Remote TV

» see kddi-tech.com/remotetv as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

There is an HDMI input on the back of this thing and no video ever went through it. The port existed to push control signals the other way, into the Blu-ray recorder it was wired to, so the app on your phone could change the channel and start a disc playing. The picture came in through the analog AV socket next to it. That one detail decides the entire product, because a recorder with no analog output could not be used with Remote TV at all.

KDDI and Okinawa Cellular announced it on 19 February 2013 and put it in au shops four days later. It was a black slab about a hundred millimeters square and thirty-three thick, a quarter of a kilo, with 802.11b/g/n on board. It had no tuner and it recorded nothing. Everything it did, it did by sitting beside equipment you already owned and relaying what that equipment produced out to the open internet.

The price was 19,800 yen including tax, and nothing else was ever charged. No subscription and no monthly line fee, nothing beyond the packets you spent watching. For a Japanese mobile carrier in 2013 that is close to peculiar, because the whole business was built on recurring fees and this was a one-time purchase sold through the same shops. Remote TV was a box au sold you and then had no further commercial relationship with.

The ceiling on it was 854 by 480. Standard definition and a bit, in 2013, from a recorder that was almost certainly playing back high definition broadcast on the television standing next to the box. That ceiling is an honest statement about what a Japanese home connection could push upstream in 2013, and it does mean the product's best case was watching a blurry copy of something you had already recorded properly.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the compatibility list ~

Compatibility was a list, and the list was the product's real specification. Recorders from Panasonic, Sharp, Sony, Toshiba and Mitsubishi Electric were supported, with au's own page adding that some models were restricted. You wired the recorder in and the box took the analog feed, while the HDMI connection handled the commands that let you drive the machine from elsewhere.

On the viewing end there was an app called Remote TV (au). At launch it ran on Android 2.3 and later, plus a desktop build that went back as far as Windows XP Service Pack 2. iPhone and iPad support came afterward, and on those it worked over Wi-Fi only. You could register five devices against one box and exactly one of them could be watching at any moment, which is a limit that tells you something true about how a household of five was expected to share a single recorder.

~ because users decreased ~

The notice turned up on the manufacturer's download page sometime between 25 September and 24 October 2016, and unlike most Japanese shutdown notices this one says why. 利用者が減少したため: because the number of users decreased. Then the set apology phrase, 誠に勝手ながら, roughly "entirely at our own convenience", and the date. Monday 19 December 2016 at 10:00.

No subscriber figure was ever published for Remote TV, at launch or at the end, so the word "decreased" is the only indication of scale anyone outside KDDI has. It is more than most dead Japanese services leave behind. The register of ended au services carries 19 December 2016 exactly once, against this product and nothing else, so it was not swept up in a platform retirement. It was taken out on its own, for the reason given.

There was a parting gift, which is rarer still. Owners could claim a coupon worth up to 5,000 yen against a new au handset, issued through remotetv.kddi.com until 31 March 2017. A carrier that had sold you a one-off box with no ongoing fee, and then switched off the servers that made it work, settled up by discounting the thing it actually wanted to sell you.

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