Nippon Television
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Nippon Television

JOAX-DTV (channel 4), branded as Nippon Television (NTV) or Nippon TV, is a Japanese television station serving the Kantō region as the flagship station of the Nippon News Network and the Nippon Television Network System, owned and operated by the Nippon Television Network Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of the certified broadcasting holding company Nippon Television Holdings, Inc. [ja]

Nippon Television's studios are located in the Shiodome area of Minato, Tokyo, Japan, and its transmitters are located in the Tokyo Skytree. Broadcasting terrestrially across Japan, it is also the first commercial TV station in Japan, and it has been broadcasting on Channel 4 since its inception. Nippon Television is the home of the syndication networks NNN (for news programs) and NNS (for non-news programs). Except for Okinawa Prefecture, these two networks cover the whole of Japan. Nippon Television is one of the ''five private broadcasters based in Tokyo'' and is the first commercial broadcaster in Asia.

Nippon Television Holdings is partially owned by the Yomiuri Shimbun Holdings (which owns 14.45% of the company's shares), Japan's largest media conglomerate by revenue and the second largest behind Sony. It forms part of Yomiuri's main television broadcasting arm alongside Kansai region flagship Yomiuri Telecasting Corporation, which owns a 6.57% share in the company. It is also the owner of Hulu Japan, formerly part of the US-based Hulu streaming service and the company has shares in animation studios Madhouse, Tatsunoko Production and Studio Ghibli as well as a share in the film studio Nikkatsu.[citation needed]

The history of Nippon Television began in 1951 with the announcement by US Senator Karl Mundt (best known as the key proponent of Voice of America) that commercial television would be set up in Japan (then under United States-led Allied Occupation of Japan). According to Japanese-Canadian writer Benjamin Fulford, Mundt recommended Matsutarō Shōriki to the CIA (which later hired Shōriki as a CIA agent under the codenames "podam" and "pojackpot-1"); with executives of The Asahi Shimbun and Mainichi Shimbun, Shōriki then persuaded then-Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida to form a commercial television network in Japan.

On July 31, 1952, Nippon Television was granted the first TV broadcasting license for a commercial broadcaster in Japan. The Nippon Television Network Corporation was established in October of the same year. After obtaining the broadcasting license, Nippon Television purchased the land for the construction of the headquarters building in Nibancho, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo (currently the Nippon Television Kojimachi branch office), and began preparations for the broadcast of TV programs. However, due to delays in delivering equipment used for broadcasting, test trials were significantly delayed from their initial scheduled date, resulting in NHK being the first to start broadcasting TV programs. On August 24, 1953, Nippon Television started broadcast trials and four days later, Nippon TV officially began to broadcast TV programs as Asia's first commercial broadcaster, with an animated dove spreading its wings in the logo on its first sign-on. The first TV commercial (for Seikosha clocks) was also aired at the same time (reports say that the commercial aired upside-down by mistake).

Due to high prices, television sets were not widely available at the launch of NTV and NHK. As a result, NTV installed 55 street TVs in the Kanto area in an effort to broaden the advertisement impact. This program was a huge success, attracting 8,000 to 10,000 people to watch sports broadcasts such as professional baseball and sumo wrestling.

Plans for the expansion of Nippon Television to the whole of Japan weren't continued due to its given license being restricted to the Kanto area only. As a result, the Yomiuri Shimbun Group filed for a separate TV license in Osaka under the name Yomiuri TV. In 1955, Matsutaro Shoriki stepped down as the president of Nippon TV after being elected to the Japan's House Of Representatives. Said election was the first electoral coverage carried out by commercial TV in Japan.

With the issuance of a large number of new TV licenses by the Ministry of Posts in the late 1950s, Yomiuri Shimbun and Nippon Television began to establish TV stations outside the Kanto area. On August 28, 1958, Yomiuri TV started broadcasting, marking the start of Nippon TV's expansion into the Kansai area. However, due to the close partnership between Nippon TV and the Yomiuri Shimbun, the network's expansion was opposed by local newspapers, and the network's expansion was slower than that of the JNN affiliates, which are less newspaper-oriented. Before 1958, NTV's programming was seen on CBC and OTV, whose television broadcasts started on December 1, 1956. The four commercial television stations that existed at the time broadcast a special program called The Coming Year (which ran until the end of the Showa era). Until the last edition, production rotated between the main Kanto stations.

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