もっとTV

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

~ the obituary ~

もっとTV opened in the first days of April 2012 as something that had no equivalent anywhere else: a video-on-demand service jointly pushed by Nippon TV, TV Asahi, TBS, TV Tokyo and Fuji TV, with Dentsu building and running the platform underneath. Five broadcasters who compete for every rating point in the country put their back catalogs into one storefront, and NHK On Demand's library was plugged in alongside them later.

The bet was on the television set itself. There was no box to buy and no stick to plug in. You needed a compatible set, a Panasonic Viera or a Toshiba Regza among them, or else a Panasonic Diga recorder, and the service came down through the hardware's own network stack. An Android phone and tablet app arrived afterward, once it was clear the living room alone was not going to carry it. Content was sold per view, with monthly all-you-can-watch packs on top.

Japanese broadcast rights do not travel, so the whole of this happened behind a wall that nothing in Turkey could see through. What makes it worth a grave anyway is the shape of the failure, which is not about content at all. The programming was fine. The hardware install base was the problem.

~ the case file ~

~ the button on the remote ~

Panasonic shipped televisions and recorders from the 2012 through 2014 model years with a physical もっとTV button on the remote control. Press it and the もっとTV app launched. That is about as committed as a manufacturer gets to a partner service, and it is also the part that could not be undone when the service closed.

On 31 March 2015, sixteen days after the shutdown, Panasonic posted a support notice explaining what the button does now. It opens a list of recommended video apps for you to pick from. Somewhere in Japan there are still working recorders with a key on the remote labeled for a service that ended eleven years ago, wired to a menu that was invented to give the key something to do.

~ the wind-down ~

Dentsu and the stations announced the closure on 22 December 2014, and the notices all carry the same reason: compatible terminals had not increased as far as expected, so expanding or even continuing the service was judged unworkable. New sign-ups stopped at 13:00 that same day. Sales of new content ended on 31 January 2015, the monthly packs on 28 February, and at 23:59 on 15 March 2015 the last of the viewing rights went dark.

The same five broadcasters launched TVer in October 2015, seven months after this one closed. TVer does its job through an app on whatever screen you already own, and it asks nothing at all of the television.

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