JORX-DTV (channel 6), branded as , is the flagship station of the Japan News Network in the Kantō region. It is owned-and-operated by , a subsidiary of the TBS Holdings. TBS Television is one of the "five private broadcasters based in Tokyo."

TBS produced the game show Takeshi's Castle, which is dubbed and rebroadcast internationally. The channel was also home to Ultraman and the Ultra Series franchise starting in 1966—initially a spinoff of Ultra Q, which was co-produced and broadcast in the same year. Most, if not all, of these series were produced by Tsuburaya Productions for the network. In the 2010s, the Ultra Series moved to TV Tokyo. Since the 1990s, TBS has been the home of Sasuke (Ninja Warrior), whose format inspired similar programs outside Japan. Sasuke itself was a spinoff of the TBS game show Kinniku Banzuke, which ran for seven seasons.

On May 24, 2017, TBS and five other major media firms—TV Tokyo, Nikkei, Inc., WOWOW, Dentsu, and Hakuhodo DY Media Partners announced that they would jointly establish a new company, Paravi, in July to offer paid online video services. TBS Holdings became the largest shareholder of the new company, Premium Platform Japan, with a 31.5% stake. Yasuhiro Takatsuna, an official from TBS Holdings, was appointed as the new company's president.

Overview Its predecessor, Radio Tokyo, Inc., was established in 1951 as a general broadcaster. On April 1, 1955, it launched as the second privately owned TV station in Japan, following Nippon Television, and simultaneously became the only TV and radio station in Tokyo (spun off in 2001). At that time, Radio Tokyo incorporated local stations into the Japan News Network (JNN) by promoting the elimination of newspaper influence in forming the news network, thereby establishing a powerful reporting system.

The current TBS Television was originally established as TBS Entertainment, Inc. a production company that produced entertainment programs for Tokyo Broadcasting System (the trade name of Radio Tokyo Co., Ltd. at the time). Since the broadcasting license was owned by the parent company, TBS, TBS Entertainment was not a member of the Japan Commercial Broadcasters Association.

On April 1, 2009, Tokyo Broadcasting System (which changed its trade name to Tokyo Broadcasting System Holdings, Inc. on the same day) underwent a corporate split. The television broadcasting business, including the television broadcasting license and the operation of various facilities such as Akasaka Sacas and Akasaka BLITZ, along with cultural projects such as events, was inherited by the newly established company, which retained the abbreviation TBS. This company transitioned from being a production company to a general broadcaster (currently a private terrestrial core broadcaster) and joined the Japan Commercial Broadcasters Association. Additionally, TBS Radio was entrusted with the maintenance and management of the company's transmitting station in Toda City, Saitama Prefecture.

History

Early history Matsutarō Shōriki, the former owner of Yomiuri Shimbun, first proposed the idea of private broadcasting in Japan in 1951. In June of the following year, NHK, Yomiuri Shimbun, and Radio Tokyo (the first private radio broadcaster) were among the first to apply for a TV broadcast license. In July of the same year, the Radio Supervision Committee announced the granting of a preliminary license to Nippon Television, while holding off on the applications of NHK (because the National Assembly needed to pass NHK's business plan) and Radio Tokyo (due to its recent establishment). On January 16 of the following year, Radio Tokyo obtained a TV preparatory license. After the completion of its TV headquarters, Radio Tokyo was granted an official TV broadcasting license on January 28, 1955.

At 10 am on April 1, 1955, Radio Tokyo TV (shortened to KRT) began broadcasting. According to a KRT survey conducted from November to December 1955, KRT's average audience rating from 6:00 pm to 9:30 pm was 24.4%, slightly ahead of Nippon TV's 24.1% and NHK's 21.9%. The income of Radio Tokyo's television division increased after broadcasting began, surpassing that of the radio division in 1957. In the early days of broadcasting, American TV series such as Adventures of Superman and Lassie played a role in KRT's program schedule. 77 Sunset Strip, which began airing in 1960, also sparked a ratings boom. In terms of technology, in July 1955, KRT and Toshiba jointly developed Japan's first domestic TV studio camera. The following year, KRT and Hokkaido Broadcasting jointly participated in the Japanese product exhibition held in Beijing, where they conducted a TV broadcast test in China for the first time.

Forming a network; transition from KRT to TBS

At the beginning of 1959, the third and fourth flagship stations in the Tokyo area, Nippon Educational Television (now TV Asahi) and Fuji TV, began broadcasting—NET on February 1 and Fuji TV on March 1. Around the same time, a large number of people purchased TV sets to watch the wedding of Crown Prince Akihito and Michiko Shoda. By April 3, 1959, the number of TV households in Japan had reached 2 million. Japan's TV advertising costs also increased from 400 million yen in 1954 to 23.8 billion yen in 1959. On April 10, 1959, KRT broadcast all of the wedding of Crown Prince (now Emperor Emeritus) Akihito and Empress Michiko, with 17 TV stations simulcasting the KRT broadcast.

