Japan's Adventure into DTV

Japan's MIC (Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications) admitted that it would not be possible to migrate all the analog TV to digital until July 2011, the deadline to stop the analog broadcasting. The Minister, Mr. Masuda, said that the MIC would request the budget more than 200 billion yen ($20 billion) to distribute digital tuners to a million households on welfare and other low-income families.

The Ministry of Finance would not easily permit such ad hoc subsidy to TV audience. Moreover, it would hardly help the problem because there are more than 100 million analog TVs in Japan now. If most of these TVs are not supported, as much as 50 million TVs might be scrapped as huge buildup of wastes. However, if MIC want to subsidize all the household as the FCC did, it would cost more than $50 billion.

Last month the Cabinet of the Prime Minister proposed the Action Plan for the Digital Transition. But the biggest problem is how to finance the huge budget. As the MIC didn't auctioned spectrum, they have little budget. So I proposed the "White Space Auction" to open the unused spectrum for new entrants.

We are going to have a symposium on July 25, the day three years before the "black out" of analog broadcasting. This would be a chance for the great transition from legacy TV to the new world of broadband Web.