Sponavi Live

~ the obituary ~

The name is a contraction of Sports Navi, Yahoo Japan's sports portal, and the service was a joint effort between Yahoo Japan and SoftBank that launched on 17 March 2016. The pricing is the first thing to understand about it. SoftBank mobile subscribers paid five hundred yen a month. Everyone else paid three thousand. There was no version of this I or anyone else outside Japan could have bought at a sensible price, because the sensible price was attached to a phone contract.

The rights were genuinely good. Sponavi Live carried Nippon Professional Baseball and it held Japanese La Liga rights for four seasons, which meant that for a while the only legal way to watch Spanish football in Japan ran through a mobile carrier's streaming app. The Premier League was there as well, and underneath the football sat ATP tennis and sumo.

On 16 March 2017 the prices moved. SoftBank customers went to 980 yen and the general rate came down to 1,480, with a lower-resolution tier still available at the old numbers. Halving the outsider price a year in is what a service does when the audience it planned for has not shown up.

It did not work. On 8 February 2018 SoftBank announced that the content was moving to DAZN. New applications stopped on 13 February, and the service ran out its last matches and closed on 31 May 2018.

~ the case file ~

~ what 980 yen was buying ~

SoftBank was never in this to make money from streaming, and the Japanese coverage is fairly direct about it. Mobile operators in Japan compete on churn, and the cheapest way to stop a customer leaving is to attach something to the line that stops working when they go. A La Liga subscription for the price of two coffees is that kind of attachment. The company was buying sports rights and booking the return in the mobile business.

This is why the two-tier price was so extreme at launch. Three thousand yen functioned as the number that made five hundred yen look like a gift, and a six to one gap is a retention lever rather than a price list. Once SoftBank halved the outside rate in 2017 the structure had already stopped holding together, because a cheap public rate undercuts the retention argument that justified the rights spending in the first place.

~ the rights went to dazn ~

DAZN had entered Japan in 2016 and taken the J.League in a ten-year deal reported at over two billion dollars, which reset what football rights cost in that market. SoftBank did not try to outbid that. It handed its own content across and went back to selling phone plans, keeping a few things it had specific arrangements for, including B.League basketball, on separate streams.

Two years and two months is short even by the standards of this site, and nothing about the ending was dramatic. A large company ran an expensive experiment in whether television could be used as a retention tool, got a clear answer, and stopped. The subscribers were moved rather than abandoned, which is rarer than it should be.

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