Report of the Commercial Broadcasters Association: In the Midst of Two Wars

■ Report of the Commercial Broadcasters Association: In the Midst of Two Wars

I contributed the foreword to the report from the Digital Network Study Group of the Commercial Broadcasters Association.

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　Humanity today faces unprecedented trials in COVID-19 and Ukraine. We find ourselves in the midst of two wars.

　Across the globe, COVID-19 pushed DX forward several years. Japan acknowledged its defeat in the digital arena and established the Digital Agency. Amid these landslide events, what roles did television and radio play?

　The invasion by Russia sparked the first war involving a major nation in an AI- and data-driven society, the first amid ubiquitous smartphones and social media. Cyber attacks, fake news, digital sanctions... the battlefield of this war is chiefly in the digital arena. What role has broadcasting played in the conflict? Was it able to command a leading role?

　For the first time, spending on online advertising has reportedly exceeded advertising spending in the traditional four media outlets. Even more than the report of 2.7 trillion yen in spending online versus 2.5 trillion yen in the four media outlets, this lumping of television, radio, newspapers, and magazines into "four media outlets" seemed to me the more significant news item. NHK launched simultaneous distribution, Japan's Copyright Act was revised, and commercial broadcasting also began… The landscape underwent periodic shifts in scenery.

　The dichotomy between communications and broadcasting has already outlived its usefulness. A market once worth nothing has grown to the scale of 2.7 trillion yen. The time for looking back on 30 years spent failing to pursue that market is now over. The closed-world dichotomies between commercial broadcasting and public broadcasting, between flagship stations and local stations, will also be swallowed up by the vortex of the global Internet. This is now a time for examining positions within the 70-trillion-yen information market, which encompasses the Internet and the 4-trillion-yen broadcasting market.

　

　Within the government Intellectual Property Strategy Headquarters, platforms and the metaverse are under discussion as content strategies. How will the industry address Chinese IT firms' capital investments in Japan, even as it responds to US-based IT firms exemplified by GAFA and Netflix? How will it meet the surging waves of new technologies such as the metaverse and NFTs? These, too, point to shifts in scenery. How will the broadcasting industry answer those?

　The industry passed through multimedia in the 90s and through the Internet and terrestrial digital broadcasting in the 2000s without drawing up a big picture. The consequences of this can be seen in the turmoil of the present. The private sector draws up strategy that takes in media as a whole. Such efforts are needed in the broadcasting industry as well.