Paravi

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

~ the last words ~

Japan is one of the few markets where the incumbents watched the streaming wave coming and decided to build a wall rather than a landing dock. Six companies with not much in common put money into a single holding company in July 2017. What came out of it was Paravi, and its whole reason for existing was that the drama library of two national broadcasters should not end up sitting on somebody else's platform.

I have never been able to open a Japanese streaming service. They geo-check at the front door and they mean it, which is not an accident of engineering but the shape of the deal that funds the thing in the first place. So this is written from outside the wall, off press releases and a subscriber count.

Premium Platform Japan was set up in July 2017 by Tokyo Broadcasting System Holdings and TV Tokyo Holdings, with Nikkei and WOWOW in it as well, plus the two largest advertising agencies in the country. Paravi opened on 1 April 2018 at 999 yen a month. The name is a contraction of paradise television, which tells you the marketing was domestic and was not aimed at anyone reading this.

That ownership list is the product. TBS and TV Tokyo make drama and variety television, and for years they had sold it to whoever wanted it. Paravi was the decision to stop doing that and sell it themselves.

~ the record ~

~ what was actually on it ~

About eight thousand titles, nearly all of it television rather than film, and nearly all of it from the two broadcasters that owned the thing. From September 2018 it also carried WOWOW's three satellite channels live around the clock, which is a peculiar feature on a subscription streaming service until you remember that WOWOW was a shareholder.

There were originals, and there was a back catalog no competitor could match at any price, because you cannot license what the rights holder has decided to keep. That was the entire bet, and on its own terms it was correct. The catalog really was exclusive. The exclusivity really did hold.

~ the arithmetic that ended it ~

850,000 paying subscribers in February 2023. U-NEXT, a domestic rival with no broadcaster behind it and no exclusive drama library, had roughly three million. Put another way: two national television networks pooled their output behind one paywall and produced a service a quarter the size of the company that just licensed things.

The content was never the problem. The problem was that six owners split the cost of building a platform and then found out a platform is not a thing you build. It is a thing you keep paying for, in perpetuity, against companies whose investors have agreed not to care about the number at the bottom for another decade.

~ where it went ~

On 17 February 2023 the merger was announced. It took effect on 31 March with U-NEXT as the surviving company, which is the polite way of recording that Premium Platform Japan stopped existing. The app kept answering for three more months while the migration was built.

At three in the afternoon on 30 June 2023 the two services became one. Subscribers were carried across rather than dumped. The combined service claimed more than 3.85 million paying members and called itself the largest domestic platform in Japan, and Paravi survives inside it as a button on the U-NEXT home page and a shelf of about ten thousand episodes. That is a better ending than almost anything else buried here got. It is still an ending.

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