Nico Nico Jikkyo (Jikkyo originally means “live state” in Japanese, but in this case, abbreviated form of Jikkyo-Chukei, “play-by-play broadcasting”) is a newly introduced service by Dwango, who runs Japan’s most popular online video service Nico Nico Douga.
Nico Nico Jikkyo introduced a client application for Windows, which shows the similar layout with Nico Nico Douga, left-side video area and user comments flow over the video. The big difference is, the left box does not show anything but it is completely transparent to the background Windows desktop level.
By this, users can use their own TV tuner unit on their PC to show TV programme, and scale the Nico Nico Jikkyo application to fit to the background TV image.
Users realtime comments are collected on the server side and shown to other TV watchers, so users can talk on current broadcasting with many others over the internet.
In Japan, ground-based TV broadcasting still dominates what people watch everyday. Although there are satellite and cable choices, such paid channels are not widely watched as same as in USA.
One of the most active bulletin boards on the massive anonymous BBS 2-channel are 7 Jikkyo-Ita (live TV watchers thread) for Kanto region’s 7 channels. For example, Jikkyo-Ita for NHK, national channel, has now its No.48621 thread, which means there have been about 48,621,000 comments in their 10 years history. It is said that one hour program gets 100 to few thousands comments (depends on channel and programme popularity, of course) there.
So, everyone knows that talking over the TV programme could be a great consumer generated media, and besides 2-channel Jikkyo-Ita, there have been many attempts to create those chatters community on the web.
The biggest obstacle is copyright. There is not many move from TV networks side to the web integration except few challenges on Nico Nico Douga/YouTube/etc. In Japan, traditional media keeps rather hostile attitude against the net so there is no Hulu-like services existing yet.
This Nico Nico Jikkyo, seems carefully to avoid the copyright infringement with TV networks, but combining two very successful web services came from the single person, the 2 channel founder and the guy behind Nico Nico Douga, Hiroyuki Nishimura (aka Hiroyuki).
