TVerプラス

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

~ the obituary ~

DOGATCH pre-opened on 1 June 2006 with free highlights from that summer's World Cup, and the thing to understand about it is that it was never trying to be a video service. It was a lobby. Japan's five Tokyo commercial broadcasters had each built a separate on-demand platform and none of them wanted to share a player, so the company they jointly owned built a site that would show you a fragment of something and then send you to whichever station actually held the rest.

That company was Presentcast, funded by Nippon TV, TBS, Fuji TV, TV Asahi and TV Tokyo on the broadcast side and by Dentsu, Hakuhodo DY Media Partners, ADK and Tokyu Agency on the advertising side. The site formally opened on 1 December 2007 with program listings, film and event features, and the clips. It was renamed テレビドガッチ on 1 March 2008. Watching video wanted an account; reading the news did not.

Look at where it pointed and you are looking at a graveyard directory. Dai-2 Nippon Television, TBS On Demand, Fuji TV On Demand, Tele-Asa BB, Anitele Theater. A hub whose entire purpose was routing traffic to five other services ended up outliving most of them by more than a decade.

~ the case file ~

~ the bean ~

Mameshiba was not created for DOGATCH. Dentsu already had the character, written by the copywriter Kim Seok-won, officially neither a bean nor a dog, and from 1 March 2008 it was pressed into service selling a website nobody had heard of. The commercials are bleak little things: someone is eating beans, one of the beans turns out to have a face, it volunteers a piece of depressing trivia, and everyone present goes quiet. The site name and URL flash up at the end for a second. The strategy was to make people remember the bean and hope the site came with it.

Half of that worked. Bandai had a Mameshiba toy out by September 2008 and a picture book followed in November. Inside about a year there were more than 500 licensed products and 300,000 copies of two picture books in print, and a Dentsu survey put brand recognition among Japanese primary-school girls at 90 percent. Business Ascii reported at the end of 2009 that one of the people running the project was bewildered by the scale of it. In December 2011 the bean was collaborating with Kyary Pamyu Pamyu. Almost none of those children could have told you what DOGATCH was.

~ 31 march 2016 ~

The video service, the reason the site existed, shut on 31 March 2016. AV Watch had reported it the previous December with the plainest possible explanation: each station's own service now covered it. Everything else stayed up, so the site carried on as a TV news and listings page with the hole in the middle where its purpose had been.

Presentcast renamed itself TVer Inc. on 1 July 2020, taking the name of the joint catch-up platform the same broadcasters had launched in 2015. The news site was rebranded TVerプラス on 1 April 2022, which made the relationship explicit in the name itself.

~ the last day ~

Every remaining service ended on 30 September 2024. The closing page is four sentences long, thanks you for your long patronage, points you at TVer, and reminds you that TVer needs no registration and costs nothing. Eighteen years earlier, that had been DOGATCH's pitch.

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