NOTTV

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

~ the eulogy ~

Japanese phones had television in them for years before mine could do anything of the sort. The free 1seg tuner was standard in the domestic handsets from the mid 2000s, so a train carriage in Tokyo could watch the baseball on the way home while a train carriage in Ankara was doing nothing of the kind. That gap was never a software problem. It was a piece of silicon that either sat inside your phone or did not, and no update was ever going to add it.

NOTTV was the paid upgrade to that idea. It launched on 1 April 2012, broadcasting over the VHF band that analog television had just vacated, at higher quality than 1seg and for about 420 yen a month. The operator was mmbi, a subsidiary of NTT docomo, with a sister company holding the transmission licenses. The plan was serious: a build out to nationwide coverage by 2016, and eventually ten million subscribers.

The proposition made sense on paper in a way that is worth stating properly. Broadcast costs the same whether one person is watching or ten million, so if you are going to send video to a whole country's phones at once, a transmitter beats a cell network that has to carry every stream separately. In 2012, on the mobile networks that existed, this was not a stupid argument. It was arguably the correct one.

~ the dossier ~

~ the origin ~

It started with about 100,000 subscribers in April 2012 and reached 1.22 million by June 2013, which for a brand new paid channel is a real number. Docomo built the tuner into its own Android handsets and third parties sold clip-on receivers for everything else, including iPhones, which should have been the warning rather than the workaround.

Subscribers topped out around 1.75 million in March 2014. That was the ceiling, and it sat at roughly a sixth of the target the business had been built to hit.

~ the unraveling ~

In September 2013 docomo started selling the iPhone. It had held out for years and finally gave in, and the phone it was now selling in enormous numbers had no ISDB-Tmm tuner and never would. The carrier's best seller could not receive the carrier's own broadcast channel. Docomo's own people later named that as one of the triggers for the retreat.

Everything else moved the same direction at once. Japanese manufacturers were abandoning smartphones while cheap MVNO plans took off on handsets that had never heard of NOTTV, so the pool of tuner-equipped phones stopped growing. LTE and decent wifi then made streaming good enough that a channel with a schedule started to look like an odd thing to pay for. The accumulated deficit reached something near 99.6 billion yen in the 2014 accounts, most of it arriving in that single year.

~ the day it died ~

Docomo announced the end on 27 November 2015, giving the service seven months to see itself out. The broadcast stopped at noon on 30 June 2016, four years and three months after it started, and the Japanese tech press sat and watched the final minutes the way you do when a transmitter goes quiet for the last time. The following day mmbi was absorbed into docomo.

~ what came after ~

Every large carrier tried this. Qualcomm burned through MediaFLO and shut FLO TV in the United States, and Europe pushed DVB-H into a handful of launches that went nowhere. Japan spent the most and lasted the longest. The technical case was sound in every one of these markets and it lost anyway, because the thing being sold was a schedule and the thing people wanted was the specific video they had in mind at that moment.

What is left of NOTTV is the spectrum and the lesson about hardware. Once your product requires a chip in the handset, your addressable market is frozen at whatever the manufacturers shipped, and you find out how large it is going to be about two years before your accountants do.

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