Based on pretty good evidence, namely that TV Japan had disappeared from the international lineups of every single cable and satellite service in North America, I concluded that NHK Cosmomedia had pulled the plug on its TV Japan contracts. It also followed that the reason the TV Japan website hadn't been updated was because it was going away by April 2024.

Well, now it is official. TV Japan will expire in six weeks.

After more than three decades of broadcasting Japanese television programming to audiences across North America, we regret to inform you that TV JAPAN will cease its broadcast on March 31 [and] will no longer be accessible [as a cable or satellite service] as of April 1, 2024.

And what will replace it? Jme TV, of course.

With Jme, you'll have access to live NHK news, the latest dramas, popular movies, and much more—all conveniently accessible on internet-connected devices. With Jme, you’ll have the flexibility to enjoy your favorite Japanese programs from the comfort of your home or on the go.

I also speculated that the current Jme TV website may be a placeholder. After all, the TV Japan URL is going to be available pretty soon. A simple redirect would take care of that. But we'll find out in April. Morbid curiosity remains my main motivation now. If NHK Cosmomedia persists with the TV Japan pricing model, that's when my subscription ends as well.

Related posts

Jme TV
Whither TV Japan
Jme TV (grumpy old man edition)

Labels: business, jme, nhk, nhk cosmomedia, streaming, television, tv japan

The Jme TV website has been live for a month. It remains a work in progress. The layout is bare bones. Site navigation barely exists. A Roku player is "coming soon." But rest assured that "We are planning to add new features from April," which suggests the current website may simply be a placeholder.

To give credit where it is due, you can now bookmark shows in your browser and you don't get logged out every time you close the browser tab.

Still, it wouldn't hurt to fix the UI problems, such as a useless banner that takes up half of the home page. The oversized genre icons that belong in a menu. Get rid of horizontal scrolling. NHK World Japan has a list-based program guide. Viki has a grid-based program guide. Both are so much better. Pick one.

I really cannot overemphasize how badly designed the Jme TV website is and how difficult it would be to scale in its current configuration. Again, I have to hope it is only a placeholder and something better will emerge in April.

In Japan, everything starts in April, from the school year to the corporate fiscal year. Except for the NHK Taiga drama. It starts in January. Speaking of which, new episodes of the Taiga drama are being added every week. Along with other recent TV Japan content, the catalog no longer feels so threadbare.

Although it's akin to filling a swimming pool with a squirt gun.

My theory for the premature rollout is that NHK Cosmomedia went ahead and pulled the plug on its TV Japan cable contracts and has to fill that hole by April 2024 with something. They should have followed the herd and called the new site TV Japan Plus or NHK World Plus and reused what they had on hand.

As a previous dLibrary Japan subscriber, I signed up for $9.99/month. That $9.99/month price lasts three months and then skyrockets to $25/month, which makes this a three-month experiment. Nothing NHK Cosmomedia has put on the table so far is worth $9.99/month, let alone 2.5 times that.

Once upon a time, TV Japan had a monopoly on live-action Japanese content and could charge whatever the market could bear. That didn't mean we liked it. As one Reddit commenter puts it, "$25/month for mostly NHK through an already overpriced cable package was one of the larger ripoffs in my life."

Taken together, there is plenty of Japanese content on Viki ($5.99/month), Netflix ($6.99/month), and Crunchyroll ($7.99/month) I could be watching instead. All three don't add up to $25/month and I don't subscribe to all three at the same time. And that's not counting NHK World Japan (free) and Tubi (free).

The only criteria Tubi appears to follow when licensing Japanese content is that it's cheap and available. It's an approach that delivers a lot of dreck, but at the same time, often yields pleasant surprises, like the Edo period Detective Dobu television series from 1991. I just wish Tubi would make it easier to find.

If NHK Cosmomedia had any sense, it'd make the site free until it becomes fully functional and then copy Rakuten Viki's pricing plan, starting at $5.99/month.

It could offer a premium tier to those who want to watch live broadcasts and real-time news (though NHK's domestic news programs are free on the NHK World Premium website).

Anyway, we'll find out in April if there is any there there. I have to admit, morbid curiosity is my main motivation now. Like, you can't sign up for TV Japan using the information on the TV Japan website. It points you to providers who have removed TV Japan from their lineups. But that page hasn't been taken down.

This is the same page that states, "The price of TV Japan is about $15/month." That has never been true and yet it's been posted there for a year. One cynical explanation is that it doesn't matter because it's all going away in April. Another is that the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing.

Oh, and to answer a previous question, the name "is derived from the hope that Jme can help bridge Japan (J) and (me)." At least the URL is easier to remember.

Related posts

Whither TV Japan
dLibrary Japan (big upgrade in the works)

Labels: business, dlibjapan, japanese tv, jme, nhk, nhk cosmomedia, nhk world, streaming, television, tv japan

Rakuten Viki is offering a limited-time 30 percent off sale on all Viki Pass plans. That works out to $3.50/month for the annual basic plan. The code for monthly plans is LUNARNEWYEAR30. The code for annual plans is YEAROFTHEDRAGON30.

This offer must be redeemed by February 22, 2024.

Labels: japanese tv, jdrama, streaming, television, viki

NHK Cosmomedia once had a near monopsony and monopoly when it came to the cable and satellite TV markets in North America. Nippon TV briefly forayed into the business on DirecTV while cable providers only offered TV Japan.

As a result, NHK Cosmomedia became the primary buyer and distributor of live-action content from Fuji TV, Nippon TV, TBS, TV Asahi, TV Tokyo, and Wowow, with NHK World Japan relying largely on JIB TV.

Unlike anime, few other platforms have demonstrated a great desire to compete in this space. Even Rakuten Viki and Netflix focus most of their programming efforts in Asian on Kdrama. Japanese content is more of a side gig.

