Japanese TV? Not Anymore They Don't!

This story makes me go, "Hmmmm?" Several Japanese TV manufacturers have stopped making TVs in Japan. This is truly the decline and fall of Japanese civilization!

I have already written about how high energy costs are going to force many factories to close especially if TEPCO is forced to raise electricity charges for these factories. For more on that, please refer to Japan's Collapse Will be Absolute and it Cannot be Stopped - Here's Why:

All one needs to do to see what that hollowing out has done to the middle class in America is to get on an airplane and fly to, say, Detroit to see what is left of industry there. It's not rocket science, but where's there's no industry, there are no jobs.

That is the future we are heading for in this country and I see no way out. Zerohedge writes in: A New Beginning in Japan: Glimmers of False Hope:

TEPCO, the bailed out owner of the Fukushima nuclear power plant, is trying to shove rate increases of 17% down the throats of its commercial customers—while rationing power at the same time. Power shortages will spread across most of Japan this summer as the last of 54 nuclear power plants will be taken off line in a few weeks. 

... Hitachi, a major Japanese TV manufacturer has already closed doors on TV production in Japan. Now this?

Toshiba drops Japan TV operations amid falling prices, global competition

Toshiba said Thursday it has stopped making televisions in Japan, citing slow domestic demand as falling prices, fierce global competition and a strong yen pressure the country’s electronics makers.

The IT-and-engineering conglomerate shuttered production lines at its last remaining domestic TV plant in Fukaya, near Tokyo, at the end of March, a company spokesman told AFP.

Toshiba, the maker of the Regza brand of televisions, has shifted all of its television production to factories in China, Indonesia, Egypt and Poland, he said, adding: “The fall in domestic demand is the reason.”

The move is the latest development highlighting the plunging fortunes of Japan’s once world-beating electronics firms.

A strong yen, intense global competition—particularly from South Korean firms—and falling retail prices of televisions have left Japanese manufacturers swimming in red ink for the financial year that ended in March.

The industry received a temporary boost from a now-ended government stimulus program aimed at encouraging the purchase of energy-efficient appliances, but demand has slackened in an economy that has been limping along for many years.

Domestic television demand also surged when the nation stopped analogue broadcasting last July, by which time nearly all households and corporations had bought new televisions capable of receiving digital broadcasts.

On top of low demand, I'm absolutely sure that the higher electricity costs played a major role in Toshiba's decision. 


There are two issues at play here. The problem of high energy costs in Japan (and they are going to go higher) and the collapse of the TV viewing audience in Japan. For more on that please refer to "Why the Digital Conversion Will Destroy TV Tokyo and TBS."


TV as a hardware industry and as entertainment vehicle have a poor future in Japan. The other two TV manufacturers in Japan, Sony and Panasonic, haven't thrown in the towel, but are attempting to tie up with South Korean manufacturers...


The time's they are a changing! If you had told people 20 years ago that the Japanese would not be manufacturing TVs today, everyone would have thought you were nuts.... What is Japan? Geisha, samurai, sushi... and TV sets.

TV isn't Dead... It Just Smells Bad!

Just returning from a trip to the USA whereby I spent the last week trying to help out a primary caregiver with my very ill father on hospice. 


It was/is a terrible situation and I hope that you don't have to go through this with any of your parents soon. But many will, so before that, won't you take one minute to take a look at this short message concerning that subject?


While there, I made some observations about television. It wasn't hard to do. I was staying at a household with my now 80-year-old father and his 80-year old live-in partner and caregiver where the TV was on from the first thing in the morning to the last thing, besides the kitchen light, to be turned off at night before bed.


Observing these folks watching TV was painful. The primary caregiver was constantly talking to the TV as if the conversation were all hers (seriously) and my dad was constantly complaining about how idiotic the TV was... Yet, on the TV stayed.... 


The situation with the TV on forever drove me crazy!


That house is, in my opinion, the typical TV household of the year 2011 and beyond. It represents the core of who are TV's main viewers today and it also represents why TV, in its current configuration, is dead. I've written about it before in "Part Two: Why the Digital Conversion Will Kill TV Tokyo and TBS":


These are folks who have seen TV all their lives. The Internet is still a new thing to them. My in-laws are the kinds of folks who turn on the TV when they wake up in the morning and leave it on all day whether they are watching it or not. They are terrestrial TV's prime audience.

Why are these people the typical prime target for a station like TV Tokyo or TBS? Think about it.

Who has the time to sit around and really watch TV for 2 or 3 hours a day, everyday (like people did 30 years ago)? Well, the only people who do have the time to do so are either:

1) Inactive
2) Poor
3) Retired or aged
4) Handicapped or ill

Think about that. Now, if you were a sponsor, would you spend money on TV advertising for people who fit any of the descriptions above? No. You wouldn't.

