Japan Mobile TV in the News

TV Bank, a division of the SoftBank Group, has announced a new contents service, Yahoo! Animation, in addition to the Yahoo! Streaming channel which was introduced at the end of May. A so-called digest version of official baseball games, offered free of charge via the operators Yahoo! mobile portal, will include games from Japanese major league baseball teams including; the Chiba Lotte Marines, Tohoku Golden Eagles, Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters along with the company-owned Fukuoka Softbank Hawks. The service sounds very much like the product offered by Tokyo-based Craftmax as described in our video interview conducted back in spring 2005.

While we’re on the mobile TV topic, several stories around the web caught our eye here this morning.

Bansai TV

If TV can go the bonsai way and shrink to wallet size, how will this affect those who make movies? Simple! Look to Japan for inspiration again and transform film making to a ‘haiku: the terse traditional Japanese verse form of three lines, of five, seven and five syllables.

Apparently it’s news of the day from The Hindu Business Line:

A variety of competing technologies and standards are available which make it possible to broadcast television signals to mobile devices. The US has generally adopted the Forward Link Only or FLO standard developed by Qualcomm. Early movers in Asia such as Japan and Korea have harnessed terrestrial and satellite-based technologies such as Digital Media Broadcast (DMB-T and DMB-S). China is deploying its home-brewed standard, China Multimedia Mobile Broadcasting, and hopes to have it working in time for the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing.

We note with some dismay the total lack of any mention of 1SDB-T in this article and were even more shocked to see that Nokia’s research document [.PDF] did not address, even once, perhaps the most significant commercial deployment of mobile television digital broadcasts available anywhere? Then again, seems the word’s out that “Mobile TV is like Sushi“.