Japan gets first 4K streaming shows

Japan’s “lost island”, Hashima, will be the subject of one of the first 4K TV shows (photo by Roger Walch)

Japan’s largest television network, FujiTV, is to stream 4K content commercially, beginning today. This marks the first regular 4K broadcast in Japan – and it may signal more to come.

The initial 4K content release includes a documentary on Hashima, the deserted island near Nagasaki that was chosen as a modern industrial heritage site only yesterday. In addition, FujiTV will present a guide to Tokyo’s famous evening illuminations and a popular Chinese-Japanese drama entitled Mysterious Summer.

The 4K streaming content comes from a Tokyo-based startup called Mist Technologies. It’s a big tie-up for the company, which launched in 2013 and received funding from Japanese telco KDDI.

Mist Technologies is the developer of MistCDN, a peer-to-peer content delivery network platform that claims to get an 80 percent saving in bandwidth. As a result, registered FujiTV streaming viewers will see bitrates of up to 40 MB per second. That’s two and a half times faster than Netflix’s 4K streaming and five times faster than YouTube’s offering.

Netflix pressure

The FujiTV partnership is MistCDN’s first mass-market application, which could push the service into the mainstream. To achieve maximum efficiency, MistCDN needs P2P users to be watching the same things at the same time, and FujiTV’s 4K offerings are expected to draw in viewers.

Though Mist has made no public predictions about how many users will tune into the FujiTV streams, they are confident that this deal will launch a new trend of high-speed content streaming in Japan. Japanese broadcasters have been slow to branch out into online services, but their shift may accelerate with pressure from companies like Netflix, which will launch its streaming service in Japan this fall.

Netflix will enter the market more than a year after competitor Hulu’s Japanese subsidiary was sold to Nippon TV, ending a three-year run in Japan. Netflix has already announced a collaboration with FujiTV to produce original content – bringing a winning business model from America to Japan as a lure for new customers.

The American giant will compete with Japan’s networks for viewers, but Mist Technologies co-CEO Masahiro Yamashita says that Netflix is only one of many potential customers. He tells Tech in Asia that another of Japan’s top five broadcasters is planning to ink a deal with Mist later this summer, and that streaming providers like Netflix are next on the list for discussion.