SKY Perfect JSAT Corporation (Sukapah!-hikari / Flets TV)

The merger of JSAT Corporation, SKY Perfect Communications, Inc., and Space Communications Corporation in October 2008 has resulted in the creation of SKY Perfect JSAT Corporation. SKY Perfect JSAT Corporation is Japan’s main provider of satellite television access. It provides its programme contents via CATV and FTTX. Major shareholders of SKY Perfect JSAT are Itochu Corporation, Fuji Television and Sony Corporation. News Corporation, the parent company of British Sky Broadcasting, used to be one of the major shareholders, but now it has divested its interest in Sky Perfect JSAT.

Sky Perfect’s Broadband TV service for apartment buildings in Tokyo was started in February 2004 by one of Sky Perfect group companies, Opticast, using NTT’s optical fibre network. Service area was expanded to include metropolitan areas of Tokyo, Nagoya and Osaka. Service for detached housing has been launched as well. From July 2008, bandwidth was expanded to 2072MHz in the Tokyo metropolitan area, enabling the provision of high definition TV (Sukapah! - hikari home type wide). Currently, 290 Sukapah! channels, including pay per view services as well as terrestrial and satellite digital channels are available. Technically, Sukapah! hikari is not an IPTV service, as its data transmission over FTTX cable does not use the Internet Protocol.