Sony eyeVio

» see eyevio.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

sony had a japan-only youtube from april 2007. that is not a thing i heard about at the time. by 2007 youtube itself had been through the google acquisition and was the default video site in most of the world, japan included. eyeVio was a locked-language competitor with a japanese-only interface and a hardware tie-in i had no path to. i learned about the site's existence and its creative-commons policy years later, reading around the cc case-study archive.

the service launched with the tagline "my life, your emotion." uploads were reviewed by staff on the way in, a moderation model closer to a small tv station than to youtube's open-firehose approach. video went out to psp handhelds and walkman video units through direct playback links, with sony-ericsson phone support layered on later. the creative-commons requirement was the interesting piece: any clip made available for download had to carry a cc license. by 2008 nearly every downloadable video on the service was CC BY or CC BY-NC.

HD support at 1280x720 arrived june 2008 as "eyeVio HD Pro," a fee-tier feature for the higher-bandwidth uploaders. it remained japan-only and stayed off any global radar.

~ the record ~

~ the creative-commons angle ~

takeshi honma, one of the co-founders on the sony side, framed eyeVio as a family-and-friends sharing site rather than a broadcast platform. the cc requirement solved two problems at once. it gave sony a clean license path for pulling uploaded content onto its own hardware without a per-video negotiation, and it gave uploaders a default legal frame without needing to think about copyright. the daily english show, a language-teaching program run under CC BY, was one of the recurring properties on the platform. the policy was documented at wiki.creativecommons.org as a case study in default-license adoption.

~ the sprasia handoff ~

sony ended its operation of eyeVio on 29 may 2009. the domain and the running service went to sprasia corporation on 1 june 2009 with user data carried over. sprasia was a japanese online-video-editing platform operator, smaller than sony and unable to keep the walkman and psp playback integrations working. the sprasia-run version continued as a general video-sharing site for a couple more years before fading out. the sony hardware plumbing that had been half the point of the original service went with the sony brand.

~ the legacy ~

niconico won the japanese video-sharing market while youtube took the mainstream layer. eyeVio's cc-default policy did not become the norm anywhere, though it foreshadowed the cc-licensed defaults that ended up on flickr for photos and on wikimedia commons at scale. sony's later media-service history sits closer to playstation network and playstation vue than to a video-share site. the eyeVio experiment lasted about the same window as revver and vidme, and disappeared with the same absence of press.

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