世論 What Japan Thinks

Even on my quite old analogue tube television, digital looks very, very nice, and this is the main reason for nine in ten being completely satisfied with terrestrial digital television broadcasting in Japan, according to this survey on the topic, goo Research’s third regular look at digital TV, and reported on by japan.internet.com.

Demographics

Between the 31st of October and the 4th of November 2008 1,044 members of the goo Research online monitor group successfully completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 52.9% of the sample were male, 16.5% in their teens, 18.1% in their twenties, 21.6% in their thirties, 16.1% in their forties, and 27.7% aged fifty or older.

I remember when I bought my television they were showing full digital-ready televisions alongside (with a decent markup at that time) at Yodobashi Camera and the picture quality between the two was incomparable. However, I noticed that the sample DVD they were playing on the set we eventually bought was a DVD encoded at a quite low bit rate, and I wouldn’t have put it past them to have been deliberately tampering with the signal to add a little noise.

Conversely, I’ve noticed on large-screen full digital LCDs and plasmas any flaws in the source material are crystal clear and… I feel I sound like an old fogey declaring that vinyl beats CD!

Research results

Q1: Do you know that on the 24th of July 2011 analogue broadcasts are switched off? (Sample size=1,044)

Yes	94.4%
No	5.6%

I reckon that nineteen out of twenty Japanese people did not all know the exact date, but were at least aware of the upcoming shutdown.

Next, they determined that 338 people, or 32.4%, currently watched terrestrial digital television. They were asked the following question. Incidentally, I’d like to know the percentage of “don’t knows” and “don’t watch television” for that question, but that data was not reported.

Q2: How satisfied are you with digital compared to analogue television? (Sample size=338)

Completely satisfied (to SQ)	32.2%
Satisfied to some extent (to SQ)	56.5%
Can’t say either way	8.3%
Dissatisfied to some extent	2.7%
Totally dissatisfied	0.3%

Q2SQ: What aspects are you satisfied with? (Sample size=300, multiple answer)

	Votes	Percentage
Picture quality	279	93.0%
Can get weather, news, etc anytime through data broadcasts	163	54.3%
Easy-to-use electronic program guide (EPG)	132	44.0%
Sound quality	93	31.0%
Can get a stable picture, sound	78	26.0%
Two-way services like quizzes, questionnaires	51	17.0%
Subtitles	47	15.7%
Many channels	30	10.0%
Can see how many copies allowed	4	1.3%
Other	0	0.0%

The second last answer, the number of copies remaining, refers to the Dubbing 10 system recently activated that allows only 10 copies to be made of a recorded program.