UULA

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

~ the obit ~

A record label and a mobile carrier built a streaming service together and named it UULA. Avex supplied the music and the video catalog, SoftBank supplied the customers, and the thing opened on 14 February 2013 as a subscription you bought through your phone bill. The price was 504 yen a month with tax included, which was cheap enough to be an impulse and expensive enough to be noticed on a statement.

The catalog opened at more than 60,000 titles and was near 95,000 by December 2014. It carried music video alongside films and drama in the same app, which was the pitch: a label's back catalog and a video rental shelf under one subscription, on a handset. It ran on SoftBank smartphones first, then on iPhone and iPad, and on SoftBank's own SmartTV box.

Growth was fast and then it stopped being growth. At the end of April 2013, ten weeks in, there were 281,000 members. By the end of January 2014 there were 950,000. The peak came a year after that, 1.41 million at the end of January 2015, and every figure Avex published after it points the other way.

1.36 million by the end of July 2015. 620,000 by the end of October 2016, which is fewer than the service had eighteen months after launch. The service closed on 31 March 2017 and the company behind it was folded into Avex Digital.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the carrier problem ~

Products sold through a phone carrier get their first million customers cheaply and then discover they cannot get a second million. UULA's distribution was SoftBank's shop counter and SoftBank's billing relationship, and both of those are excellent at signing people up and useless at giving them a reason to stay once the shop assistant is out of the room. The catalog was good. The reason to keep paying for it, once Netflix landed in Japan in September 2015 and Amazon Prime Video followed that same month, was not.

Avex bought SoftBank out in March 2016 and took full ownership through Avex Digital. That is usually read as commitment. Read against the membership curve it looks more like one partner taking the keys to a car the other partner had stopped driving, and the service lasted twelve months after that.

~ what it was competing with ~

Japan in the mid-2010s had a crowded shelf of carrier-tied and broadcaster-tied video services all launched within a few years of one another, and almost all of them are now graves. BeeTV was on docomo. Video Pass was on au. acTVila was inside the television set. UULA was the SoftBank one. Each was engineered around a billing relationship rather than around a catalog nobody else had, and the arrival of two American services with global libraries and no carrier requirement went through all of them.

I was not in that market and could not have subscribed to this one from Ankara even in principle, since the sign-up ran through a Japanese carrier account. Distance here is contractual rather than cultural. The app existed, the catalog was real, and the door was a phone contract I was never going to hold.

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