Japan has long had some unique cultural aspects that make it an unreliable model for the rest of the world. That is partly why so many predictions relating to Japan have proved false in the past, dating back at least to the time of its global consumer electronics domination in the 1980s when briefly it threatened to overtake the US as the world’s largest economy. This turned out to be a bubble inflated by a grotesquely overvalued yen which burst as the economy was overtaken by other countries in the region where wages were lower, although the country has continued to be a force in micro-electronics and also in mobile technology. But things are never quite what they seem and even the latest statistics highlighting Japan’s affinity for mobile TV hide some specific aspects of usage. This time round there are some respects in which Japan may be holding the torch for the rest of the world.
We have been here before, since mobile TV has thriving in Japan in some guise for over a decade. The story dates back to 2003 when ISDB-T superseded analog for commercial terrestrial transmissions in Japan, followed over the next few years in several South American countries including Brazil. Except in Brazil where it is slightly different, the ISDB-T system adopted the UHF band at frequencies between 470 and 770 MHz, rather lower than say DVB-T, yielding a total bandwidth of 300 MHz. This band was divided into 50 channels each 6 MHz wide, with the unique aspect being the further sub-division into 13 separate 428 KHz segments.
Of these 13 segments comprising each digital ISDB-T channel, only 12 were dedicated to full-bandwidth HD programming, leaving one over to carry a much lower resolution mobile broadcast, which as a result became known as 1-seg. This enables a resolution of 320 x 420 pixels, ample for the earlier mobile TV services, which took off rapidly with Sharp profiting on account of its then world-leading position in small LCD screens, although Sony and Panasonic soon caught up to some extent. By 2008 over 10 million people were watching at least some mobile TV and owned 1-seg capable handsets, but almost exclusively for snacking news and sports clips, with just 15% watching more than 30 minutes of TV a day on their mobiles. Over 80% of viewing was either at work or travelling to and from it, leading to many predictions that equivalent mobile TV technologies outside Japan, like DVB-H and Qualcomm MediaFlo, would enjoy similar uplift.
But this reckoned without the much greater Japanese affinity for miniaturization generally exemplified in bonsai plants as much as electronic devices. This partly explains why in Japan mobile TV take up was not confined to or driven by young people, with about half of all early viewers being over 40 and only 27.5% under 30.
This early mobile TV boom was not entirely confined to Japan, since in South Korea T-DMB mobile digital broadcasts were almost as popular per head as 1-seg was in Japan. Elsewhere we know the likes of DVB-H proved a dismal flop, largely because the quality allowed by available handsets and bandwidth was not enticing enough, along with the cost of building out a separate network.
Even in Japan interest in mobile TV flat lined for a year or two given limitations over quality with 1-seg. However, in 2009 NTT DoCoMo, the country’s dominant mobile operator, launched a 3G based service called BeeTV, which took up the slack, growing steadily to gain 5.3 million subs at its peak two years ago around April 2014, charging around $3 a month for a variety of content dedicated to the platform.
But BeeTV was a unicast service and so to an extent became a victim of its own success, which is partly why subs have declined since that 2014 peak and stand at around 4 million, having been rebranded as DTV in April 2015. Meanwhile Japan has been at the leading edge once again by stepping into mobile broadcast as opposed to unicast. This arrived in April 2012 with the launch of Nottv, occupying spectrum vacated by analog TV channels after switch off.
The spectrum was handed over to mobile operators, but without the same acrimony as in the US and Europe, since it was done in close collaboration with broadcasters, which saw this as a new outlet for their channels. Unlike 1-seg, which was merely relaying terrestrial broadcasts to mobile handsets, Nottv was a true mobile platform tied to specific services users could subscribe to from their MNOs and at a higher resolution. And multicasting made far more efficient use of the spectrum than NTT DoCoMo’s BeeTV.
It was not surprising that NTT DoCoMo which came into Nottv first with announcement of two devices to support the platform, one being a Sharp Aquos dual-core smartphone with a 4.5-inch 720p 3D display. Broadcasts began in April 2012 and again this took off quite quickly, with 2.2 million devices sold and 500,000 paying subscribers by the end of that year. This ushered in the third generation of Japanese mobile TV (after 1-seg and unicast 3G) and galvanized the field, with the telecoms conglomerate Softbank launching in November 2014 an a la carte streaming service for Japanese smartphone users. Users can sign up to single channels for around $4 each, which has proved popular because in Japan, as in many other countries, pay TV has been sold predominantly only in bundles that include a lot of content any one household never watches.
With various options for watching TV on mobile devices it is harder to count numbers meaningfully, but according to Nielsen NetRatings Japan, there has been a continued swing in OTT viewing from PCs and laptops to smartphones specifically. In the latest count in November 2015 there were 5.32 million smartphone viewers of VoD content, compared with 1.39 million on desktop or laptop computers. There was a similar dichotomy for subscription VoD, with 7.81 million viewers in Japan watching such services on smartphones during the month, compared with 2.69 million on desktops or laptops. Nielsen also found that levels of consumption per user were rising rapidly, with smartphone viewers spending 12 minutes in November 2015 watching TV VoD content against just 2 minutes in November 2014. The ratio was almost identical for SVoD services at 31 minutes in November 2015, up from 5 minutes in November 2014.
Such studies highlight how at last Japan’s mobile TV scene does provide a pointer for the rest of the world. Firstly, it was ahead of the game with multicast and broadcast, but Japan has also been leading the way over VoD with the growing use of predictive download onto users’ handsets. This was established by Nottv, but can also be done over unicast services by pushing content down at times of low usage. Notttv is based on Push VOD and FileCasting, moving towards a predictive download model taking account of what particular users might want.
By playing out directly from the device the service can avoid the buffering and artefacts that are common with live streaming even over 4G networks. The flip side is that storage is still relatively limited on smartphones, given that 32GB will soon fill up even at the lower resolutions of mobile TV in the event of indiscriminate downloading, being enough for about 30 full length movies at 700 Kbps using say the LD 360p 4G Mobile @ H.264 main profile. This is why predictive download will be important for mobile TV over the next few years, taking account of individual users’ preferences just as it commonly done by pay TV operators to DVRs.