TV Really Going Down the Drain in Japan

I've written extensively on the fall of television in Japan. In July of 2011, all terrestrial television stations in Japan stopped analogue broadcasting and switched to digital. That cost all the stations 20% of their viewership. Japanese major TV stations were losing money before the switch to digital, how shall they make money when they spent a cumulative $5 billion dollars on the switchover and then lost 20% of their audience?

I can't figure that out no matter the size of my abacus.


While on vacation to Guam the other day, I saw a sign along the road that made me chuckle. In Guam, there are a very many people who are quite a bit overweight... No! Make that quite obese. The sign along the road said,


"You need more fiber in your diet and less cable TV"

Yep. Sitting around and watching TV while munching on chips and junk has seriously fallen out of favor with the active and young crowd.


Another sign that TV viewership is collapsing in Japan is the fact that, after initial fanfare and many years of positive spin on poor sales, Sony has decided to get out of flat TV manufacturing. The sales projections do not make up for poor sales ( and high manufacturing costs) which have lead to wide price dumping across the board. 


Bloomberg reports:

Sony Corp. sold its stake in the venture with Samsung Electronics Co. to make liquid-crystal displays to the South Korean company after predicting an eighth consecutive year of losses from TVs amid sluggish demand.

Samsung will pay 1.08 trillion won ($935 million) in cash for Sony’s stake in S-LCD Corp., a venture formed in 2004, the Suwon, South Korea-based company said in a statement today. Sony, which invested 1.65 trillion won in the venture, will take a charge of about 66 billion yen ($846 million) in the quarter ending Dec. 31 after the deal, Japan’s biggest consumer- electronics exporter said in its statement.

The stake sale enables Sony Chief Executive Officer Howard Stringer, 69, to shed the responsibility of panel manufacturing amid losses in the TV business, where Samsung is the world’s biggest. To turn around Sony, which has forecast a fourth consecutive annual loss this year, Stringer has teamed up with partners to announce acquisitions worth a combined $8.4 billion in 2011. The purchases are designed to bolster the profitable phones and music divisions and introduced tablet computers to challenge Apple Inc.’s iPad.

Catch that? It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out what Sony has figured out: There's no future in TV sales; they're best off investing in the future of hand-held devices... Hand-held devices and tablet computers are generally not used to watch TV.

Tissue Time was a famous Japanese TV show in the mid-80's... No more.

How much clearer could the writing on the wall be?