Freshlive

Freshlive is a Japanese video hosting website and app. Both free and paid content was made available through it. It is currently in a staged shutdown, public access to the website is expected to be restricted on December 18th, 2020.
= Shutdown announcement =
E-mail announcement, posted by a user on October 2nd, 2020:
Thank you for using FRESH LIVE.
We are sorry to announce that FRESH LIVE will no longer be available. We would like to thank you for your continued support. We would like to thank you for your continued support.
The schedule for the future is as follows
* Announcement to users: Early October
* Automatic billing renewal for pay-per-month channels will stop on Friday, October 30
* Making Public Videos Private Monday, November 30
* Termination of the delivery function Monday, November 30
* Access to FRESH LIVE will be suspended on Friday, December 18
* End of providing the past video download function on Friday, January 29
* End of providing the revenue drawer function Friday, January 29
* Suspension of access to the distribution management screen Friday, January 29
Please note that the schedule is subject to change.
OPENREC.tv, which is operated by our group companies, provides high quality, low latency video streaming. We offer a live streaming service. Similar to FRESH LIVE, we also offer a monthly fee-based channel.
If you have any questions about opening a channel on OPENREC.tv, please contact us for more information.
The latest post on Freshlive's announcement blog reads (Google Translate):
2020.10.09 09:30
Notice of end of FRESH LIVE service
FRESH LIVE will end the provision of all services as of November 30, 2020 (Monday).
For customers who are currently subscribed to the monthly membership channel, the billing will not be automatically renewed after November 1st (Sun).
Programs that are open to the public for free will be available for viewing until Sunday, November 29th.
Thank you for your patronage. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.
= Site structure =
The site featured long-term videos, "programs" (streams) and posts, possibly more. Examples:
* Channel with premium (payment) content: https://freshlive.tv/sakuragakuin
* A freely accessible text post by above channel: https://daily.freshlive.tv/posts/10265101
* A normal video: https://freshlive.tv/tackychannel/12560
A page's information for video content is stored at the bottom of HTML in the second <script>-tag after div.announcer and contains the metadata necessary to retrieve the video.
Videos are hosted as .m3u8 playlists of .ts segments (backed by Cloudfront CDN); based tackychannel above:
# Extract json metadata from HTML
#* This includes all info for the client-side to render the page: Channel, thumbnails, recommendations etc.
# Contains all resolutions (quality): https://movie.freshlive.tv/manifest/12560/archive.m3u8
#* manifests will return a JSON if an error occurs: e.g. "json.errors[0].message" → "forbidden" for premium content / "not found"
# Get playlist for highest quality: https://movie.freshlive.tv/playlist/37466.m3u8
# Download the video segments
= Archival =
The Japanese live site announced on October 19th 2020 that it would end on November 30th and stop releasing free videos on November 29th. The video archive was deleted soon after.
On 2020-12-04, ragu__ gathered a list of .m3u8 URLs (). The website was also archived via ArchiveBot ().
In mid-December, there was a distributed archival project with limited success.