three distressed prefectures, which had been suspended in the Tohoku district because of the occurrence of the Great East Japan Earthquake. The completion of the ubiquitous network environments is driving the rapid transformation of the broadcasting media, shown in the examples of the emergence of the program-distribution services via Internet, or the program-production based on the collaboration with social media.

### 1. Completion of the switchover to the digital terrestrial broadcasting service, and the new expansion of broadcasting media

The switchover to the digital terrestrial broadcasting service has been completed as follows: in December 2002, the service started in the three greater metropolitan regions of Kanto (around Tokyo), Chukyo (around Nagoya), and Kinki (around Osaka); in December 2006, the nation-wide service was started; on July 24, 2011, in the 44 prefectures, excluding the three prefectures in the Tohoku district, Iwate, Miyagi, and Fukushima, the analog terrestrial broadcasting service was terminated; on March 31, 2012, in the three prefectures in the Tohoku district, the analog terrestrial broadcasting service was terminated. The Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications had promoted the switchover to digital terrestrial broadcasting, based on the cooperation of each individual in the country, in collaboration with each of the ministries and agencies, local government, broadcasting organizations, equipment producers and other related parties.

Specifically, for the purpose of the development of the broadcasting receiving environment, the ministry promoted the analog frequency band shift at first, the construction of digital relay-stations, and aids to the cable-TV subscribers for digital-conversion service; in addition, the ministry promoted consultation to viewers by opening a "MIC Digital Support Center (Degi-Sapo)" in every prefecture in February 2011, helping the viewers suffering from digital reception difficulty or visiting their home depending on the situation.

After the start of the switchover to digital terrestrial broadcasting, it was found that in the areas where analog broadcasting had been successfully received by a home-antennae, some households are actually having difficulty in receiving digital broadcasting using a home-antenna (comprising another poor-reception area); according to surveys, 279,000 households nationwide (14,119 areas) were identified as poor-reception households. The ministry, in collaboration with the local government and the residents in each of the areas, determined and implemented countermeasures, and, for some areas where the countermeasures could not be completed before the termination of the analog broadcasting, the ministry decided to tentatively broadcast programs via a satellite.

The ministry will continue to provide such measures for the elimination of digital-poor-reception areas, and plans to terminate the tentative satellite broadcasting by the end of March 2015, which is received by 111,000 household at present.

As for TV sets, the ministry has conducted the promotion of measures such as digital-TV-purchase-aid (ecopoints), and the digital-tuner-purchase-aid to the economically-disadvantaged; as a result, nationwide sales (excluding the three distressed prefectures in the Tohoku district) were 122.18 million units as of June 2011, just before the termination of the analog broadcasting, which was plus 124.7% of the original target at the time of completion of the switchover. In addition, the preparation of reception environments has reached the level of that originally targeted or an equivalent level.

In the final stage of the completion of switchover to the digital broadcasting, in addition to about 1,600 nationwide degi-sapos and temporary-support-corners, volunteers from various organizations such as scout-associations, mom-clubs, local-governments and affiliates, volunteer associations, local welfare commissioners and convenience-stores participated in the publicity or material-distribution for raising awareness regarding digital broadcasting. The ministry will acknowledge and remember that the completion of the digital-switchover would not be possible without the grass-roots cooperation by the entire nation.

Japan’s broadcasting media, generally completing the digitalization by the completion of the switchover to the digital terrestrial broadcasting, has proceeded into the next stage where they are faced with the issue of how to utilize the digital networks suitable for a high degree of collaborative or integrated services of communications and broadcasting. New-ways of broadcasting, such as V-High multimedia broadcasting which has started in April 2012, are emerging.

### 2. Smart-TV and promotion of integration and collaboration of broadcasting and social-media

(1) Acceleration of smart TV

The term “smart TV” is used differently by each of the broadcasting organizations, equipment manufacturers, network-related businesses and other players. In this article, a smart TV is classified as a TV receiver with features that are expandable through Internet connection,