Radicon

» see radi-con.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Radicon was a shop that sold radio. TBS Radio and Communications put up a beta on 25 March 2010 and opened the full site on 5 April, and what it sold was audio files. Talk shows and documentaries, including programs that had gone out once on a local station and been heard by nobody outside the prefecture. Two hundred and ten yen bought about ten minutes. INTERNET Watch, writing it up that May, called the price somewhat expensive, which it was.

What it was competing with was free. Podcasting had been going about five years by then, and TBS Radio was giving its own shows away on it. Kajita Yozo, the digital content director on the project, said so directly: listeners were used to free podcasts, so anything with a price on it had to earn the price. One program handled that by putting a clock on the conversation and stopping mid-topic, so you would come back for the next file.

Underneath, it was a Windows store. Files came down as Windows Media Audio at 96 kbps, with a separate 128 kbps build for the PSP and the Walkman sold as its own purchase. There was no membership and no account: contact details were typed in at the moment of payment, by credit card or by WebMoney, and the file arrived with a license attached to it. By the end the site's own header read Radicon FOR WINDOWS.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the counters in the file ~

The license terms were published on the site and they sat at the generous end of what DRM allowed in 2010. No listening deadline. No play-count limit. You could burn a purchase to CD three times and move it onto portable players ten times, whether or not the player was SDMI compliant. If the file went missing you could have the license reissued up to ten times within three hundred and sixty-five days of the purchase, by quoting the order number.

The counting was done in-house. TBS Radio had brought its own delivery platform online in the autumn of 2009, with rights checks and payment handling in the same stack, and Shioyama Masaaki, the producer in TBS Radio's business division, said the reason was visibility: an outside distributor reported a monthly download total and nothing else, while running it yourself showed the order people bought in and how they moved through the pages. What that turned up was that buyers tended to start with the newest episode and work backwards into the archive.

~ the parts that did not travel ~

Radicon carried no geo-block that I can find, which is unusual for a Japanese media service. Payment was a Japanese credit card or WebMoney, a prepaid voucher sold over the counter at Japanese convenience stores. JASRAC took a fee on every single download, which is why producers often scored their free podcasts with royalty-free music instead. And the catalog was Japanese talk radio, a great deal of it made by stations in prefectures the rest of Japan had no particular reason to tune into either.

~ why the TBS logo was kept small ~

Shioyama, who had built the thing, kept his own company's mark deliberately small on the page. The point was to get other stations to put their programs up, and a storefront with TBS across the top is a TBS storefront. By January 2012 the provider list ran to thirteen names, among them RKB Mainichi in Fukuoka, CBC in Nagoya, IBC in Iwate and Radio Nikkei.

What he was hoping somebody would find was a Suiyoubi Doudeshou: the Hokkaido television show that escaped Hokkaido and turned into a national cult object. Wakayama Broadcasting had put up a documentary about the baseball life of Bito Tadashi that won a Japan Commercial Broadcasters Association award and had aired exactly once, in Wakayama. The argument was that hundreds of those were sitting in station archives with no way for anybody to pay for them.

~ two noons ~

Dated 21 January 2015, the notice sat on the front page and set out three dates. New content stopped on Sunday 29 March. Sales and downloads ended at noon on Thursday 30 April. The site shut and re-downloading stopped at noon on Friday 29 May. Radicon FOR ANDROID, released on 19 July 2011, ended with it. The notice thanks you for five years of patronage and gives no reason at all.

The FAQ underneath is the part worth keeping. You could go on playing anything you already held, it said, provided that for paid content the license authentication had been completed by noon on 29 May. A footnote widened that to some of the free downloads as well, the ones whose files ended in .cvd. After that noon, purchased content could not be fetched again. A service that had advertised no listening deadline and no play limit closed by setting one deadline for everybody at once.

radi-con.com still answers. What comes back is the site as it stood that spring: the program list, the ranking panel, the red link announcing the end of the service, a last-updated stamp in March. The notice page is up too, still explaining to anyone arriving eleven years late what is going to happen at noon on the twenty-ninth of May.

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