Rimo

» see rimo.tv as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Hatena put Rimo online on 16 February 2007. It did one thing. It looked at YouTube, decided which videos were popular using its own scoring based on access counts, and played them, continuously, from the moment the page loaded. ITmedia's headline for it used the word ダラ見, which means watching something slackly, with no particular attention, the way a television is on in a room where somebody is doing something else.

You could steer it if you wanted. Specific videos could be nominated into a channel, and channels could be shared, so the thing worked as a playlist tool for people who wanted that. The default behavior was the point though: arriving at a URL and finding a program in progress, which in 2007 was a shape nothing else on the web had, because the web was a place where you chose each item individually and then waited for it to buffer.

The mark was a lowercase Rimo in pale cyan with a small radio arc over the R, drawn to look like a signal rather than a website. Eighteen months later Hatena switched it off at the end of a month, and wrote down why in terms far blunter than a shutdown notice usually manages.

~ the record ~

~ the wii had a browser ~

Nintendo's Internet Channel put Opera on the Wii in December 2006, and for a stretch of 2007 it was the easiest way in the world to get a web page onto a living-room television. Rimo arrived eight weeks later with an interface sized for that screen and that pointer. Hatena was not alone in noticing. ITmedia ran a piece a few weeks later on the small run of YouTube-on-your-TV services arriving at once in Japan, all of them aimed at the same console.

In March 2007 a Windows Vista desktop gadget version appeared, which pinned the same endless channel to a corner of a work machine. Between the console skin and the desktop widget, Rimo spent its first five weeks trying to be a television that was already on, in two different rooms.

~ the english version ~

Rimo had an English build. The archive still holds header_en.gif and a row of English heading images, and the English header carries the words User's manual in plain type, so a reader without any Japanese could open rimo.tv and get a working product with instructions in a language they could read. Somebody built that deliberately and nobody writes a manual twice by accident.

It made no difference. Those English files are the only evidence that anybody at Hatena considered an audience outside Japan, and there is no sign in the record that one turned up. Rimo stayed a Japanese product with an English button on it. That makes for an unusual silence: no barrier anybody can point to afterward, and nobody at the far end of a door that was open the whole time.

~ demoted ~

On 29 January 2008 Hatena moved Rimo out of its product list and into はてラボ, Hatelabo, the experiments wing. The announcement that it was ending followed on 21 August, posted to the Hatelabo group diary, and Impress carried it the next morning.

The reasons Hatena gave are worth reading in order. There was no developer assigned to it, so bugs and features could not be handled quickly, and videos had been failing to display for some time. Then the substantive one: YouTube's own added features now covered the use Rimo had originally been designed around, in a year when easy ways to watch video were multiplying anyway. On that basis the company judged that Rimo had finished the job it was built for, and ended it on 31 August 2008. A service dying because the thing it was a workaround for grew up is a better death than most of the entries in this archive get.

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