Music&Videoチャネル

» see nttdocomo.co.jp/service/music_movie/music_video_channel/ as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Somewhere between two and five in the morning your phone woke up by itself and downloaded television. docomo charged 315 yen a month for the arrangement. The handset ran three dedicated programs to manage it, one of which did nothing but fetch, and the fetching happened while you were asleep because that was when the network had room.

It began on 31 August 2006 as ミュージックチャネル, Music Channel, released nationwide on the day the N902iX HIGH-SPEED went on sale and HSDPA switched on across Tokyo's twenty-three wards. For a while the N902iX was the only handset in Japan that could run it, and docomo described the service as the company's first built around what HSDPA could do. Video arrived on 26 November 2007 with the 905i series and the name became Music&Video Channel. Contracts carried over automatically, which makes this one service with two names rather than two services.

Why it worked that way is set out in a paper four docomo engineers published in the company's technical journal. Packet flat-rate billing had arrived in June 2004 and subscribers had responded by downloading large things at the hours when everyone else was also awake. Music Channel took that traffic and moved it into the dead middle of the night. It was a congestion-management idea dressed up as entertainment.

An engineering journal is an odd place to meet a consumer product, and it is also the clearest view available. The advertising told you to expect something new on your phone in the morning. The engineering journal tells you why the phone had to be given an exact time to wake up.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ between two and five ~

The problem with a nationwide overnight delivery window is that every subscribed handset in the country wants to use it at once. docomo's answer was an extra HTTP header. When a handset asked the server for a program's header file, the response came back carrying a field called X-RPD, and inside it a timer: the delay before that particular handset's downloader was permitted to start. The value was worked out when the program was registered, specifically so the night's load would spread. Every fetch returned a fresh one for the next delivery.

That header is also the proof that the system was unicast. A broadcast reaches every receiver at the same instant and would need no stagger at all. docomo had to give each handset its own appointment because each handset was pulling its own copy over ordinary HTTP, chapter file after chapter file, in sequence.

Each program had a delivery day chosen by its provider on a day-of-week basis. If the handset was out of coverage the downloader retried, and when it ran out of retries it set its timer for twenty-four hours after the last expiry and went again. A partially delivered program played up to its last complete chapter. You could start a download by hand if the night run had failed, though not between 5 PM and 11 PM, because that was the evening peak the whole design existed to stay out of. Music ran up to about an hour, video up to about thirty minutes, H.264, capped at 25 MB a file.

~ the bill underneath the bill ~

The 315 yen was docomo's fee and docomo's fee only. Every program carried its own monthly information charge on top, and the charges were not uniform. MTV Hot Picks was 315 yen a month, the Macross program was 315, the Jinrikisha comedy program was 525 and the Winter Sonata package was 840. A few were free. Underneath all of it you needed an i-mode contract and one of the packet flat-rate plans before any of it applied at all.

Canceling helped less than you would expect. docomo's own caveats page says that ending your Music&Video Channel contract did not cancel the My Menu registrations sitting behind the individual programs, so those per-program information fees carried on billing you. Moving your FOMA card into a handset that did not support the service did not cancel them either.

~ the overwrite ~

When the next program arrived it saved over the previous one. docomo's wording is flat about it: because the newest program is written over the program delivered before it, past programs can no longer be viewed. There was an escape, which Impress documented rather than docomo: move the file out of the program folder before the next delivery and it survived, up to whatever the handset's internal memory would hold.

Internal memory was the only place it could go. Saving a downloaded program to external memory was explicitly forbidden, which had a consequence nobody put in an advertisement: your programs could not follow you to your next handset. Each program's header file also carried its own playback rules, among them an expiry and a number of permitted plays, and the play count was tracked per chapter, so watching one chapter again spent one of them.

~ two sundays ~

docomo announced the end on 31 July 2012. New applications stopped on Sunday 30 September 2012 and the service finished on Sunday 31 March 2013. That is six years and seven months from the start.

The press release gives a reason and gives it in one clause: changes in the business environment including the expansion of the smartphone market, in order to concentrate management resources. The user-facing notice issued the same day puts it slightly differently, as changes in the market including smartphones. Both documents close by asking for your understanding and stop there. No migration was offered and no refund. Neither document names a successor, and since the programs lived in body memory and could not be exported, whatever sat on your handset on 31 March 2013 was the last thing it ever fetched.

docomo never published a subscriber number for this service at any point across its six and a half years. It published i-Channel's readily enough: 15.65 million contracts by March 2007.

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