TBS OnDemand

» see tbs.co.jp/tbs-ondemand as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

TBS OnDemand opened on 3 February 2009, running as a trial through the end of March before it became a real service. The idea was the one every Japanese terrestrial broadcaster arrived at within about eighteen months of each other: the network already owns decades of drama and variety and music programming, the tape is sitting in a building in Tokyo, and there is no reason a viewer should not be able to pay to watch an episode from 1998 on a Tuesday.

What was on it was TBS and only TBS, plus licensed Korean drama. Old series and new ones a week after broadcast, concert films, anime, sports, documentaries. It started as a pay-per-episode shop running on a prepaid point balance, which is how Japanese digital services charged for most of that decade, and on 3 October 2016 it added a premium unlimited tier at ¥900 a month. It also ran as a branded channel inside other people's storefronts, so the same catalog surfaced through Hulu Japan, U-NEXT, GYAO! and Amazon Prime Video without the viewer necessarily knowing whose service they were in.

By the point it closed it was already a legacy product inside its own parent company. TBS Holdings had spent 2017 building the thing that would replace it, with partners, and the partners were the reason the replacement could not simply be TBS OnDemand with a new logo.

~ the dossier ~

~ the handover ~

In July 2017 Tokyo Broadcasting System Holdings and TV Tokyo Holdings set up a company called Premium Platform Japan, with Nikkei and WOWOW in it as shareholders alongside the two largest advertising agencies in the country. That company launched Paravi on 1 April 2018 as a single national subscription service carrying all of their libraries at once.

TBS OnDemand stopped accepting new registrations and stopped adding new episodes on 31 March 2018, the day before Paravi opened. Existing paying members were offered two months of Paravi free as a switching plan. The site then ran in read-only decline for three months and closed on 30 June 2018.

~ the rest of the chain ~

Paravi lasted five years. On 30 June 2023 it merged into U-NEXT and Premium Platform Japan stopped existing, which means the service TBS killed its own product to feed is also in this file. The TBS back catalog now sits on a platform TBS does not control, and whoever runs the merged library decides which 2003 drama stays streamable.

~ the geo-lock ~

None of this was ever available to me and none of it was meant to be. Japanese broadcaster streaming is locked at the rights layer rather than the technical one: the network licensed the domestic transmission and nothing else, so the catalog stops at the coastline and always did. From outside Japan, TBS OnDemand existed the way a library in a city you have not visited exists. You can read the index and you cannot take anything off the shelf. When it closed in 2018 the story ran in the Japanese trade press and essentially nowhere else.

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