Homework in Broadcasting, 15 Years Overdue

■ Homework in Broadcasting, 15 Years Overdue

The Study Group on the Ideal Broadcasting System in the Digital Age of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC) released a draft report.

The report recommends a revision of regulatory structures to expand options for management, as well as enhancement of flexibility in physical, content-related, and management aspects.

I concur with this. The report was put together well.

1. Study the shared use of physical assets, including joint investment by NHK and commercial broadcasters.

2. Allow IP and cloud adoption as options.

3. Consider IP unicasts as a possible replacement for relay stations.

4. Eliminate regional restrictions for the exclusion of mass media concentration.

5. Enable the assimilation of broadcast programs across multiple regions.

6. Examine the positioning of NHK's Internet utilization operations.

All of these represent unfinished homework from 15 years ago, postponed following their discussion by the Council on the Ideal for Telecommunications and Broadcasting in 2006 under the Koizumi Cabinet's Minister of Internal Affairs and Communications Heizo Takenaka, and its follow-up Study Group on a Comprehensive Legal System for Communications and Broadcasting (in which I participated as a committee member) under the first Abe Cabinet's Minister of Internal Affairs and Communications Yoshihide Suga.

The discussions involved significant alteration of the legal framework for telecommunications and broadcasting to enable separation of physical and non-physical aspects and shared use of the telecommunications and broadcasting spectrum, and deregulation aimed at enabling cross-sector services.

On the point of expanding options for management, this aligns with the current study group.

However, nearly no new services or businesses utilizing the new legal framework have come out of the broadcasting industry, and in 15 years the digital market was scooped up by the Internet.

Simultaneous streaming has been implemented over a decade later in Japan than overseas. Regulatory structure remedies have been put in place, with the Copyright Act finally amended last year in response to calls from industry.

The direction proposed by the study group looks past the convergence of telecommunications and broadcasting and picks up remaining points for discussion to aid broadcasters in overcome increasingly difficult circumstances.

It can be seen as a final trimming on the broadcasting regulatory structure.