NTT Hikari-TV

Japan has been relatively slow to see IPTV subscriber growth. This situation partly reflects a cautious regulatory approach for TV. However, potentially there is great scope for development. NTT started installing fibre targeting 30 million FTTH subscribers by end-2010, thought it managed to sign up only half of that figure by end-2011.

'OCN Theatre' VoD was an add-on service for customers subscribing to both OCN (ISP) and B-Flets (FTTX). OCN (Open Computer Network) is an ISP service provided by NTT Communications Corp. (The other ISP in the NTT group is Plala Networks Inc.). On 29 July 2007, Ondemand-TV, 4th Media, and OCN Theatre were merged into 'Hikari-TV', provided by NTT Plala Inc. Hikari (meaning ‘light’) TV service is the first major IPTV deployment to use IPv6.

For ADSL users, NTT-East offers Flets On-Demand, which is a streaming media service using PPPoE (instead of standard TCP/IP connections), hence only users on Flets can access these services irrespectively of which ISP they use.

In January 2011, NTT DoCoMo launched Japan’s first LTE service using Qualcomm’s MDM9200™ LTE/3G multi-mode chipset solution. The chipset supports UMTS, HSPA+ and LTE.