On Friday, a joint venture of the Tokyo-based emerging music company Avex Group and Japan’s largest cellphone operator NTT DoCoMo, Avex Broadcasting & Communications Inc. launched a TV service called BeeTV[J], which is fully designed for cellphone handsets viewing.
Unlike 1-seg TV service using a segment in terrestrial digital broadcast wave to carry visual and audio, BeeTV uses HSDPA-based packet data link, and is available only with 10M i-motion compatible handset models which have capacity of downloading the maximum filesize of 10MB for each of video files, meaning 2 to 10 minute long production work for each. It requires flat rate subscription for data packet access as well.
In partnership with Fuji-TV, Hori-Pro[J] (one of the largest talent management office for actors / actresses / models / comedians), TV production studios such as East[J], HowFull’s[J] (famous for producing top-rated TV programs), Robot (an animation studio well-known for its employee who won this year’s academy award with his title) and Oz (led by the famous producer who arranged Hollywood reproduction rights licensing of Japanese films like The Curse and Ring 0: Birthday), the venture brings you eight channels including drama, comedy, music, cartoon and edutainment.
As well as book publishing and DVD title publishing industries, BeeTV is based on revenue sharing with content providers, and it has the business scheme allowing producers and performers to earn royalties in addition to base fees, in proportion to how many times each of their works has been watched.
The followings are the trailers featuring BeeTV programs.
Masaru IKEDA