TS News - Japan Launches Digital TV

• From: martyn@twics.com (Martyn Williams)
• Date: Wed, 02 Oct 1996 22:28:08 +0900
• From owner-ts-news@tele-satellit.com Wed Oct 2 09: 48:31 1996

TELE-satellit News, 2 October 1996

Japan Launches Digital TV
  TOKYO, Japan, 96/10/02 (SatND) -- Japan's first digital TV package started
on JCSAT 3 (128 degrees East) Tuesday, initially offering a bundle of 60 TV
and radio channels. Future plans call for an increase to 170 channels.

  More than 35,000 decoders for the service called PerfecTV have already
been sold,. Perfect TV Corporation said it expects 300,000 subscribers by
the end of the year and over a million within the next three years. The
price for the reception equipment (decoder and satellite dish) reportedly is
about 50,000 yen (US$450).

  The company recently doubled its capital to 50 billion yen (US$455
million) by issuing new shares to a total of 28 companies, 23 of them new
investors such as Toyota Motor, Sony and Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp.

  The next digital venture is already close at hand. Rupert Murdoch will
launch his JSkyB service next June, co-operating with the domestic software
wholesaler Softbank Corp. while at the same time buying 21.4 percent of the
Japanese Asahi TV network. Other companies have announced digital satellite
TV services as well.

(c)TELE-satellit 1996. All rights reserved.

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