Japanese IPTV Standardization Effort

Several Japanese service providers and manufacturers have joined together to unify the technical standards for IPTV services in the country, with the first compliant devices expected to emerge by March 2009.

NTT, KDDI and Softbank BB have teamed together with Sony, Matsushita Electric, Toshiba, Sharp and Hitachi , plus the country's five major TV broadcasters, including NHK. The group expects to develop standards by the end of this August. Sony, Matsushita and others expect to start selling the first flat-panel televisions with built-in IPTV receivers compliant with the new standards by the end of March 2009.

The forum is also expected to present its work to the International ITU and other global bodies with the help of Japan's Ministry of Communications.

It is a significant step forward to get IPTV implemented into TVs and other consumer electronic devices. They face significant issues. It will be interesting to see if they can meet this schedule and how the resulting products are accepted.

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.