Interview with Oki Electric about Japanese IPTV Market

I recently had an interview with Oki Electric in Japan. Oki has been active in the Japanese IPTV market supporting NTT’s various efforts. Oki explained to me that NTT has set up three separate IPTV services

• 4th MEDIA which offers broadcast and on demand content.
• OCN Theater which had only offered on demand content, but now is including broadcast content to its service.
• On Demand TV which offers broadcast content and on demand content.

Oki said that NTT has a plan to restructure its IPTV for NGN, the next-generation network. These separate services evolved this way due to separate efforts in NTT group companies as well as due to regulatory restrictions that have made it difficult for NTT to enter the IPTV market.

Oki provides video on demand servers to 4th MEDIA. Oki also provides middleware and content security systems to 4th Media.

Oki is also entering the IPTV set-top box market. It will start shipping an IPTV set-top box to trials in China before the end of 2007.

The IPTV market has been quite complex in Japan. NTT has had to take several approaches to overcome regulatory obstacles. It appears that this complexity may reduce over time.