Watching High Quality Live Japanese TV

Problem:
You want to watch high-quality, live Japanese TV but you don't live in Japan.

Solution:
Subscribe to a Japan-based Slingbox hosting service.

Discussion:
The company Sling Media makes a product called a "Slingbox" that allows you to watch and control a TV remotely across the Internet. This comes in handy for people who travel, for example, that want to have access to their TV at home. To view the TV, you install a free software package called "Slingplayer" on your computer. You start up Slingplayer, enter in your Slingbox's unique ID and password and away you go. The Slingplayer software comes with a virtual remote control that allows you to change the TV's channel and make various other adjustments. The setup of the Slingbox hardware is pretty straightforward. You connect your cable signal (or dish, analong antenna, etc.) and an ethernet cable, follow some basic setup instructions and you are ready.

If you live outside of Japan, you may be asking what all this has to do with watching live Japanese TV. Well, imagine you had a friend living in Japan that was willing to connect your Slingbox to his TV. Perhaps you would ship him the Slingbox and some instructions for hooking it up. After he got it connected, he would provide you with the Slingbox ID and password. You fire up the Slingplayer client, enter in the connection details and boom, you are watching your friend's TV! But not all of us are lucky enough to have such a friend and even if we did, it is not a very good deal for the friend. Whenever you are using the Slingbox, the friend would be forced to watch the same channel you are watching. Also, the Slingbox demands a significant amount of upload bandwidth which would cause your friend's overall Internet performance to suffer.

Enter Slingbox hosting services. These businesses are fairly new but are becoming more and more popular. At the time of this writing, there are at least two that I know of operating in Japan. You pay them to host a Slingbox on your behalf in their facilities. They take care of buying the Slingbox, setting it up, ensuring that it has plenty of upload bandwidth, making sure it is always on, etc. The Slingbox is your own dedicated device.

I have subscribed to two such services. Information about the one I use now can be found on a site simply called "Watch Japanese TV". The owner, Ben Holden, is a very nice guy living in Fukuoka. The Slingboxes themselves are also in Fukuoka. You get 7 analog channels and pay 7,000 yen a month. The channels are the local Fukuoka stations. For example, channel 59 is "TVQ Kyushu Housou" which is more or less equivalent to Terebi Tokyo in Tokyo but occasionally plays local Fukuoka news and the commercials are often specific to Fukuoka businesses. Here is a complete list of the channels:

Channel	Fukuoka Station	Tokyo Equivalent
39	ＦＢＳ福岡放送	日本テレビ - Nihon Terebi
41	ＮＨＫ教育（北九州）	ＮＨＫ教育 - NHK Education
43	ＮＨＫ総合（北九州）	ＮＨＫ総合 - NHK
50	ＲＫＢ毎日放送	ＴＢＳテレビ - TBS Terebi
56	ＫＢＣ九州朝日放送	テレビ朝日 - Terebi Asahi
59	ＴＶＱ九州放送	テレビ東京 - Terebi Tokyo
62	ＴＮＣテレビ西日本	フジテレビ - Fuji Terebi

Another service I have tried is based in Sapporo. It is called "Nihon Nama Terebi" (Japan Live TV). Nihon Nama Terebi is quite a bit more expensive than Ben's service and there is a large setup fee. Also, if you are not comfortable dealing in Japanese to sign up for the service and exchange customer service emails, it would be a bit tricky as their English skills leave a bit to be desired. One feature they do have which is nice and possibly justifies the larger fee is built in DVRs. This allows you to record and playback television programs. If you are based in the United States, recording ability is essential as most of the prime time TV will be playing in the early morning hours in the USA. However, it is not worth it as there is a great software application you can purchase separately from Applian Technologies called "At-Large Recorder 2". At-Large Recorder 2 runs on your local PC and is set like a VCR (remember the old days..). You just tell it the time, channel and duration and it logs into your Slingbox and records. The recordings are saved locally as ASF files on your computer. Also, I found that the Nihon Nama Terebi DVRs are very cumbersome to control remotely. I much prefer having the recording device operating from my local PC.

So, in a nut shell, if you are looking for a live Japanese TV solution with recording ability, I recommend going with "Watch Japanese TV" and using "At-Large Recorder 2" to record (note that At-Large Recorder 2 only works on Windows). If you give "Watch Japanese TV" a try, I would sincerely appreciate it if you mention jdictionary.com when you sign up. I'm not working with them nor do I get a free month for a referral or anything like that but I think they have a great service and I want them to know I support and appreciate them.

In a future blog entry I will go over recording in detail and show you how you can use Yahoo Japan's TV listing service to keep track of your favorite shows. Also, for iPhone/iPod Touch owners, it is worth mentioning that Slingbox has an iPhone client app (about $30) that works great with both of the hosting services mentioned above. Below is a screen shot of a "Watch Japanese TV" Slingbox streaming on an iPhone.

Thanks for reading the blog. I welcome any comments or questions. You can find me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/jdictionary.