That's one huge problem for these dinosaur TV stations that have thousands of employees and a dropping revenue base.


This problem is universal. Perhaps countries like India or China haven't (nor will they???) face these challenges... (But I know that in India, people still use 45 rpm records and cassette tapes, so maybe they will someday soon!)


Japan and the USA are in the same boat, though, when it comes to TV. Here are some things I noticed while in the USA that just confirmed and consolidated my opinion on that:


TV in the USA is now playing a defensive strategy that I have seen stations play in Japan. It is a strategy doomed to failure. I have seen this with my own eyes and even argued this point against program directors and station managers as far back as 1998.


The strategy that these stations are trying can't possibly work in the long run. It goes like this: The audience of TV viewers is shrinking. So, instead of pursuing an aggressive policy to reach out to younger people and gather new viewers and a new audience, the stations pursue a defensive strategy to prevent erosion of their current audience (old people). The stations will, instead of making efforts to attract new viewers, will make efforts to keep their old veiwers and prevent them from switching channels to the other competing station (who is pursuing the same policies). This might be fine, but when you realize that your core audience is numbers 1 ~ 4 above, this is not an audience that is growing. This is an audience that is dying off and shrinking.


Now, it doesn't take a genius to realize that this sort of strategy is a sure-fire way to fail. Most promising new business plans attack new, growing markets; not old and shrinking ones.


A good piece of evidence for this is the many FM radio stations that are still playing Bob Seeger, Journey, Foreigner and Steve Miller Band; the same music they were playing 30 years ago! The current sad financial state of today's FM stations - in Japan and the USA - is a testament to the failure of this policy.


My conclusions about network TV in the USA pursuing this policy were reinforced by the commercials I saw. They were very heavily geared to an older audience. One particularly memorable commercial was for a boxed set of DVD's of Shirley Temple movies. Now, I like Shirley Temple as much as the next movie fan (OK, maybe not that much) but for lack of a better description, when I saw the commercial, I thought, "This is not 'cool'!" 


Now, who in the world would want to buy a Shirley Temple boxed set of movies? Anyone under 50-years-old? No? How about under 70? How about 75? 


One of the stations that my ill father and his caregiver watched constantly was ABC. I surmise that their favorite TV show is Good Morning America that has been on since before I moved to Japan in 1984. This show has definitely declined in quality and popularity (I could deduce that by watching shots of the audience). The main host Regis Philbin is retiring so he has good timing. These stations are trying to do anything to pump some life into their lifeless format but it fails miserably. 


It used to be only on late night TV like David Letterman that when the station returned from a TV commercial, would the audience scream and yell while clapping. But now, even on the morning TV shows, they do that. It used to be just polite clapping on morning shows. Now, it's a bunch of people yelping and screaming like a high school sports match or American Idol (which is the intelligence level of this nonsense).

It might have been OK to have these people screaming loudly like a bunch of junior high school kids excepting that one time, on Good Morning America, they foolishly showed the audience and there weren't twenty people standing there. Probably most people don't notice that, but I caught it immediately.


Twenty years ago, it would have been a few hundred people trying to gain their 15 seconds of fame. Now? 


In a related note, as I predicted long ago, many Japanese have turned away from TV. I predicted that the digital conversion would see Japanese TV stations voluntarily throw away 20 ~ 30% of their core audeince. Some people scoffed. I had written in Why the Digital Conversion Will Kill TV Tokyo and TBS:

It seems obvious to me that there's no doubt about it...  Basically:

1) People with money do not watch TV
2) The only people who do watch a lot of TV have either no money or too much time on their hands; they are not active
3) Advertising to people with no money and who are not active is a waste of money.
4) When digital goes online fully, then the only people who don't have the digital equipment are poor people
5) Poor people are the only ones who watch TV Tokyo and TBS now (see #2 above)

The countdown has begun. The digital TV conversion will kill TV Tokyo and TBS.

People aren't scoffing about what I predicted anymore. The TV people are panicking. It has happened and is happening right before your very eyes. The end of an era is upon us. TV, as we have know it for decades, is on its last legs and there is no one in that business (that I have met) who understands he problem enough to fix it. It is too late. The audience is gone.

Japan has lost a huge slice of existing viewers by cutting them off from digitial. They will not return. The USA still has the fashionable senior citizen crowd on Medicaid and Medicare....  

Japanese Are Turning Off the TVs.


Tokyo-- The Japanese, once one of the most TV-addicted people on the planet, are drifting away from the tube -- forcing networks to scramble for other sources of revenue, from pic production, satellite services, Internet streaming sites and other new technologies.

