NHK Net Club (NHKネットクラブ)

» see nhk.or.jp/netclub as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Turn on satellite broadcasting in Japan with a set NHK does not have on file and the broadcaster writes to you on your own screen. A message sits over the picture asking you to get in touch about your reception contract, and it stays there until you do. BS受信メッセージ消去, removal of the BS reception message, was a line item on the feature list of NHK Net Club. A members' club whose selling points included making your own broadcaster stop nagging you is not a thing most countries have the apparatus to produce.

It opened at about four in the afternoon on 27 October 2009, and it was an amalgamation rather than a new idea. NHK had been running two separate account systems, NHK+ID and NHK Online Members, and the Net Club absorbed both. The two halves were not treated alike, and the launch coverage records it: NHK+ID holders were carried straight across as premium members with the same credentials they already had, while NHK Online Members users had to go and sign up again from scratch.

What you got for the account was mostly access to NHK as an institution rather than to its programs. The centerpiece was イベント・インフォメーション, the notice board for studio recordings and events, where you entered the ballot for seats in the audience. Around it sat 番組表ウオッチ, an alerting service that would email you when a keyword or a nominated favorite turned up in the schedule, and ネットステラ, the web edition of NHK's own listings magazine. Further down the page were discount coupons for the Studio Park tour in Shibuya and a points scheme you fed by answering surveys and spent on merchandise.

~ the case file ~

~ the number NHK wanted ~

At launch NHK told reporters it was aiming for 550,000 members by the end of the 2009 fiscal year. Japanese Wikipedia, citing an NHK release of 4 February 2011, says the club passed a million. That release is not findable today, so the million is reported rather than confirmed. The 550,000 target sits in the contemporaneous Impress coverage and is solid.

~ two grades and a license fee ~

Membership came in two grades and the dividing line was money. Premium required a household that pays the 受信料, the reception fee that funds NHK, and it unlocked one-click applications for audience tickets along with the fee-handling tools. Ordinary membership was open to anyone and got the newsletters. The club's tiering was, in other words, an index of whether you were a paying customer. That is an odd foundation for a loyalty program and an entirely logical one for this particular broadcaster.

In Turkey the public broadcaster is funded through a levy on electricity bills, which means nobody here has ever had a relationship with TRT that involves telling it anything. There is no register to be on and no message to clear, so there is nothing for a members' club to be built around. The entire shape of NHK Net Club follows from a funding model where the broadcaster has to know who you are, and where you therefore have a reason to log in.

~ closed on two dates ~

NHK posted the closure notice on 27 August 2019, giving a little over three months. The wording is flat: the Net Club you have been using since 2009 will end all of its services on Saturday 30 November 2019.

The shutdown then came in two pieces. At 23:00 on 30 September the club stopped taking new registrations and stopped letting members upgrade their grade. The event notification emails and the coupon downloads went off on the same stroke. For the final two months what remained was a login that let you look at an account you could no longer change. The 30 November date closed the rest.

~ every record deleted ~

The notice carries a line in parentheses that does more work than the announcement around it: after the service ends, all customer member information will be erased. Not migrated anywhere, and not held against a future NHK account system. Ten years of registrations went into the bin, four months before NHK launched NHK+ with a login system of its own.

And the thing people actually wanted survived without the club entirely. The same notice promises that applications for events and studio audiences, and the questionnaires attached to programs, will carry on as before, just no longer as a Net Club service. The ballot was the thing people had come for, and the club had only ever been wrapped around it. NHK took the wrapping away and the ballot was still standing.

The address most people would look for was never the real one. nhk.or.jp/netclub was a stub that bounced you to pid.nhk.or.jp, where the club actually lived, and that host is still NHK's login system today. The stub kept returning a page until 1 July 2020, seven months after there was anything behind it to redirect to, and first answered 404 on 20 July 2020.

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