YNN

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

~ the obit ~

The letters stood for よしもとネタネットワーク, Yoshimoto Neta Network, and neta is the word for a comedian's material. Yoshimoto Kogyo has been the management company behind most of Japanese comedy since 1912, and in 2011 its talent subsidiary decided it also wanted to be the distributor. YNN opened on 16 May 2011 and closed on 20 December 2019.

The timing was deliberate. On 27 April 2011 Yoshimoto had launched あなたの街に住みますプロジェクト, which assigned a comedy act to each of Japan's 47 prefectures and had them actually move there, work local television and turn up at local festivals. Three weeks later the agency had a website that could sell whatever those acts filmed. The launch coverage put it plainly: neta from all 47 prefectures, delivered by the comedians themselves.

This is comedy in a form that does not travel. Manzai runs on a two-person rhythm and on the name of the town it is being performed in, and a paid Japanese video service for regional comedy acts had no reason to ever reach me. YNN turned up in a category listing of Japanese video-on-demand services that stopped, which is how most of these arrive.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ warokoin ~

The site ran on its own money, called ワロコイン off warau, to laugh. One coin was worth exactly one yen, except that buying coins cost you the yen plus consumption tax on top of it, so the exchange rate was honest and the purchase was not. Coins bought individual videos. If you did not want to buy per item there was お笑いコース 500, a 500 yen monthly pass over whichever comedy videos the editors had flagged as unlimited.

~ the idols moved in ~

YNN NMB48 CHANNEL opened on 29 August 2013. NMB48 is the Osaka branch of the AKB48 system and Osaka is Yoshimoto's home ground, so hosting the group's video on the agency's own platform was housekeeping rather than a deal anyone had to negotiate. It worked better than the comedy did. The channel carried live streams and member programs at a volume that turned the rest of YNN into the part of the site you scrolled past.

On 29 April 2018 the channel ran a live broadcast titled YNN（終）, YNN (end), and used it to announce that it was renaming itself 新YNN NMB48 CHANNEL. The service it was named after still had twenty months left. On 26 July 2019 the channel opened on Niconico, and by the time YNN closed that December the move was finished. Kawaiian TV had been rebroadcasting a cut of it on television as でかせぎ YNN NMB48 CHANNEL, and Kawaiian TV went dark on 30 November 2019, three weeks before the site it was borrowing from.

~ what came after ~

Part of the comedy library went to 大阪チャンネル, Yoshimoto's subscription service for its Osaka theaters, which is the right resting place for a regional comedy archive if it has one. The three other idol channels YNN had picked up did not last long enough to need a destination. PASSPO☆ arrived on 30 July 2015 and stopped getting new content in March 2016, and Rev. from DVL managed the same six months starting 10 September. ベイビーレイズJAPAN held out until June 2016, which made it the long one. YNN then stayed open for another three and a half years with nothing new going into any of those sections.

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