NHK+

NHK+ (NHKプラス) is NHK's official streaming service. It provides simulcasts and already-carried programs seen on both NHK General TV and NHK Educational TV.

In November 2010, then-NHK Chairman Shigeo Fukuchi announced his intention to begin simultaneous distribution of television programs over the Internet, and announced that he would request the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications to revise the Broadcasting Act.^[1] However, in addition to requiring a large investment in the development of distribution servers, issues such as how to deal with copyrights and portrait rights, and whether NHK's license fee system should be applied to households that do not own a television set were raised by private broadcast stations and experts, including Michisada Hirose, then chairman of the Japan Commercial Broadcasting Federation (Commercial Broadcasting Federation) and advisor to TV Asahi, and Masayuki Shimada, president of TV Tokyo, and the project was at a standstill.^[2]

Subsequently, after the revised Broadcasting Act was enacted in 2014, NHK began providing ``simultaneous broadcasting on NHK's official website and smartphone app for important news such as disasters and national elections, as well as global sports broadcasts such as the Olympics and Paralympics and the FIFA World Cup.^{[3][4][5][6][7]}

Additionally, since November 2015, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications has held a "Study Group on Issues Related to Broadcasting", where discussions centered on the simultaneous distribution of NHK TV broadcasts. However, due to the problems mentioned above, it took nearly four years for a full-scale simultaneous distribution service to begin.^[8]

In response to the revised Broadcasting Act passed and enacted at the 198th Diet/House of Councilors plenary session on June 5, 2019,^[9] trial distribution was initially planned to take place at the 70th NHK Kouhaku Uta Gassen held on December 31 of the same year, and full-scale service would be launched within the same year. However, in November of the same year, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications was concerned about NHK's bloat and requested a review of the implementation plan for simultaneous internet distribution services, and at the same time, approval was also postponed until January 14, 2020, so the service implementation was temporarily postponed and started at the date and time mentioned below.^[10][11][12]

NHK+ is a service that simultaneously distributes NHK TV's terrestrial (general/E-tele) broadcasts and the Internet after obtaining approval from the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications.^[13][14]

Simultaneous program distribution time is limited to a 24-hour period,^[13] and broadcasts from NHK Broadcasting Center (South Kanto) are relayed. In addition, missed program distribution can be used any time and any number of times for 7 days after broadcast.^[15][13][14]

NHK Plus is implemented as a service that supplements broadcasting in areas with difficult viewing,^[16] so subscribers and people who share the same livelihood as the subscribers can use up to 5 screens (streams) without any additional burden if they apply for use and complete the authentication procedure.^[13][14] For the time being, continuous simultaneous distribution and missed program distribution are not available under business contracts.^[13]

The service is scheduled to end in October 2025, with all of its content integrated into the NHK ONE platform.^[17]