Neon Alley

» see neonalley.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Neon Alley was locked at the platform layer twice over. You needed a PlayStation 3 with a North American account on it, and past that hardware gate the entire selling point was English dubbing, which only matters in a market where dubbing is the default. Neither condition applied where I was sitting, and the second one would not have applied even if the first had.

Viz Media announced it on 13 July 2012 and it went live on 2 October that year. Viz is the American arm that licenses and publishes a large share of the Japanese catalog in English, so this was a rights holder deciding to run its own outlet instead of selling episodes to someone else's. Xbox 360 support arrived on 12 February 2013, and PC and Mac access was announced at Anime Expo the same summer.

The unusual part was the format. Neon Alley did not open on a grid of thumbnails. It played, continuously, on a schedule somebody had programmed, twenty-four hours a day, uncut and uncensored, and if you turned it on halfway through an episode then you were halfway through an episode. In 2012 that was already an odd thing to build.

~ the chronicle ~

~ a channel, not a library ~

The argument for a linear schedule was never stupid. On-demand puts the burden of choosing on the viewer, and for a catalog most people have not seen, choosing is work. A programmed channel does the work for you and it does something a library cannot, which is create the accident of catching something you would never have picked.

That is how most people who love anime in the English-speaking world found it in the first place, through a block on television at a fixed hour rather than a search box. Neon Alley was trying to rebuild that experience over the internet, on a console, for the audience that had aged out of the television version. It charged $6.99 a month for it, which was more than the free ad-supported services and less than a cable bill.

~ the move to hulu ~

On 1 April 2014 the whole thing changed shape. Neon Alley stopped being a paid linear channel and became free on-demand streaming inside Hulu, dubbed and subtitled both. That solved the distribution problem, since Hulu was already installed on everything, and it quietly killed the only feature that made the product distinctive.

It also cost Viz the Canadian audience, which lost access in the migration because Hulu did not operate there. Two years later Tubi announced in July 2016 that it had started carrying some Viz titles in Canada, which is the sort of patch that only happens after the hole has been open long enough for someone to notice.

~ the name came off ~

Viz relaunched viz.com in spring 2016 and put its streaming directly on it, so the intermediate brand had nothing left to do. Neon Alley was declared finished on 4 May 2016. There was no shutdown in the usual sense, no last broadcast, no final episode with a card at the end, because by then the product had already been reduced to a name sitting on top of somebody else's player.

The category moved on without it. VRV arrived later that year bundling anime alongside other niche catalogs, then folded into Crunchyroll, which was itself bought by Sony and then merged with Funimation. The consolidation ran in one direction the entire decade. What Neon Alley was actually attempting, a curated channel that plays whether you are watching or not, came back years later on free ad-supported television services, and by then nobody remembered a games console had gotten there first.

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