Five years have passed since the digital TV broadcasting service for mobile phones (“one-seg” TV service) started in Japan. This paper examines how the youth in Japan uses mobile TV. Employing various types of data, we compared mobile TV with other functions of the mobile phone, such as Internet access and the built-in camera, used actively by the Japanese youth.
A survey was conducted with 310 ramdomly selected youth living in Tokyo. In addition, six focus groups including 19 mobile TV users were surveyed to examine usage details. The findings show that the ownership of mobile TV has little to do with the active use of other functions and that its usage is scarcely determined by demographics, suggesting that the active and constant uses of mobile TV cannot be warranted despite the extensive diffusion of the mobile phone among Japanese youth.