Minna no Theater Wii

» see theaterwii.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

The Wii was a games console that Nintendo kept insisting was a household appliance, and in January 2009 somebody took that literally. Fujitsu Software put a video rental shop on it. Not Nintendo, not a broadcaster, not a studio. A Japanese enterprise software company best known for systems integration work shipped a WiiWare channel that streamed movies to a television through a games console, and it was the first video-on-demand service the Wii ever had.

It was supposed to arrive in December 2008 and slipped to 27 January 2009. The launch catalog was about 150 titles covering roughly 3,000 individual programs, and it grew at about 50 programs a month after that. Six genres were on offer, with anime and film carrying most of the weight and education and music filling out the shelves. Video came down as a stream at VGA resolution, 640 by 480, somewhere between 1.3 and 2 megabits per second. On a standard-definition set in 2009 that looked fine.

The pricing is the part that dates it hardest, because it was denominated in Wii Points. You did not pay yen for a movie. The channel itself cost 500 Wii Points just to download, before a single minute of video, and after that you bought points and spent them. The cheap course was 300 points for one title over two days; the longest was 800 points for three titles over five, with a middle tier in between and separate Gold and Platinum courses at 300 and 500. Anime and tokusatsu episodes ran short enough that three or four of them counted as a single title, so a rental was sometimes an afternoon of Yatterman rather than one film.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what was actually on it ~

The lineup as of July 2009 reads like somebody emptied a Japanese television archive into a console. World Masterpiece Theater is all over it: Anne of Green Gables, A Dog of Flanders, 3000 Leagues in Search of Mother, Princess Sara, Romeo's Blue Skies. Tezuka is there with Astro Boy and Black Jack. Kamen Rider films sit next to Star Trek films, and Crocodile Dundee sits next to a Kabuki-era jidaigeki nobody outside Japan has heard of. A handful of first episodes were free, or the first part of a first episode was, which is a very 2009 idea of a trial.

This was a domestic Japanese service on a domestic Japanese menu, and that is the whole reason I only know it from records. The Wii itself reached Turkey and reached me; this channel never left its market. There is a category of dead product you miss not because you passed on it but because the button was never on your screen, and a firmware-delivered rental shop for one country is squarely in it.

~ the last day ~

Fujitsu announced the end on 31 March 2011 and closed it on 31 October, which is seven months of notice for a service most people had forgotten was on the menu. No dramatic cause is on record, which fits: by late 2011 the Wii was four and a half years old, the Wii U had already been announced, and anybody who wanted to rent a film in Japan had a phone or a set-top box that would do it without a points card. Nintendo's own Wii no Ma outlived it by six months and then went the same way on 30 April 2012, so the third-party video channel died before the first-party one did. What is left is the odd fact of the thing: for thirty-three months a Japanese enterprise IT contractor ran a movie rental business inside a Nintendo console, priced in a currency that only existed on that console, and then closed it.

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