Sega Channel

» see segachannel.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

sega channel launched on december 12, 1994 in north america. it was a partnership between sega and the cable companies tci and time warner cable. you signed up through your cable provider, paid roughly $15 a month plus a $25 activation fee. they sent over a special adapter cartridge that slotted into the genesis cartridge port. a coax line ran from the wall into the adapter. the cable head-end transmitted a continuous loop of about 50 sega genesis games. when you booted the console, a menu appeared. you picked a game from the menu and the data downloaded into the adapter's 4mb of ram. the game ran like any cartridge. switching the console off erased everything. tomorrow the lineup might be different.

this was on-demand console gaming five years before broadband. the catch was that it required a cable subscription with a head-end that had been upgraded to carry the sega data feed, which limited the service to the cable systems tci and time warner had retrofitted. it never reached every market. canada got a smaller version in 1995 with a slightly higher monthly fee. the rotating lineup was the main draw. parents who balked at $50 cartridges could rent a whole library of them by paying the cable company instead.

the service hit over 250,000 subscribers at peak. then two things lined up against it. the sega genesis itself stopped getting new releases as sega shifted to the saturn in 1995, and the same cable systems that carried the game feed were rolling out cable modems and the early home internet. by 1997 a customer with a cable modem could download mp3s and play games against people on the internet, which made a one-way game-loop feed feel old. sega channel was switched off on july 31, 1998. the adapters became paperweights overnight.

i was a kid in turkey while all of this was running. cable tv in turkey did not even support the basic teletext-era data services this depended on. sega channel was a US cable infrastructure product that needed a specific upstream box at the cable provider. it never appeared anywhere outside north america. i first heard about it years later in retro game writing, the same way i heard about q-link and the early aol world. by the time i had a games console with internet at all, i was downloading demos over a 56k ttnet line.

~ the case file ~

~ how it actually worked ~

the cartridge was the trick. the sega channel adapter was bigger than a normal genesis cart and contained 4mb of ram plus a tuner that listened to a dedicated channel slot the cable provider had assigned. games were broadcast in a constant rolling carousel. when you picked one from the menu, the cart waited for it to come around in the carousel and then captured it into ram. download time depended on luck and game size. once cached, the game ran exactly like a normal cartridge. power off and the ram cleared, since there was no battery backup for the downloaded code itself.

~ what it had ~

about 50 titles in rotation at any time, refreshed monthly, drawn from sega's first-party catalog along with select third-party publishers. some games were sega channel exclusives or early demos that never appeared in retail. the most-cited example is a special version of x-men: clone wars made for the service. there was also pulseman, a japan-only release that sega channel let north american players try without an import cart.

~ what killed it ~

two things at once. the sega genesis hardware was a discontinued platform by 1996 in the eyes of most retailers, with the saturn taking over shelf space. the second was that cable internet started rolling out across the same plant, and once a household had a cable modem the appeal of a one-way game-broadcast feed dropped fast. the cable companies had no reason to keep allocating bandwidth to a closed loop when they could sell that bandwidth as a generic ip pipe. sega took the hint and ended the service in mid-1998. the saturn never got an equivalent.

~ what it predicted ~

on-demand game distribution. xbox live arcade did roughly the same idea ten years later, except over the open internet and on a hard drive. game pass and steam are the same notion, with library rotation and a monthly fee, on a different network. the sega channel concept was years ahead of the bandwidth required to make it routine. when the bandwidth caught up, the model came back, just running on a different pipe.

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