Japan has made a lot of breakthroughs in certain areas of technology which, as a consequence, they'll probably be the last to abandon. Their national broadcast

Japan has made a lot of breakthroughs in certain areas of technology which, as a consequence, they'll probably be the last to abandon. Their national broadcaster has a research lab into television technologies, it's figuring out how to encode 8K for terrestrial broadcast, among other amazingly cool projects. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NHK_Science_%26_Technology_Research_Laboratories http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NHK_Science_%26_Technology_Rese... On the flip side, their national broadcaster has been really slow to invest in internet streaming, or push online access, with 60% of weekly Japanese NHK news consumers claiming they didn't even know NHK had a website: http://www.nhk.or.jp/bunken/english/reports/pdf/10_no8_07.pdf http://www.nhk.or.jp/bunken/english/reports/pdf/10_no8_07.pd... Maybe CDs vs. streaming is in some ways Sony vs. Apple, and there are factors like national pride, domestic market control, and local branding dominance that play a role in the choice of technologies, rather than just products. Even so, always fascinating to see weird exogenous factors (beyond performance / capacity / etc.) tip a market.