S!ケータイ動画

» see softbank.jp/mobile/service/keitai_douga/ as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Vodafone's Japanese arm started this on 15 December 2004 under the name Vodafone live! BB, and the BB stood for the broadband you were expected to have at home rather than anything the phone could do. Video files were too large for 3G packet rates to move at a price a normal person would pay, so the service did not try. You downloaded the content to a PC and wrote it onto a memory card that went into the handset.

The file on the card was useless on its own. Playing it meant fetching a license key from Yahoo!ケータイ over the air, and that fetch was where the charge happened. Keys carried an expiry measured either in days or in the number of plays, and a few titles came with no limit on either.

Vodafone sold its Japanese network to SoftBank in 2006, and on 1 October that year the service took the S! prefix the new owner was putting on everything. It ran under that name for less than a year. SoftBank ended it on Sunday 30 September 2007 and told customers to use the phone version of Yahoo!動画 instead, which still charged packet rates for every download and had very little available to download in the first place.

In 2004 I was at university in Ankara, where a phone was a thing you sent text messages with. The nearest Turkish equivalent to a carrier video store was a WAP portal selling ringtones, so there is nothing on my side of this to hold it against.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the handset list ~

Forty-four models could run it, and the numbering reads like a product cycle laid out end to end: the 702 series at the bottom, the 911T and the 911SH at the top. Several entries are Nokias sold under Vodafone's Japanese numbering, the 702NK and the 705NK, which is what happened when a European operator tried to run a Japanese handset lineup.

That list is also why the replacement did not fit. The mobile Yahoo!動画 did not cover all of it, so a paying customer could be told to move to a service their own phone had no way to reach.

~ the operator's video store ~

Every Japanese carrier had one of these. KDDI ran EZチャンネル on au and NTT docomo ran ドコモ動画, all built on the same assumption: that video on a phone would arrive through the operator rather than through the web. Late in the run this one showed a tie-up with GYAO!, which was the first sign of the other answer. SoftBank's next move is visible in the footnotes of its own closure: in October 2007, the month after this ended, it announced S!ミュージックコネクト for WMA music, built on the same idea of a file you fetched and a key that unlocked it.

~ the notice nobody took down ~

SoftBank did not delete the product page. For at least fourteen years after the service stopped, softbank.jp/mobile/service/keitai_douga/ still resolved, and what it held was one line: the service ended on Sunday 30 September 2007, and thank you for the long use. Around that sentence sat the current SoftBank navigation, with iPhone 12 banners and links to Netflix bundles, wrapped around a notice about a 3G download service for phones nobody had owned in a decade.

It is gone now. The address returns a redirect to the service index, and the notice went with it.

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