year and a half. Neo, a company in Chiyoda in Tokyo that had been called Neo-Index when the project started, built a site where the default was that you paid.

There were two ways to pay. VOD rented you a program for a fixed window. EST sold you a file you downloaded and kept, which was unusual enough in 2006 that the site had to explain what the letters meant. A handful of programs were free and the free shelf grew over the years, but the premise never moved. Milanca was a store, and the sites it was up against had decided to be television.

Turkey had neither side of that argument in 2006. I had come off dial-up onto TTNet broadband around then, and the legal video question had not arrived yet, because there was no legal video to have a question about. Japan spent those three years finding out whether people would pay for a program on a computer. Turkey was still years away from anyone bothering to ask.

~ the case file ~

~ the one show ~

What kept the site alive longer than the model deserved was Uchimura Sama's, which started there in November 2006. It put Uchimura Teruyoshi together with the duo Sama's and let them do the sort of unstructured nonsense a terrestrial slot would have trimmed for time. This was not a television show repackaged for the web. It was built for the web first, with some of the most recognizable comedians in the country in it, at a moment when web-original programming in Japan mostly meant somebody's camcorder.

By September 2008 Milanca was licensing the show out to GyaO and Yahoo! for limited runs. The stated reason was promotion. The effect was that the only thing you could not get anywhere else became something you could get somewhere else.

~ the shelf problem ~

Anime is where the gap showed. Milanca carried Lupin III THEATER and the Tokyo Movie Online catalog, a real catalog and also a narrow one, tied to a single studio's back library. Competitors were signing anything that moved. The Japanese trade writeup of the closure said it without decoration: popular titles and the users chasing them kept concentrating on the biggest sites, and conditions for mid-sized and small distributors got worse every year.

~ the last three weeks ~

Sales of paid content stopped on 21 June 2009, and after midnight on the 22nd nothing on the site could be bought. The service itself ended on 30 June at 15:00, an afternoon shutdown rather than a midnight one. Neo gave the reason as a management decision and called resumption undecided. It never resumed.

Downloaded EST files kept playing, with a catch that says a lot about how early DRM aged: from 1 July the company could no longer reissue a license, so anyone who reinstalled Windows or changed machines was alone with a file they had paid to own. Member records were deleted at shutdown. Uchimura Sama's moved to E!TV's own site from episode 64 and ran on for years without the portal that made it. The domain, miranca.com, is parked and for sale.

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