S!CAST (S!キャスト)

~ the obituary ~

SoftBank Mobile described S!CAST, in its own closing notice, as a service that automatically delivered content, mobile magazines chief among them, meant to be enjoyed the way a magazine is. The Japanese phrase is 雑誌感覚, the feel of a magazine, and that phrase carries the whole pitch. The product pushed content to the handset on a schedule rather than waiting to be asked, overnight, so that whatever had been published was already sitting on the phone in the morning. You registered once and then it simply arrived.

It launched in March 2006, which the company never pinned to a day in anything that survives. Alongside it ran 3G Weather Icon, a smaller thing that put an icon for the weather in your current area onto the standby screen and kept it current. The shutdown notice names the dying service as S!CAST with 3G Weather Icon included, which settles what had always been slightly ambiguous. By the end the weather icon was part of the same product rather than a neighbor of it, and it died on the same Friday.

The notice went up on 10 August 2007 and gave 28 September as the end. Registration stayed open for another seventeen days and closed on the 27th. From the 28th of August through to the last day, every delivery was free of information charges, which is a month of a paid service being given away to people who were about to lose it. The release runs to a few short paragraphs and nowhere in it does SoftBank say why.

~ the case file ~

~ the overnight magazine ~

Push on a Japanese feature phone in 2006 meant something fairly literal. Delivery ran on the carrier's schedule rather than on yours, and the content was waiting when you next opened the phone. For a magazine this is a better fit than it sounds. A magazine is a thing that turns up whether or not you went looking for it, and S!CAST reproduced that on a device with a screen a couple of inches across.

A second release went out the same day, ending S!ケータイ動画 two days later on 30 September. That one is a separate announcement for a separate product and has its own grave. What the pair shows is a carrier spending a single morning closing two of its own content services, seven weeks out, with no explanation attached to either.

~ the autumn that was january ~

The notice does make one promise. SoftBank says a new automatic content delivery service with the contents entirely renewed is planned to start around this autumn, and that details will be reported once decided. No name is given, because there was not one yet.

It arrived on 28 January 2008, announced eleven days before, as S!情報チャンネル. Autumn had been and gone. The successor was explicitly the renewal of both halves of what had died: Yahoo! news delivery, and the weather icon back on the standby screen where it had been before. The monthly fee was zero. By December that year it had passed a million contracts, which is a number S!CAST is not recorded as ever having reached, for a product that was recognizably the same idea with a different name and no information charge on it.

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