Television in Japan

The fee varies from ¥12,276 to ¥21,765 (reduced to ¥10,778 to ¥20,267 for households residing in Okinawa Prefecture)[3][4] depending on the method and timing of payment, and on whether one receives only terrestrial television or also satellite broadcasts.

[10] In the same period the engineer Kenjiro Takayanagi also turned his interest to television studies after having learned about the new technology in a French magazine.

He developed a system similar to that of John Logie Baird, using the Nipkow disk to scan the subject and generate electrical signals.

But unlike Baird, Takayanagi took the important step of using a cathode ray tube to display the received signal, successfully reproducing the Katakana character イ in December 1926.

[13] At the behest of the Ministry of Communications the local stations of Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya were thus merged in 1926 into a single national organization called Nippon Hōsō Kyōkai.

[a] Right after its creation, four other stations were created in other regions, namely Hokkaidō, Tōhoku, Chūgoku and Kyūshū, whose first broadcasts took place in November 1928.

[13] In 1930 the Nippon Hōsō Kyōkai founded the Science & Technology Research Laboratories (STRL) with the aim of developing a television set in the wake of the inventions of Paul Gottlieb Nipkow and Vladimir Zworykin.

Takayanagi himself and other leading engineers of the time took part in the program and, although the Olympics were officially canceled in July 1938, television research continued, fueled by the zeal of those involved in the project.

Nippon Hōsō Kyōkai itself, which until then had maintained a certain independence from the government, with the increase in military control over the institutions ended up becoming a simple propaganda weapon of the State.

[28] The two broadcasters immediately entered into competition by offering viewers schedules with different styles and contents: if NHK insisted on culturally elevated programs suitable for the highest social classes, NTV aimed more decisively at the masses.

[29] Initially the high cost of the receivers slowed down their diffusion, when at the end of March 1954 there were only 17,000 subscribers compared to more than eleven million radio listeners.

[38] Events of such magnitude and general interest, as well as the wedding of the then crown prince Akihito in 1959, contributed to the rapid popularization of television as a new medium of mass communication.

[40] In the meantime, the last and smallest of the main Japanese commercial broadcasters also appeared on the television scene, TV Tokyo, which began in 1964 as a channel dedicated to cultural and educational programs before later establishing itself also in the entertainment field in general, with particular attention paid to anime.

[42] The Nippon Hōsō Kyōkai (NHK, the Japan Broadcasting Corporation) began conducting research to "unlock the fundamental mechanism of video and sound interactions with the five human senses" in 1964, after the Tokyo Olympics.

The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE), headed by Charles Ginsburg, became the testing and study authority for HDTV technology in the international theater.

SMPTE would test HDTV systems from different companies from every conceivable perspective, but the problem of combining the different formats plagued the technology for many years.

[44] In 1973, the Space Activities Commission launched the experimental satellite transmission program, entrusting its development to NASDA and management to NHK.

[45][46] The latter, unlike its predecessors, allowed signal reception even from small satellite dishes of 40 or 60 centimeters in diameter, suitable for domestic use.

[49][50] The Fujio's team agreed that, both technically and economically, HDTV technology was more easily applicable to direct satellite broadcasts, also taking into account how cable TV was poorly developed in Japan than it had been, for example, in the United States.

emerges as one of Japan's largest pay-TV platforms, competing with WOWOW, cable company J:COM and Hikari TV's IPTV service.

The transition concluded in most of the country on July 24, 2011, except for the prefectures of Iwate, Miyagi, and Fukushima, on whose switchoff was postponed to the following year due to the Tōhoku earthquake.

[58][61] However, the transition was not without problems: the 333m Tokyo Tower was in fact insufficient to adequately cover the Kantō area with the digital terrestrial signal.

[62] In January 2014, Nippon TV launched a free service that allowed viewers to watch programs online up to a week after the original air date.

[62] In 2015, to counter the entry of Netflix and Amazon Video into the Japanese market,[63] the main commercial networks based in Tokyo struck a deal by jointly launching the free TVer website.

These new features are unlikely to be adopted in Japan due to incompatibility problems but are being considered for use in future implementations in other countries, including Brazil itself.

The TV transponder units are designed to sufficiently amplify transmitted signals to enable reception by small, 40 or 60 cm home-use parabolic antennas.

[43] The Japanese have sometimes subdivided television series and dramas into kūru [ja] (クール), from the French term "cours" (both singular and plural) for "course", which is a three-month period usually of 13 episodes.

All major TV networks in Japan produce a variety of drama series including romance, comedies, detective stories, horror, and many others.

An exception is Power Rangers and their subsequent series that used battle sequences from the Super Sentai counterpart and combined them with American actors who acted out entirely original story lines.

Doraemon, Case Closed, Pokémon, Fairy Tail, Bleach, Naruto, Dragon Ball and One Piece are examples of anime.