Daily TV viewing time, which averaged more than five hours in the 1970s, shrank to 3 hours and 28 minutes by 2010, according to figures compiled by the NHK Broadcasting Culture Research Institute.

Males aged 10 to 20 are watching less than two hours a day.

Meanwhile, program ratings have been trending downward for terrestrial networks, pubcaster NHK and commercial rivals TV Asahi, NTV, TBS, Fuji TV and TV Tokyo, despite spikes for major sport events and other special programming.

In June not one show on commercial TV in the 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. "Golden Time" slot won a rating of 10 or above -- once considered the minimum for survival.

Even long-running shows that once seemed immortal have either been axed or are on the brink. One that recently got the heave-ho after 43 seasons is period drama "Mito komon," which bowed in 1969. At its peak, the show's ratings reached as high as 43.7, but recently it has struggled to achieve double digits. Its last episode will air in December on MBS, an affiliate of TBS.

Various causes have been advanced for the ratings slide. Like other countries, Japanese families no longer sit around the TV watching the same show, as viewers did in the industry's 1960-to-1990s heyday. The Japanese now consume entertainment on a range of platforms, including PCs, smartphones and game consoles.

Also, an estimated 100,000 households, including a lot of elderly "Mito komon" fans, failed to make the switch from analog to digital in July, and have effectively given up TV entirely.

But the biggest cause, says Hiro Otaka, a media analyst for the Bunka Tsushin entertainment news services, is that "the programs have become boring."

Otaka blames network execs who have responded to falling ratings by cutting costs and hedging their bets.

There is no media in the world who can survive when the under 30-year-old crowd do not care about it. Can't be done. And under 30-year-old in Japan definitely do not care about TV... Come to think of it, why should they?


TV isn't dead... Yet. It just smells really bad.

TV News Viewership Sinks...

More proof that major station TV - with their 1000's of employees - is heading to the end of the road...

I've written (again!) repeatedly about the demise of TV in Japan. Some people think that I mean that TV is going to disappear off the face of the earth forever. That is not the case. TV will be around for many more decades to come, I'm sure.

What won't be around for many more decades to come are these over-sized bloated TV networks that employ thousands of people.

Think about it: A TV station like TV Tokyo targets a very wide audience of ages from 6 ~ 86. TV Tokyo employs well over 1,000 people.

A station like Fashion TV in Tokyo targets 20 ~ 45 year old women.  Fashion TV employs about 40 people so their overhead is nowhere near as high as TV Tokyo.

Let's say you are a women's shoes manufacturer. Fashion TV targets your main audience. Yet their advertising rates are less than 1/20th the price of TV Tokyo. As a sponsor who wants a prime audience, do you spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on TV Tokyo advertising, or do you specialize and only go for your core audience?

Of course, you go for the core audience.

Today, again, more data has come out on the quick collapse of TV. Specifically TV News.

Mashable reports:

In 2010, 65% of people younger than 30 cited the Internet as their go-to source for news, nearly doubling from 34% in 2007. The number who consider television as their main news source dropped from 68% to 52% during that time.

Of all 1,500 American adults surveyed, 41% say they get their national and international news from the Internet, up 17% from 2007. Sixty-six percent cite television — down from 74% — indicating the trend is spreading among other age groups.

Forty-eight percent of those 30-59 cite the Internet as their main news source, up from 32% in 2007, while television went down from 71% to 63%. Though the number of those in the 51-64 age group who consider television their main news source (71%) is about the same, those who turn to the Internet (34%) is nearly equal to the number who cite newspapers (38%). The amount of people 65 and older who get their news from the Internet has risen from 5% to 14%, but television remains the chief source for 79% of respondents. 

News is the bread and butter of television.  So, to extrapolate on the figures above... If 65% of all people younger than 30 cite the Internet as their main news source - and TV is losing money now - what's going to happen in 10 years?

Like I said, there will always be TV stations... But the day of the hugely staffed stations is soon coming to an end.

Terrestrial TV Stations Getting Cold Feet?

All the major TV stations in Japan were supposed to stop broadcasting in analogue on July 24, 2011. There was one piece of information that wasn't made public until now, and that is that the Japanese government wanted the TV stations to stop broadcasting regular programming on June 30, 2011.

The government plan called for the TV stations to air only a notice that TV sets that cannot pick up Digital would only receive "snow."

As Yomiuri reports:

Commercial TV stations are likely to continue analog TV broadcasts until noon on July 24, deviating from a government plan to phase in terrestrial digital broadcasts and end regular analog service by the end of June, sources said.

This means the TV stations will not participate in a planned June 30 to July 24 transition period during which the government hopes analog broadcasts will be reduced only to a notice saying terrestrial TV broadcasting will go exclusively digital at noon on July 24.

