Watch Me! TV

» see watchme.tv as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

2006 was the year YouTube became a Japanese problem rather than an American website, and the Japanese broadcasters spent it working out how much of their own material was already up there. The coordinated answer, a request from JASRAC and twenty-two other rights bodies to remove around thirty thousand clips in one go, landed that October. Fuji Television had moved before that. Fuji TV Lab was registered as a limited liability company on 17 May 2006, jointly owned by Fuji Media Holdings and the business development arm of teamLab, and the site went into beta on 13 July.

The product looked like YouTube and behaved differently in exactly one way that mattered. Every upload was reviewed. Anything that infringed copyright or was judged inappropriate did not get published. That single rule was the entire pitch to a broadcaster's legal department and the entire reason the site could never win, because the thing people wanted from video sharing in 2006 was to put up whatever they had immediately.

Fuji ran it as a real property rather than a demo. There was original programming on it, including a news strand called Watch Me NEWS and a correspondent segment shot in New York. There were submission contests: a short animation prize, a high school media competition, a dance studio built at the Odaiba summer event with a camera crew filming whoever turned up. A user clip channel fed into the FNN evening news bulletin, which is the one part of this that a broadcaster could do better than YouTube.

~ the record ~

~ the moderation bet ~

The user targets are on the record: a million registered users by the 2007 financial year, 2.8 million by 2010. Those were not absurd numbers for Japan in 2006. Niconico Douga launched five months after Watch Me! TV, in December 2006, with the scrolling-comment overlay and no meaningful pre-publication review, and it took the audience Fuji was aiming at.

Pre-screening is not just slow, it is a cost per upload that rises with success, and every yen of it is spent making the service less appealing than the free one next door. A broadcaster is the one kind of company that has to pay it anyway. Fuji could not publish an infringing clip on a site with its own name attached without the rest of the industry noticing, and the rest of the industry was busy suing.

Turkey met the same problem in the same years and answered it from the opposite direction. YouTube was blocked here from 2008 to 2010 under a court order, so the whole country spent two years reaching the American site through proxies while nobody built a safer local copy at all. Twelve years of a broadcaster in Tokyo paying humans to watch every clip before anybody else could reads strangely from a country that just shut the door and left it shut.

~ the show that outlived the point ~

There was a television show attached, Watch Me! TV x TV, which went out weekly on BS Fuji from July 2006 with Marie and Terry Ito presenting, and clips from the site shown on air and then posted back to the site afterward. It ran until 26 March 2016, which is nearly ten years, and it outlasted the website's relevance by most of a decade. The last broadcast came two years before the service it was named after closed.

~ how it was wound up ~

Fuji TV Lab converted from an LLC to a joint stock company on 28 October 2016, which reads like a company being tidied up for an ending rather than one planning a second act. The service closed on 31 March 2018. The site stayed up for years afterward as a single Bootstrap page, a logo and four lines of text thanking users, signed by the company with a copyright notice reading 2016 to 2018. Liquidation completed on 18 December 2020.

The domain still resolves. It is a Japanese gambling comparison site now, sitting behind a bot filter, which is a worse fate than going dark.

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