Haven’t written much here lately, but this news is big: NHK announced on January 28th (at a press conference which I attended) that it will begin a 24-hour global English-language TV service starting on Monday. The Breitbart.com article explains:

NHK World TV is expected to reach 110 million households in North America, Europe and the Middle East as well as areas in Africa and Asia by the end of March 2009, Yoshinori Imai, vice president of NHK, said at a news conference at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan in Tokyo.

Here is the first paragraph of the text of the handout at the FCCJ webpage:

The world of news media is facing uncertain times, not only because of the emergence of new media using the untapped and unlimited potential of the Internet, but also because of the global economic meltdown. Competition among international broadcasters has intensified and media companies are under pressure to find new business. NHK, Japan’s public broadcasting corporation, has decided to meet that challenge with a plan to expand its broadcasting to the Asian continent and far beyond.

Now, this is all very interesting. I’ve said before that I would put my bets on NHK as the winner of the whole media shakeup in Japan, not only in terms of news but also in other areas of content distribution. According to an article in Variety, last summer first steps were already being taken toward this English-language site when NHK started offering content on Joost, a UK-based internet television service.

The thing that made me really wonder, being at the actual press conference, was when someone from NHK stated that this new English-language service would be broadcast on the Internet, but (at last for starts) not in Japan. That is to say, they will broadcast the service to foreign audiences only, on the Internet.

Isn’t that a bit odd? Why wouldn’t you broadcast your English-language service locally? What about all us English-speakers living here (like me!) who would love to watch such a service? Does that mean that they will track where an Internet user is viewing from and alter site content accordingly?

Maybe there was some kind of misunderstanding, but it strikes me as a strange thing to do. In any case though, I’m looking forward to seeing this when it does eventually come online here.