NHK

   

Japan Broadcasting Corporation
日本放送協会
Nippon Hōsō Kyōkai

Logo since March 2020
NHK Broadcasting Center (headquarters)
Type	Radio, terrestrial television and satellite television broadcaster
Branding	NHK
Country	Japan
Availability	Nationwide and Worldwide
Founded	Tokyo Broadcasting Station founded 29 November 1924; merged into Japan Broadcasting Corporation in 6 August 1926; implementation of Broadcasting Act in 1 June 1950
Motto	Honest, seriousness (まっすぐ、真剣。, Massugu, shinken.)
Headquarters	Shibuya, Tokyo (35°39′55.07″N 139°41′45.41″E)
Broadcast area	Japan
Owner	Government of Japan (statutory corporation chartered under the Broadcasting Act of 1950)
Key people	Terunobu Maeda, President Satoru Masagaki, Executive Vice President
Launch date	March 1925 (radio) November 1950 (February 1953) (television)
Former names	Tokyo/Osaka/Nagoya Broadcasting Station (1925–1926)
Picture format	1080i (HDTV) 2160p 4K UHD (NHK BS4K) 4320p 8K UHD (NHK BS8K)
Callsign meaning	Nippon Hōsō Kyōkai
Official website	www.nhk.or.jp

NHK (Japanese: 日本放送協会, Hepburn: Nippon Hōsō Kyōkai), also called the Japan Broadcasting Corporation and shortened from Nippon Hōsō Kyōkai, is a Japanese public broadcaster. NHK, which has always been known by this romanized initialism in Japanese, is a statutory corporation funded by viewers' payments of a television license fee.

NHK operates two terrestrial television channels (NHK General TV and NHK Educational TV), four satellite television channels (NHK BS1 and NHK BS Premium; as well as two ultra-high-definition television channels, NHK BS4K and NHK BS8K), and three radio networks (NHK Radio 1, NHK Radio 2, and NHK FM).

NHK also provides an international broadcasting service, known as NHK World-Japan. NHK World-Japan is composed of NHK World TV, NHK World Premium, and the shortwave radio service Radio Japan (RJ). World Radio Japan also makes some of its programs available on the Internet.

NHK was the first broadcaster in the world to broadcast in high-definition (using multiple sub-Nyquist sampling encoding, also known as Hi-Vision) and in 8K.

History

NHK's earliest forerunner was the Tokyo Broadcasting Station (東京放送局, Tōkyō hōsōkyoku), founded in 1924 under the leadership of Count Gotō Shinpei. Tokyo Broadcasting Station, along with separate organizations in Osaka and Nagoya, began radio broadcasts in 1925. The three stations merged under the first incarnation of NHK in August 1926. NHK was modelled on the BBC of the United Kingdom, and the merger and reorganisation was carried out under the auspices of the pre-war Ministry of Communications. NHK's second radio network began in 1931, and the third radio network (FM) began in 1937.

Radio broadcasting

NHK began shortwave broadcasting on an experimental basis in the 1930s, and began regular English- and Japanese-language shortwave broadcasts in 1935 under the name Radio Japan, initially aimed at ethnic Japanese listeners in Hawaii and the west coast of North America. By the late 1930s, NHK's overseas broadcasts were known as Radio Tokyo, which became an official name in 1941.

See also

This page uses material from the Wikipedia page NHK, which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (view authors).