Which is why TV Japan has been able to levy a $25/month premium for the past three decades. By contrast, Kokowa, the Korean equivalent of TV Japan, charges $6.99/month for its streaming service (also available on Xfinity X1).

Nevertheless, I grudgingly paid the price when TV Japan was on DISH and the grand total came to $42/month. When TV Japan left DISH and went to DirecTV and Xfinity, the overhead almost doubled the total into no way territory.

By then, more affordable options had become available. Crunchyroll offers a vast library of anime for $7.99/month. You can stream NHK's domestic newscasts and Japan's commercial news services post their live feeds to YouTube. NHK World Japan is free.

In the meantime, streaming has been eating away at traditional cable TV like a hungry great white shark. As Luke Bouma sums up the bad news,

In just the first half of 2023, cable TV companies lost over 2,748,000 TV subscribers. All together, cable TV companies are losing about 15,000 subscribers every single day in 2023. If this trend continues, cable TV companies will lose over 4 million subscribers in 2023.

As things turned out, in 2023, Comcast alone lost over 2,036,000 TV subscribers and another 38,676 Internet customers to 5G home Internet and fiber.
As bad as things are for Comcast, the decline of traditional cable TV presents an existential threat to niche entertainment products like TV Japan.

This demographic reality first struck home in Europe, where NHK's home satellite service (JSTV) shut down on October 31, 2023, citing a decline in subscribers. In its domestic market, NHK merged BS1 and BS Premium into NHK BS on December 1, 2023.

Things that can't go on forever won't. The question is how long forever is. In this case, it may have already happened. A commenter points out that TV Japan is no longer in the international channel lineups on the Xfinity and DirecTV websites.

Indeed, while the TV Japan website still lists Xfinity as a provider, if you navigate to the international channels on DISH, Xfinity, Optimum, and DirecTV, the Japanese option is gone. TV Japan is also not available on any of the live TV streaming services.

Spectrum will formally bid TV Japan goodbye at the end of March.

TV Japan and TV Japan HD on channels 1500 and 2587 will cease programming and will no longer be available on the Spectrum TV lineup after March 31.

The obvious conclusion is that, after over three decades on satellite and cable, NHK Cosmomedia is abandoning traditional linear TV as the content delivery vehicle for TV Japan in North America, with a target date of April 1, 2024.

If so, NHK World Japan likely has a lot to do with the decision. NHK Cosmomedia launched NHK World Japan in 1998 and has since transformed it into a free livestreaming, video-on-demand, and (in some areas) over-the-air service.

So it has been there and done that and should know the ropes. Although since TV Japan only broadcasts the news and some sporting events live, it may not need to livestream at all.

In any case, this would explain why Jme TV is charging $25/month for new sign-ups. Because that's been the cost of a TV Japan subscription since time immemorial. Then why not host TV Japan on the TV Japan website? We should find out in April.

But let me wildly speculate. The first Jme TV signup email that NHK Cosmomedia sent out by accident suggested a tiered subscription model. What we could be getting in April is a livestream link to TV Japan.
The way the old dLibrary Japan website had a link in the masthead to NHK World Japan. I'm thinking something like that.

Related links

NHK World (Japanese)
NHK World (English)
TV Japan
News from Japan
Jme TV
Japan's phantom content boom

Labels: business, dlibjapan, japanese tv, jme, streaming, technology, tv japan

As a general rule, Japanese speakers who acquired only Japanese as their first language will have difficulty pronouncing consonant clusters.

With the exception of stopped consonants and the /n/ phoneme, Japanese phonology expects every consonant to be followed by a vowel. For example, the /ts/ consonant cluster is common but is always followed by /u/. Since "fruit" is pronounced /furuutsu/ in Japanese, we get the cute transliterated English title of Fruits Basket.

The /th/ phonemes /ð/ and /θ/ don't exist, so a word like "the" is pronounced /za/ (and sometimes /ji/). As such, /za/ has come to occupy its own weird sociolinguistic dimension as a repurposed cognate.

Peter Backhaus digs into the unique ways Japanese have come to use /za/ (ザ) in The Japan Times.

One of its chief functions is to spotlight some sort of prototypicality in the word it is paired up with.

Take the phrase ザ・月曜日 (za getsuyōbi, "the" Monday). When someone says this to you, they do not simply want to inform you about the day of the week. What this means is it's one of those miserable, most Monday-like Monday mornings that really have it in for you. Think sick kids, torrential rainfalls, train delays, etc.

Another example from my own collection of ザ cases: A Japanese friend who had just changed jobs complained to me that the new work environment was really ザ・会社 (za kaisha, "the" company). Which was to say it was full of red tape, opaque procedures, cemented hierarchies and everything else one commonly associates with the unpleasant aspects of corporate life.

The stereotyping capacities of ザ also come to the fore when pigeonholing people. ザ・お嬢様 (za o-jōsama, "The" Miss Princess), for instance, can be used to characterize someone who's perceived as excessively posh, and ザ・サラリーマン (za sararīman, "the" salaryman) is for people who are, well, extraordinarily ordinarily salaryman-like.

But ザ also does a great job in extracting positive stereotypes.

Two examples from [linguist Ayako] Kajiwara's data are ザ・トマト (za tomato, "the" tomato) and ザ・和食 (za washoku, "the" Japanese cuisine). The first one designates a particularly "tomatoic" specimen of the fruit, in terms of color, taste, juiciness, what have you, while the second evokes a textbook example of a classic Japanese meal. The washoku that out-washokus all others.

As Backhaus concludes, "there is nothing the Japanese language can't swallow when eating its way through the English language."

Labels: japanese, japanese culture, language