After the changeover is complete, TV sets incapable of digital reception will display only "snow" on their screens. TV stations plan to start broadcasting an image of a snow-filled screen repeatedly in announcements to begin as early as this month to avoid confusion among TV viewers after the full transition.

The government is so unorganized that it is not even funny. Here we are 7 months from D-Day for these foolish TV stations that agreed to go into huge debt to go digital and the government - as is par for the course - hasn't got their ducks in order.

Hell, they stopped giving people so-called eco-point discounts on these digital ready TV sets already! (Now, don't get me wrong, I think these eco-points discounts, are a sham and the government has no business offering people discounts for products on the free market...) But if they are going to do it anyway, you'd think they would continue to allow credits to people to buy a digital set for at least a year after conversion... But no!

The government can't fill in a pothole in the road on time and on budget; who thinks they can control and run an entire country switchover to digital smoothly?

Let me make a prediction right here. When the stations stop broadcasting in analogue, they will lose viewers in huge numbers and they will receive a massive amount of complaints. This will affect their sales. I predict that the government and the broadcasters will start to quarrel and, before April 2012, some of the TV stations will request that they be allowed to broadcast in analogue also.

This will cause even more confusion and complaints amongst the people, manufacturers, broadcasters and the government. And that will, in turn, make TV an ever more undesirable method of advertising. This will also hurt TV viewership ratings.

The Japanese government will realize that they made a mistake by making digital broadcasting mandatory and then they will try all sorts of "fix-it" remedies - all of which will fail.

These sorts of events will help lead to TV Tokyo and TBS's bankruptcy by 2015.

Major Television Stations in Japan on Death's Doorstep

The major terrestrial TV stations in Japan are in big trouble. On July 24, 2011, they will stop broadcasting analogue and start digital broadcasting. On that day they will lose at least 30% of their viewing audience. If they are losing money now, what will they do when the estimated 30% of the people who do not own a digital tuner drop off?

I have written extensively, during 2010, about the coming collapse of TV Tokyo, TBS TV and TV Asahi in Japan before. Read those articles here, here and here.

Now, after spending five days at my in-laws house this New Year's I can definitely attest to the coming demise with anecdotal evidence.

Booooooooring

My father in-law is 72-years-old. My mother-in-law is 68. These folks are typical prime target audience for a station like TV Tokyo.

These are folks who have seen TV all their lives. The Internet is still a new thing to them. My in-laws are the kinds of folks who turn on the TV when they wake up in the morning and leave it on all day whether they are watching it or not. They are terrestrial TV's prime audience.

Why are these people the typical prime target for a station like TV Tokyo or TBS? Think about it.

Who has the time to sit around and really watch TV for 2 or 3 hours a day, everyday (like people did 30 years ago)? Well, the only people who do have the time to do so are either:

1) Inactive
2) Poor
3) Retired or aged
4) Handicapped or ill

Think about that. Now, if you were a sponsor, would you spend money on TV advertising for people who fit any of the descriptions above? No. You wouldn't.

That's one huge problem for these dinosaur TV stations that have thousands of employees and a dropping revenue base.

In fact, I was told that, in TV Tokyo's case, their sales are dropping by 5% a month and they are losing more than one million dollars a month.

But there's another, more subtle problem that I have discovered during this New Year's visit that makes me want to share it with you; it used to be, that coming to the in-laws house drove me crazy as they, like I mentioned, would watch TV all the time.

At my house, we do not have a TV and I do not want my 7-year-old son watching it. So, it would pain me whenever we visited the in-laws as the TV was on constantly....

Not this year. We have been here for 5 days now and they only turned on the TV 3 times that I saw, and each time was just for 10 or 15 minutes. Then they'd turn it off. After coming here annually for the last 15 years or so, this recent behavior had me curious so I asked my father-in-law what was going on. I asked him why they hadn't been watching TV like they did before. I was wondering if they were being kind to us as they know we don't watch TV and don't approve of our son watching it either...

Well, it wasn't anything like I was expecting. My father-in-law told me that they didn't watch TV like before because he said, "The Internet is more interesting."

I was so surprised. Of course, I'd agree. Yesterday, when my family and in-laws all went outside for a few hours, I grew curious. I mean, they have this expensive new-fangled system, yet they don't watch as much as they used to? Hmm....I sat here doing some work and then I watched TV for 20 minutes or so to see what the new system was like.

My in-laws have a brand new plasma TV and they get all the analogue channels and Chidigi (the analogue stations on digital) and both BS and CS digital. I flipped through the stations for a while and thought (as I usually do with TV) "Who'd watch this crap?"

