PlayMemories Online

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

~ the eulogy ~

Sony announced the date on 20 April 2012 and opened the doors five days later, at four in the afternoon Japan time. PlayMemories Online was a cloud for photographs and video with five gigabytes free, aimed squarely at people who had just bought a Sony camera and found PlayMemories Home bundled in the box. You could drag files into a browser or let PlayMemories Home on the PC push them up for you, and there were phone apps on both platforms. Then you could watch the results on a Bravia television or on one of the digital photo frames Sony still had in the catalog.

For a hardware company in 2012 this was sensible work. Every camera maker was staring at the same problem, which was that the phone in the customer's pocket uploaded a picture the instant it was taken while the camera needed a cable and a Sunday afternoon. A free cloud with your name on it was the obvious answer, and Sony got there before most.

Eleven years and ten months later it was gone. The schedule was published on 28 February 2023 and executed to the day, and the last date on it was 29 February 2024, which is a date that only exists every fourth year. Not one of the notices, in any language, contains a sentence explaining why.

~ the dossier ~

~ where it shipped ~

The launch list was Japan, the United States, Canada, Germany, France and the United Kingdom. Six countries simultaneously and nowhere else on day one. A consumer cloud in 2012 had that shape: you went where you already had a storefront and a support line, and the rest of your camera customers waited to see whether you would ever come.

It did come, slowly. In February 2023 the archive holds captures of the site answering on thirty-nine locale URLs covering twenty-seven countries, from Denmark across to Taiwan, and no better map of where the thing reached was ever published. Turkey is not on it. Sony sold cameras here the whole time, the same bodies with the same software in the same boxes, and the cloud those boxes advertised was a country code that did not resolve.

~ the three dates ~

Sony took it down in three moves and spread them over twelve months. On 28 February 2023, the day the schedule was published, new accounts stopped. On 30 September 2023, uploading stopped, and with it every way into the service except a plain web browser, which took the phone apps and the living-room clients out on the same day.

That left five months in which the only thing the service did was hand your own files back to you. Sony pointed people at a download tool and at Creators' Cloud, its newer thing, and noted that what each country got from Creators' Cloud would differ. On 29 February 2024 the remaining photos and video were deleted.

~ fifteen languages ~

What replaced the site was one page carrying one heading, which read Thank you sincerely, and under it the same sentence set fifteen times over. We have terminated our service as of February 29, 2024. English and Japanese at the top, then French, German, Dutch, Chinese, Italian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian and Polish, with Portuguese at the bottom of the column.

Fifteen languages for a service that launched in six countries, and Turkish is not among them either. The page itself came down at some point after July 2024. Type the domain today and a 503 comes back, and the only readable copy of the thank you is the archived one.

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