2009 Volume 30 Pages 45-53
This paper examines the reason why Japanese contents, which are famous for their "coolness", realize both media-mix and diversity simultaneously in terms of industrial structure of contents in Japan. In the US, media-mix or multi use of contents are often accompanied by concentration of copyright to media conglomerates because it is presumed that horizontal integration is desirable for maximize revenue from. deployment of a content. On the contrary, industrial structure in Japan is horizontally separated one and media-mix is implemented by transaction between companies from various sectors of content industry such as an advertisement sector, distribution sector, and production sector. Addition to transaction between companies, the existence small, but numerous content production companies are the key factor to the creation of content diversity. Historically, "production commission system" has been formed as cooperative organization to invest jointly to deploy contents to many forms and to share risk and return. "Production commission system" has merit for the participants since it limits the risk to producet content by sharing related copyrights and revenue from deployment contents. For example, movie industry and also amine industry have expanded the use of "production commission system" about mid 80's. Recently,. some mobile contents productions adopted "production commission system" to make short drama clips for distribution to mobile terminals. This system is unique to Japan and the mechanism of media-mix through "production commission system" is yet to be examined.. This paper analyzed the amine series' data of "Television Drama Database" from 1950's to mid 2000s to examine the expansion of production of amine series and to figure out what are the characteristics of actual media-mix cases. The result shows that the number of amine series is increased twice at around mid 80's and mid 90's. There are two main reasons of the increase. One is the increase of the content distribution platform by advent of the satellite broadcasting system. Other reasons are widening of time zones to broadcast amine series to mid-night time zone and expansion of TV stations to produce amine series to UHF stations and local stations. By identifying the original work of amine series, there is tendency that the types of the original work are diversified in 90's in Japan. Furthermore, many kinds of media-mix are actively conducted among different forms of contents along with diversification of content distribution platforms. Utilizing "production commission system", content production in Japan enables both media-mix among various platforms and diversity of contents produced by small but creative companies. This would be the unique mechanism that sustains the coolness of Japanese content.