I think the BS and CS stations have a chance to survive as most of these stations are small and have staffs that number under 100 people. But the Chidigi stations, like TV Tokyo or TBS, that have well over 1,000 employees are dead.

Just because their signal is digital, people are not going to watch the same old crap. Hello TV Tokyo, TBS and TV Asahi! The problem is not your platform, the problem is your content; it sucks and is boring.

On top of that, some of the channels asked for "pay per view" yet they were showing movie like "Kramer vs. Kramer." No joke! No one is going to pay for that! Why not rent it or watch it on Youtube? At with those you can watch it when you want - with no commercials!

I did watch a bit of some other movie about the CIA but gave up after 20 minutes because of commercials.

After flipping through the channels a while and seeing lots of Shopping TV and commercials, I turned the TV off. Not only was the content the same old boring stuff, but, the tuning system is confusing... Instead of one block of channels to pick from, you now have three...

It's not convenient at all.

If older folks like my in-laws have turned away from TV; if 30% of the TV audience is dropping off this July; if the content is going to be the same old thing; and Japan's economy stays in the doldrums - which it will. Then I stick by my predictions:

TV Tokyo, TBS and TV Asahi will not survive 2015 in their current configuration. Expect TV Tokyo and TBS to go bankrupt first.

What happened?

1) No one has time to sit around and watch TV anymore.
2) TV demands that you adjust your schedule to fit theirs. That doesn't work anymore.
3) Minor stations only have to support 40 ~ 80 workers. Big stations need to support thousands. There is no revenue base for that anymore.
4) Other forms of entertainment are much more satisfying and time-flexible.

Considering the above and now, throw in the older folks coming to the conclusions that TV isn't interesting anymore then, there you have it.

Are there any stations that will do well? Yep. I predict that Cartoon Network will always do well.

Cable TV Stations Lose Over 500,000 Subscribers

This article is not about Japan, but I think it points to what is going to happen here very shortly concerning major television stations .

I have written extensively about how the digital conversion in Japan on July 24, 2011 is going to destroy TV Tokyo, TBS, and then TV Asahi. In that order. This is because these stations are last in ratings and losing money now. When the digital conversion happens, they will lose another 30% of their audience.

They aren't making ends meet today. It is inconceivable that they will do better when their audience shrinks by 30% overnight. I wrote about that here and here.

In an article that came across my desk today, I see that Cable TV stations in the USA lost over 500,000 subscribers in the 3rd quarter of 2010. They, too, cannot survive this kind of bleeding of audience.

The Daily Tech reports:

Cable companies have traditionally increased the cost of their TV services each year, often with no improvement in the offerings. As people start looking to save money, many are leaving cable providers. Gigaom reports that it has cobbled together the number of cable subscribers lost for four of the top five cable companies around the country for Q3 2010 and the number of folks leaving cable is growing.

However, Gigaom reports that over the last few quarters the number of subscribers lost from cable and gained at satellite and IPTV firms is not matching up. Many people are just walking away from paying for TV. This is getting easier to do with most major networks offering their programs online free and services like Hulu offering old shows for fans to watch.

What is written here is true but I think the writer is missing out on something else that is going on. There are now services popping up all over the world that offer satellite TV for a one time fee. Here's one called Satellite Direct.

How does that song go? "3,500 channels and nothing on..."

Satellite Direct sells their service for a one-time fee of $49.95 (Ask for a discount and they'll sell it to you for $24).... These sorts of services offer you a download to your computer and give you thousands of channels. Of course, I am not selling this to you. I think TV is brain damage and a complete waste of time, so I don't recommend it. My point here is to illustrate how these pay TV services have a business model that is now broken.

The moral of the story is that this is what is going on now and this also shows why these huge TV stations like TV Tokyo with over 1,000 employees (and the overhead that goes with that) are dead.... How in the world will they compete with a music only - or a fashion channel, sports channel, etc, TV stations that only have 20 ~ 40 employees?

They won't. They are dead.

Read more at Daily Tech.

Thanks to What Really Happened.

Bizarre Japanese Surveys: 72% of 20-some-year-old girls would date men over 40!

In Japan, surveys are very popular. The Japanese love to know just what percentage of the population they fit into. Be it where people like to go or what they like to do or what they think about this or that, the average Japanese, it seems, finds comfort in knowing that they are not alone in their views... No matter how silly the surveys get.

Here's one that was done by the Japan Times that had two things that I thought were interesting. See if you can find the two:

• 72% of women in their 20s who were polled by Yomeishu Seizo Co. replied that they would consider a relationship with an older man aged between 44 and 62 years old.
• 71% of those who responded to a survey by ishare Inc. said that they have already purchased the necessary equipment to view digital television.
• 68% of respondents surveyed by Japan.Internet.com and Goo Research said that they do not read the license agreements before installing new software.
• 44% of women who responded to a poll by Nikkei Woman Online said the first international destination they intend to visit from Haneda Airport’s new international terminal is Paris.
• 33% of people in a survey by ishare Inc.  said that they had something that was discovered by their mothers that they didn’t want to be found; 39.6% of this group responded that what they didn’t want to be found were books.

Of course it is the first two. Really? 72% of women in their 20's would consider a relationship with an older man between 44 and 62 years old!?

Maybe I should start going back to the sport gym! Do you think my wife will give me the money so that I can run around with a girl younger than my own daughter?

"Really? You'd date me?.. Ok, well, can you also lend me a dollar?" 

(writer's image girl - left)

And the second one: 71% of those surveyed said that they had already bought digital equipment to view digital TV. Aha! That is another piece of evidence that verifies what I wrote a few months back that the digital conversion is going to bankrupt TV Tokyo, TBS and TV Asahi.

If you want to read that blog and check the rationale, see here: http://modernmarketingjapan.blogspot.com/2010/08/marketing-japan-why-digital-tv.html

TV Sets Don't Even Make Beautiful Antique Furniture!

By Mike in Tokyo Rogers

If you would have told me fifteen years ago that old style TV and radio were going to die out, I wouldn't have believed you. But now, I can't really see any other way. Oh sure, there will probably always be TV and radio stations, it's just that they won't be these massive companies with thousands of employees that we have today. I foresee them becoming like their cable and satellite competitors. I have written before on some technical reasons, see here and here. Today, I want to write from my own experiences as a 30-year insider and the only foreigner who was ever the general manager of a major Japanese broadcasting station in history.

Not even useful as a future antique

Today, companies like TV Tokyo have over 1,000 employees. A satellite music TV station like Music On! TV has less than eighty. I foresee stations like TV Tokyo becoming the same in five years... This will cause them severe restructuring or bankruptcy. Not good for the shareholders; terrible for employees.

Take your average FM radio station in Japan that has 40 employees... I predict that, if they can even survive the next three ~ five years (which most won't) they will have to find a way to run the station with, not 40 employees, but 5. If they can do that, they have a chance.

With the poor quality of management that many of the stations in Japan have today,  I'll give 40 - 1 odds of that ever happening.

What are they going to do when the only way they can survive and stay competitive is to cut 90% of their workforce, yet Japanese labor laws will not allow such a thing? Talk about stuck between a  rock and a hard place!

What they will have to do is to force older employees into retirement earlier and to cut salaries across the board and hope that employees quit. I have seen this method employed before. The company cut all salaries by 25%. Then, six months later, they cut all salaries by 25% again for a total of 40%. Many employees quit. The problem with this method soon became apparent when it was realized that all the good employees quit because they could find a job somewhere else, but the poor employees, the "dead-wood" stayed.

So the station lost all of its productive employees and was left with the useless ones.

I have worked in TV & radio (the music business) since 1978. When one works in these businesses, there are many "tops of the mountains." In my later career, radio, the top of the mountain was producing, directing, and hosting the morning drive time show Monday - Friday. I did that. We made one of the most famous and successful morning shows in Tokyo history. When that ended in 2009, at 52-years-old, I decided to retire from that business. Why?

It's best to retire when you are at the top of the hill.

Since then, I started another business with some friends whereby we do new methods of marketing and Internet hybrid marketing and PR in immature markets. It's been fun. Through his experience, though, I have been able to go around to most of the major mass media and get a glimpse of what is going on everywhere.

I have had face to face talks with upper management about their struggles and travails in a steady shrinking market; I have been in meetings to discuss strategy and develop methods to generate sales. All of them revolve around using the Internet as, not just a piece of the puzzle, but, in many cases, it has replaced the old media as the "main course" on the plate presented to sponsors and advertisers.

In fact, at one station, the chief of programming admitted to me that he thought it was impossible to sell his old media vehicle, as is, to sponsors.

From these experiences I, too, have come to see the future quite clearly; there is no way for over 70% of the major TV & radio stations to survive in their current state more than 5 years.... I doubt that any major station will be able to survive in their current state past 10 years. In twenty years, there will probably be entirely brand-new names running our media. Who knows? Perhaps Google or Apple will buy out these major media conglomerates? Perhaps, in Japan, Rakuten will own TV Tokyo and turn it into a 24/7 shopping channel? That's the only think that I can see that the station could be useful for...

Still, not even beautiful as an antique

Either way, TV and radio are antiques. Their days are numbered. This admission not from an old Internet hand, but from an old TV/radio hand. Unlike the radios of old, today's TV and radio sets are near useless... They don't even make beautiful furniture to display in the living room.

