Opening Japan’s first commercial television station and manufacturing an audience with street receivers (1953)

The author’s view

Even in June 1955 there were only about 110,000 receivers in the whole country, of which some 67,000 were formally registered. Try to sell advertising slots on that basis and several years of losses after opening are unavoidable. The large receivers Nippon Television planted in busy shopping districts were, in themselves, equipment that earned not a single yen. That they nevertheless pulled a profit forward to the seventh month appears to be because the company replaced the ground on which the price of advertising rested — from the number of sets in homes to the number of people standing in the street.

The shape Shoriki Matsutaro first drew, however, was never realised. His plan for a single company covering the whole country with American capital and a microwave network was rejected in December 1954, and national reach was left to a coalition of affiliated stations. The street receivers, too, were a temporary device, their purpose exhausted once every household had a set of its own. What remained from the opening years was not the apparatus but the sequence — create the audience yourself, then sell the advertising — and that carried straight through into the later contest over scheduling and ratings.