MovieGate (ムービーゲート)

» see movie-gate.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

There was no way into this one from outside Japan. It billed through the monthly phone bill, which meant the only door was a contract with one of the three Japanese carriers, and the catalog was licensed for that market and no other. Whatever my distance from it is, it is not a matter of having missed it. There was nothing to miss from here.

It opened on 2 July 2007 as iムービーゲート, announced by Kadokawa Mobile as a general variety video site for i-mode. The press at the time called it a comprehensive video portal, which undersells the structural job it was doing: it was the single video hub sitting behind all forty-three of KADOKAWA's official i-mode sites. Around 800 titles at launch and about 1,500 three months later, at 525 or 1,050 yen a month depending on how much of it you wanted.

Two things about it were less ordinary than the description makes them sound. Despite the i-mode branding it ran on all three Japanese carriers, so docomo had no exclusive on it. And alongside streaming it delivered video over peer-to-peer, licensed from BitTorrent Inc., with the files locked by Windows Media Rights Manager. In 2007, on a Japanese phone, that is a stranger arrangement than it reads now.

~ the dossier ~

~ closed one front and opened another ~

On 23 January 2009 it arrived on desktop as MOVIE GATE×MovieWalker, a paid movie site built with KADOKAWA's film-listings brand, and on 21 December that year it was relaunched as a general video site under the plain MovieGate name. Nine months later the desktop version was gone. The notice is still readable: 「『Movie Gate』PCでの動画配信サービスは、平成22年9月30日(木)をもって終了させていただきました。」 The PC video service ended on Thursday 30 September 2010, and anyone left holding unspent points was emailed about a refund, with an address to write to if the email never came.

Two months later, on 30 November 2010, the same brand launched a paid video service for iPhone and iPad. The site's own strapline through all of this read 最強のモバイル動画サイト, the strongest mobile video site, and it was still describing itself that way while the desktop half of it was a refund form.

~ the four endings ~

The second notice went onto the same page by April 2011 and it is the more interesting one. Three programs had stayed on the dead PC service after the rest of it closed, and all three ended on 31 March 2011. None of them simply stopped. The Famitsu show and the B's-Log show each moved to their own channel on Niconico, while the golf lesson series went to ShowTime. The notice prints the new addresses rather than apologizing and leaving it there. Then it adds, in the same breath, that the mobile and smartphone MovieGate service is continuing as normal.

The last two endings have no notice behind them at all. KADOKAWA's own corporate chronology says the i-mode original finished in June 2012 and that the video distribution service ended in full on 31 August 2012, and nothing first-party survives to confirm either date. So the record is lopsided: the two shutdowns that cost somebody money were written up carefully, and the two that only cost people their videos were recorded by an encyclopedia.

~ what the company turned into ~

The corporate line is short and it ends somewhere unexpected. Kadokawa Mobile was founded on 1 December 2005. A separate company called ムービーゲート was spun up on 3 December 2007 to run the thing. On 1 October 2009 the two were merged back together and renamed Kadokawa Content Gate. On 1 July 2012 that company changed its name again, to BOOK WALKER.

Which means the new name was already in place before the last of it was switched off. By the time the last of MovieGate went dark, the company that owned it had been renamed after the ebook store it was turning into, and it is still trading under that name today. The video business was the thing it did on the way to being something else.

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