Like Marc Abela wrote:

I personally think that the days of "TV" as a concept (i.e. you sit there and someone tells you what to watch, when and how) are so totally counted. Hard to put a clear number, is it 2 years left, 5?, 10?, 1? ...

It has been a year and some I have not turned my TV on. Not even once. Really. Weird. But it still sits in my living room. Antique.

Remember this day well, my friends, the day is coming when we are going to tell our children or grand kids that, "there was a time when everyone had a TV in their house...." Those children won't believe us and will say, "What for?"

-------


Keywords:
TV, radio, Google, Mike Rogers, Marketing Japan, Mike in Tokyo Rogers, antique, Rakuten, Apple, TV Tokyo, Music On! TV 

Marc Abela on TV: "TV Days are Counted...Revolution is on its Way"

I received lots of mail from different people about the article I wrote concerning TV Tokyo borrowing $5 billion dollars from Mizuho Bank.

I plan on commenting or placing data supporting facts on this site later today (I'm looking for English language based materials which is making it hard), but I did want to put up an excellent commentary about the entire debacle that was written by Marc Abela.

Marc Writes:

Yes, I read about the TV Tokyo loan - from your web page, mostly. Pretty weird deal indeed. I mean, of course, personally, if TV Tokyo wants to freely bet 5 billion dollars on their next idea, and Mizuho Bank's managers are dumb enough to bet 5 billion of their customers' money on the TV Tokyo "business model" - let them be my guest, just as long as they don't come knocking, of course, at the door of the taxpayer in 3 years in yet another attempt to force government to redirect resources coercively from unrelated neighbors to pay for the cleanup of their own mess. 


If Mizuho cares to lose its reputation as a viable financial institution where you don't want to put your money because the managers on top make all the wrong calls - I surely won't stop them (but like you said, I will definitely take my money out and move it elsewhere). 

I personally think (like you, I'm sure) that the days of "TV" as a concept (i.e. you sit there and someone tells you what to watch, when and how) are so totally counted. Hard to put a clear number, is it 2 years left, 5?, 10?, 1? But the amount of nonsense we regularly get on TV, weirdly covered news and biased reporting, wannabe "entertaining" programs that mothers wished they could just keep their kids from, crappy commercials about just that much more vendor financing for your already indebted father, dumb and dumber discussing on reality TV live, is driving most (all?) of its customer base away - at an unbelievable speed.

It has been a year and some I have not turned my TV on. Not even once. Really. Weird. But it still sits in my living room. Antique. I currently just use my own personal channel registration on YouTube and other video web sites of people I personally trust and care to follow. When they post something new I get a note - and watch it if I can or skip it if I have to. Programs can last 7 minutes, or 77 minutes - as apposed to the 30 minute or 60 minute structure imposed by TV. 


New posts and programs come and appear freely, at times twice a day or sometimes only once a month - as opposed to the daily or weekly structure imposed by TV. Commercials are more targeted to me (guitar stuff, etc) and I click on it when I want - as opposed to having me patiently listen for 2 minutes about how the brand new shampoo will surely make me have better looking friends... What's wonderful is that the pay-per-click commercial on the internet makes both me "and" the shampoo company lose much less of our resources (time/money/etc), and finally, I can watch it all from where I want - when I want - starting from the second which fits me, and pause all the way until I'm done, with any more important phone call.

TV days are counted. Meanwhile the internet has not even started yet. Revolution is on its way.


Marc Abela is an extremely well-known businessman in Japan. He founded the Ludwig Von Mises Institute website at www.mises.jp. You can contact Marc Abela through Facebook.  

Own Mizuho Bank or TV Tokyo Shares? Sell Now While You Can!

By Mike in Tokyo Rogers


"The management of that company couldn't properly run a fruit and vegetable stand." Kazuo Inamori - Chairman of JAL and founder of Kyocera said when he fired the entire Japan Airlines Upper Management staff in early 2010..


I've written before about how there's no way out of the hole for companies like TV Tokyo; they are quickly heading for bankruptcy. The Chairman of TV Tokyo, the president and the entire management team, needs to be fired immediately for incompetency and for running TV Tokyo into the ground. Management like these people clearly have sold out the future of the TV station in order to prop up short term financial goals so that he and his cronies are able to get full retirement benefits.


(Note: Under the rules of any Nikkei-related company - of which TV Tokyo is one - the president can only reside in his position for 6 years and then is forced into retirement. The current president is 3 years into his term. All he needs to do is float the company for three more years and he gets his full retirement package. Hence, I suspect, a huge motivating factor in taking out a huge loan that can never be paid back. He has sold the future of the company and all its staff up the river so that he can have a good retirement package. The employees and shareholders should be up in arms.) 


Short-term thinking and immediate gratification are no way to run a company. TV Tokyo's balance sheet shows the proof in this. TV Tokyo group is currently losing around $40 million dollars cash a year.


Short term thinking and goals are what has gotten TV Tokyo into the mess it's in and there's no way out now short of radical changes in management - if it's not already too late. Like I said, at the least, the current management needs to be fired immediately and replaced with someone who has at least some new ideas on how to run the station. At this rate, with the digital conversion just around the corner coupled with the collapse of the Japanese economy, TV Tokyo isn't going to make it another 5 years.


The most alarming part of this picture is that, in order to stay afloat, TV Tokyo group, in February of this year, borrowed... are you ready for it? About $5 billion dollars from Mizuho Bank in order to be able to continue with the running of day to day affairs. Five Billion US Dollars! That's $5,000,000,000.00! This is a $5 billion dollar loan taken out by a company that is losing $40 million dollars a year.


Evidence of this loan showed up in TV Tokyo's balance sheets after their shareholder's meeting ended in February. Considering that TV Tokyo is losing money, and has been losing money for the last few years, taking this loan out - without a solid business plan for making money - or paying the loan back - is suicide. 


This is plainly insane. The only people who could be stupider or more insane than the person who took out this loan is the people who would loan this money. That brings me to the real criminal idiots in this mess: Mizuho Financial Group (MFG).


MFG took this money - not theirs mind you, their customer's money - and lent it out to a company that is basically insolvent. That is just plain irresponsible and bad business.


Why would MFG lend this money to a company that they know is losing so much money and has no way of paying it back? Well, for so many years in Japan, it was believed that the Japanese government would never allow a broadcasting station to go bankrupt. And they never did before... Well, not until this year. Earlier this year, the broadcasting world in Japan was turned on its head when a major FM radio station in Nagoya, Radio-I, went bankrupt and the Japanese government didn't step in to stop it.


It's probably due to the fact that the Japanese government has already spent the public into debt and obligations that already equal over 190% of GDP... The fact of the matter is that there is no more money left in government coffiures anymore. The piggy bank is broken and there's nothing left.


So, besides telling you, once again, that TV Tokyo is a dead-horse, I'd like to warn you about one of Japan's biggest banking firms, Mizuho Bank. Or, more specifically the Mizuho Financial Group (MFG).


Wikipedia writes about MFG:


It holds assets in excess of $1.44 trillion US dollars through its control of Mizuho Bank, Mizuho Corporate Bank, and other operating subsidiaries. The company's combined holdings form the second largest financial services group in Japan. Its banking businesses rank the third in Japan after MUFG and SMFG, and the ninth in the world by market capitalisation as of Nov 2009.^[1] It is the 59th largest company in the world according to Forbes Global 2000 rankings. Its shares have a primary listing on the Tokyo Stock Exchange.


This sounds all dandy, but I have some information today to share with you that should warn you about this company; the Mizuho Financial Group is so deeply intertwined with TV Tokyo that they've gotten themselves into a huge jam and can probably never extract themselves from it... This is going to cause them to write off, or take pennies on the dollar, for a $5 billion dollar loan that they gave to the TV Tokyo group. This is a loan that TV Tokyo is not paying off, nor can they ever pay off, as the TV Tokyo group is losing money. How could they possibly pay it off?


Maybe MFG was hoping that the Japanese government was going to bail out their loan like the US government did with the US banks and automakers. Fat chance. 


TV Tokyo will not be able to make their first payment and will have to roll over this loan next year. Considering their business state and the state of the Japanese economy, how many years will they be able to continue to roll over this loan? I doubt that they can do this for more than a few years.


When MFG calls in the loan, it's game over for TV Tokyo. Game over for TV Tokyo will seriously damage MFG share prices too. What will happen when their $5 billion dollar loan is sold for pennies on the dollar?


Both companies share prices are in serious trouble as it is. Three years ago, TV Tokyo shares sold for about ¥4,440 each (calculated at today's rate of about ¥85 to $1 USD). Today, TV Tokyo shares sell for ¥1540 (about $18.30) a drop of 66%. That's bad, but MFG shares have done even worse dropping from a price of about ¥1,100 (about $13.06) three years ago to ¥401 today (about $4.75 each). That's a 77% drop in price. 


It's hard advice to swallow if you own shares in either TV Tokyo Group or MFG.... You've already lost a bunch of money as it is... But considering the above information, it's not going to get better.


If you own MFG shares or TV Tokyo shares, then take your lumps. Face the ugly facts: You lost money. Get out now or you will lose even more.


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Keywords: JAL, TV Tokyo, Mizuho, MFG, Kazuo Inamori,