10th April 2006 - NHK and five commercial TV broadcasters held a splashy launch party in Tokyo's central Shinjuku train station on Saturday afternoon, announcing the official start of terrestrial 'One-Seg' broadcast services. The carriers have lined up accordingly: NTT DoCoMo has partnered with Nippon Television and Fuji Television, while KDDI has forged a partnership with TV Asahi. The new digital tuner-enabled handsets, coming from Panasonic, Hitachi and Sanyo, should deliver up to three hours of TV viewing time by processing and decoding only the requested channel -- as opposed to current analog units which run only about an hour and eat more juice as they decode all incoming broadcast channels.

Vodafone's 905SH from Sharp is rumoured to be available just in time for the World Cup in June.

Initially, content will be available in real time for free and consist of exactly the same programming that is already served to existing home digital TV sets; nonetheless, broadcasters and mobile content providers are anxious to explore mobile digital TV revenue possibilities.

Both TV broadcasters and advertisers can use live feeds and hot link campaign web sites right on the TV display on the phone to drive program interest, audience participation and -- of course -- impulse buying.

WWJ has been covering this story since the spring of 2004 when early prototype handsets were first introduced at an NHK open-house event.

Watch our latest video with a six-minute hands-on digital TV shot here in mid-March on a demo unit at KDDI's Designing Studio: http://www.wirelesswatch.jp.

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