TV Asahi Corporation (株式会社テレビ朝日), commonly abbreviated as Tere Asa (テレ朝), with the call sign JOEX-DTV, is a Japanese television station subsidiary of certified broadcasting holding company TV Asahi Holdings Corporation, itself controlled by The Asahi Shimbun Company. Its studios are located in Roppongi, Minato, Tokyo. TV Asahi is one of the five private broadcasters based in Tokyo.
History[]
After NHK and Nippon TV were launched in the early 1950s, TV has become an important medium in Japan, new regional television stations opened successively one after another. However, most of the programs that were aired at that time were vulgar which caused well-known critic Sōichi Ōya to mention in a program that TV made people in Japan "total idiots"; those criticisms already gave birth to two events; a "perma-freeze" on issuing new licenses to commercial television stations in Japan from 1940; and the idea of opening an education-focused TV station. On February 17, 1955, the Ministry of Posts issued frequency allocations, and the Kanto Region obtained three licenses in total. Among the three, one of them is used by NHK Educational TV, while the other two were open for private bidding. The license for the second educational station, which would have used channel 12, was later scrapped, because it was believed the station would open after 1960. Among those bidders are film production companies Toho and Toei Company, radio broadcasters Nippon Cultural Broadcasting and Nippon Broadcasting System, and educational publishing group Obunsha. On July 4, 1956, the Ministry of Posts later decided to unify those applications into Tokyo Educational Television (as its tentative name) which was later obtained on July 8.
On October 10, 1956, Tokyo Educational Television held its first shareholders meeting and changed its company name to Nippon Educational Television Co., Ltd. (NET). In November 1 of the same year, the broadcaster was later established. After Fuji TV obtained their broadcast licenses, they set an official start date of broadcast on March 1, 1959. NET advanced their start date of broadcast months earlier. On July 24, 1957, NET began to have test signal transmissions. On September 2, their broadcast license was approved, and test signal transmissions continued every night throughout the month.
At 9:55am on October 1, 1957, NET signed on, airing at least 6.5 hours of programming per day. By April, this figure was extended to 10 hours.