Pokémon TV

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

~ the obit ~

Pokémon TV was a television channel that behaved like one, which by 2010 was already a strange thing for a website to be. You opened it and episodes were playing. There was no account to make and no library you could browse down to the bottom of. The back catalog ran to more than seven hundred episodes and the service showed roughly fifty of them, swapping titles out after seven days and putting different ones up.

That constraint was not a technical limit. It was the deal. The Pokémon Company owned a twenty-five-year anime and wanted children to be able to watch some of it for free without a parent reaching for a credit card, while keeping the rest of it valuable enough to sell to broadcasters. Rotating scarcity is how you do both. The effect on a kid was that Pokémon TV felt like catching something: the episode you wanted might be up, and if it was, you watched it that week or you lost it.

It spread onto everything. The browser came first, then iOS and Android, then a run of television and console storefronts: Roku, the Amazon Appstore, eventually the Nintendo Switch eShop, where it was one of the few things on the console that was not a game. The 2016 rebuild gave it a proper app shell and offline download for a single episode at a time, still free, still rationed.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the eleven weeks ~

The announcement came on 8 January 2024 and the app was pulled from every storefront the same day. Service continued until 28 March, so there were eleven weeks of advertised life left in a product that no new person could install. If it was already on your phone it kept working. If it was not, that was the end of your access, two and a half months before the official date.

The website went first and went quietly. By 25 January 2024 watch.pokemon.com was no longer serving the player at all, just forwarding to the shutdown notice, which means the browser version died about nine weeks ahead of the date the press reported. The official line was eighteen words long: thanks to all the fans who had enjoyed Pokémon TV over the years, the app and website would sunset, the service would end on 28 March 2024.

~ where the episodes went ~

The replacement was a list of places to go, and the list was the point. Netflix carried some seasons while Prime Video carried others, several of those behind an extra purchase on top of the subscription you were already paying for. A free advertising-supported channel turned up later on Pluto TV. The complete run that had been sitting in one free app, rationed but whole, was now distributed across services by contract, and no single one of them carried all of it.

That is the ordinary economics of a franchise that outlives its own distribution habits. In 2010 a free app was the cheapest way to keep a twenty-year anime in front of children. By 2024 the same episodes were inventory that streaming services would bid for, and an owner who gives them away for nothing is leaving money on the table in a market that did not exist when the app launched. Pokémon TV was not killed for failing. It was switched off because the catalog finally had a price.

~ who it was for ~

I was twenty-six when this launched and forty when it closed, and at no point in those fourteen years was I the audience. The Pokémon anime reached Turkish television in the early 2000s, dubbed, on a schedule, while I was in internet cafes playing Counter-Strike rather than at home watching cartoons. What makes this one worth a stone is not that I used it. It is the number: 467,000 people were still opening a free app in December 2023 to watch whichever fifty episodes had come up that week, and the owner of those episodes had somewhere more profitable to put them.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »