MY Slide Video (MYスライドビデオ)

» see au.kddi.com/my_slidevideo as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

KDDI announced MY Slide Video on 29 January 2009 in release number 2009-021 and promised it for late March. It turned up in April instead. There is no launch-day release at all, and the April date survives only because two other companies mentioned it in passing: Acrodea, which built the thing, and Sony, which plugged a television into it later that year.

What it did was make a video out of your photographs, somewhere that was not your phone. You opened the portal on an au handset and chose a template that already had music and motion in it. Then you emailed up to five photos from that phone to an address the service gave you, and some minutes later a second mail came back carrying a download link. The file ran about 45 seconds at 320 by 240, thirty frames a second, and averaged a megabyte and a half. It played in LISMO Player on the handset.

It cost 262 yen including tax per download, on top of packet charges, and KDDI's own material recommended being on a flat-rate data plan before you started. Some templates were free samples. Once a video was on the phone it stayed with no expiry, although the copy sitting on the server had a retention window and would eventually be cleared.

It was discontinued on 29 February 2012, a leap day, announced seventy days ahead on 21 December 2011. The notice runs to two sentences: the date, and a line of thanks. No reason appears in it.

~ the chronicle ~

~ a render farm with a mail gateway on the front ~

The architecture explains the product. A Japanese feature phone in 2009 did not composite video out of still images, so the compositing happened on KDDI's hardware and the phone contributed a camera and a mail client. The entire user interface was a web menu and two emails. Acrodea built the system on top of its own product, VIVID Communicator, and the company's annual report still lists the January 2009 joint development with KDDI in its corporate history.

You could also give one away. Mailing the download link to someone else was a supported feature, with the sender paying the content fee and the recipient paying only for the packets. At launch everything stayed inside the walled garden, with creation and playback both limited to LISMO Video handsets. That loosened twice. From August 2009 an au user could send a video to a docomo phone, which was an unusual thing for a Japanese carrier to allow in that period. From late November you could push one to a Sony BRAVIA television through a feature called ブラビアポストカード, re-encoded to 720 by 480 at 2 Mbps, free for one set and playable for two weeks.

~ three hundred templates ~

There were roughly a hundred templates at launch and more than three hundred by the autumn. Disney and Sanrio licensed designs into it, and Atlus contributed a Persona 3 Portable template whose file still carries a 1996 to 2009 copyright line. Named musicians supplied others. KDDI handed content providers an authoring tool so they could build their own, which is why the number climbed as quickly as it did.

No usage figure was ever published, at launch or at the closure, and Acrodea's filings do not carry one either. The nearest thing to a scale number anybody printed is Acrodea's note that as of the end of April 2010 the service had been made to work on 44 handset models, which measures au's phone lineup and tells you nothing about how many people used it.

Turkey in 2009 had operator content portals too, and I had a phone that took photographs. The depth was different. No carrier near me was selling a rendered 45-second film of your own pictures for about the price of a coffee with Sanrio licensed onto it. What I remember buying off an operator menu in those years was ringtones.

~ the twenty-ninth of february ~

29 February 2012 was a clearing day at au, and it pays to be careful about what kind. Four other properties had something happen to them on that date, announced across four different dates, so this was a shelf being emptied over two months rather than one decision. au one キャラタイム stopped being an au product that day and carried on under a different operator, which makes it a handover. ナカチェン's 29 February was only the last day to sign up, with the actual ending a month later.

In KDDI's own register of discontinued services, MY Slide Video is the single entry carrying that date, and of everything that moved on 29 February it is the one thing that simply stopped. The platform underneath it lasted much longer. EZweb ran another ten years and went down with au's 3G network on 31 March 2022. The piece that did the difficult work went first, by a decade.

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