Niconico DVD

» see dvd.nicovideo.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

This one is a grave about a rights problem. In January 2010 Niconico could not legally show you most films or most anime. What it had instead was an audience that liked watching things together and saying so over the top of the picture. So Niwango, the Dwango subsidiary that ran the site, built the only bridge available: you supply the licensed copy, we supply the crowd. You went and bought or rented the disc, you put it in your computer, and a free application downloaded from dvd.nicovideo.jp drew other people's comments across your own playback.

The synchronization is the part worth keeping. There is no fingerprinting and no chapter detection. The service worked off the observation that two copies of the same release are the same number of minutes long, so a comment timed to 00:41:12 lands on the same shot for everybody. The comment pane could be made transparent and sat over the player window, and in fullscreen you got a passable imitation of the site itself, running on a film the site did not own.

Geo, one of Japan's big rental chains, came along as launch partner with a campaign dropping older rentals to 100 yen until the end of March. Rent a disc for about a dollar and watch it with a few hundred strangers. That is the whole product, and it needed a country where the rental shop was still a going concern.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how the sync worked ~

Timing a comment to the clock rather than to the content is a crude solution with one serious virtue, which is that it required no cooperation from anybody holding a copyright. Niwango never had to negotiate an identifier with a distributor, and it never had to put a single frame of licensed film on its own servers. The film stayed in the customer's drive. Only the talking went over the network.

It also has an obvious failure mode. Different editions run different lengths, and a release with a distributor logo on the front or a different cut in the middle slides every comment out of position for the rest of the film. The service handled this by not letting the problem arise, which brings us to the real limitation.

~ thirteen titles ~

On 12 January 2010, the day after launch, thirteen anime titles were supported. Thirteen. And users could not add to that list themselves: if you wanted a film, you wrote a request on a board at bbs.nicovideo.jp and waited for Niwango to prepare it.

A whitelist maintained by hand, one release at a time, by a company whose entire advantage was that it did not need permission. Every title had to be set up individually even though the mechanism itself was indifferent to which disc you owned. Somebody at Niwango had to sit down and register a release before a single person could talk over it, and that work scales exactly as badly as it sounds.

~ the role it finished ~

The farewell page, which was still being served in May 2012, puts the cause of death in one sentence and does not dress it up. Niconico DVD was for enjoying content that was not on Niconico. Niconico Movies and the Niconico Anime Channel had since expanded what was on Niconico. Therefore the service had finished its role, and therefore it was being ended, with thanks for the long patronage.

Every licensing deal Dwango signed between 2010 and 2012 made the bridge shorter, until it was standing over nothing. The archive shows the site healthy at around five kilobytes through February 2012, and then every thumbnail on the service redirecting by 8 March.

The farewell page ends with numbered instructions for uninstalling the Windows application: open the Start menu, go to the control panel, select Niconico DVD, click uninstall. The last thing the service ever asked anyone to do was remove it.

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