MIRAIL

» see mirail.video as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

MIRAIL opened on 16 April 2019 with a pitch aimed over the heads of the streaming services: the studios would sell to you themselves. Sixteen rights holders came in at launch, Walt Disney Japan and Toei among them, with Shochiku and KADOKAWA further down the list. The catalog was described as curated by the people who made the films rather than assembled by a platform buying licenses. You did not pay a monthly fee. You rented a title or you bought one, and the ones you bought you kept.

The company running this was Video Market, which had been operating an ordinary subscription-and-rental streaming service in Japan for well over a decade. So the shop built to cut out the middleman was built by the middleman. MIRAIL ran on PC and Mac only for its entire life, never shipping the phone app that every competitor treated as the whole product, and it closed on Tuesday 30 September 2025.

The notice went up the next morning. Customers holding titles marked with an indefinite viewing period could move those titles to Video Market, the sibling service, where no monthly charge would apply. Titles that had not been sold with an indefinite viewing period did not move at all.

~ the case file ~

~ what the majors wanted ~

The appeal to a rights holder in 2019 was margin and control. Netflix and Amazon were paying for licenses and then deciding what got promoted, and a Japanese studio with a deep back catalog could watch its own films disappear under a recommendation engine it did not operate. A storefront where the studio set the price and the shelf was a reasonable thing to want.

MIRAIL also became a redemption target for MovieNEX, the Disney scheme that put a code in the box of a physical disc so the buyer could claim a digital copy. When you entered the code you chose which service would hold the copy, and some people chose MIRAIL. That choice is the one that mattered six years later, because it was the only thing that made a digital copy migratable. Nothing about this reached Turkey, where the whole arrangement needed a Japanese disc to start with.

~ the password nobody set ~

The migration had a gate on it, and the gate was a password. A large number of MIRAIL accounts had been created sideways, through a MovieNEX code rather than through a signup, so the people holding them had never chosen a password and in many cases did not know one existed. The transfer process asked for it anyway. The company's position at first was that if your password was unset or unknown, you could not transfer.

That held until enough customers complained. The notice was amended on 27 October 2025 to say that a temporary password would be issued after all, to anyone who emailed in with the address on the account and the words requesting a transfer password reissue. People who had bought a film outright, on a service whose selling point was that you owned the thing, had to write to a dead company and ask permission to keep it.

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