In June 1958, KRT signed a news material exchange agreement with CBC, OTV, RKB, and HBC. This agreement lead to KRT's idea of establishing a national network. Building on the cooperation among various stations during the Crown Prince's wedding, KRT signed a JNN news agreement with 15 TV stations from across Japan on August 1, 1959, creating Japan's first TV network, the Japan News Network (JNN). By the end of that year, the number of JNN-affiliated stations had increased to 18.

The JNN news agreement stipulated that each station would be responsible for news gathering in its own region and was obligated to provide the news materials it collected to JNN. It also prohibited exchanging news materials with other networks or broadcasting news programs and other content from other networks. The following year, KRT, CBC, ABC, RKB, and HBC established the "Five Station Alliance" to strengthen cooperation in various fields.

In October 1960, KRT was listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. To reflect the reality that television had replaced radio broadcasting as the company's main business, Radio Tokyo changed its name to Tokyo Broadcasting System on November 28, 1960, and the English abbreviation changed from KRT to TBS.

KRT began trial broadcasting of color TV on February 2, 1959. On September 10 of the following year, KRT officially launched color TV broadcasts, becoming one of the first eight TV channels in Japan to do so. At that time, TBS believed that color TV technology was not yet fully developed, and as a result, it was less active in colorizing its programs compared to other Japanese TV stations. In October 1970, TBS completed its transition to color broadcasting, with its first primetime broadcasts using NTSC-J color for non-news programming.

Hero of private TV In October 1961, in response to the rising challenge from Fuji TV, which was seeing increasing ratings, TBS undertook a major reorganization of its program schedule. American TV dramas and music programs for young audiences were scheduled for 7:00 pm, American TV series at 8:00 pm, and TBS's self-produced TV series at 9:00 pm This new arrangement boosted TBS's ratings and prompted other stations to adopt similar schedules, making the one-hour program format a standard in the Japanese TV industry.

In the early 1960s, Ben Casey was the most successful TV series broadcast by TBS from the United States, achieving a rating of 50.6%, which remains the highest rating for a foreign TV series broadcast in Japan. However, as TBS's capability to produce its own programs improved, the network gradually reduced its broadcast of American TV series after the mid-1960s.

On November 1, 1963, TBS eliminated the afternoon break from Monday to Thursday to provide uninterrupted broadcasting throughout the day. According to a 1963 survey by Video Research, TBS had an average audience rating of 16.7% during prime time, ranking first among all Tokyo stations. Its average full-day audience rating was 8.3%, lower than NHK's but the highest among private stations.

On November 23, 1963, TBS, along with Nippon TV and NHK, conducted the first satellite broadcast between Japan and the United States, covering the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

In the early 1960s, spurred by the 1964 Summer Olympics, TBS experienced rapid growth. By 1965, TBS reported a turnover of 14.702 billion yen and a profit of 1.673 billion yen. To diversify income beyond advertising, TBS funded the establishment of the Tokyo Electronics Research Institute (now Tokyo Power Technology) in 1963.

From 1961 to 1964, TBS constructed TBS Hall on the north side of its headquarters and began exploring the real estate business. In the late 1960s, TBS also established TBS Encyclopædia Britannica and TBS School of Computer Science, expanding into cultural and educational industries.

In the early 1970s, TBS opened housing exhibition halls in Musashisakai, Omiya, Machida, Hachioji, and other locations, entering the housing industry. TBS's investment in radio and television-related businesses increased from 2.1 billion yen in 1968 to 11.5 billion yen in 1973.

However, following the first oil crisis in 1973, many of TBS's sideline investments encountered operational difficulties. Consequently, TBS focused its resources on broadcasting and television, selling shares in subsidiaries such as TBS Encyclopædia Britannica.

Although TBS's profits declined for two consecutive years in 1974 and 1975 due to the Japanese economic downturn, turnover and profit began to rise again after 1976. By 1977, the turnover of TBS's TV department had exceeded 65.5 billion yen.

On the other hand, due to high labor costs and the high ratings of outsourced TV series, TBS began promoting program outsourcing in the 1970s to reduce costs. As part of this strategy, TBS transferred some employees to a newly established program production subsidiary.

In 1973, the turnover of the TBS TV department exceeded 40 billion yen. During the mid-1970s, major national newspapers in Japan reorganized their equity holdings in TV stations. The Asahi Shimbun and Yomiuri Shimbun sold their stakes in TBS to the Mainichi Shimbun. By April 1974, the Mainichi Shimbun held a total of 9.97% of TBS shares, becoming the only newspaper shareholder among TBS's major shareholders.

However, in 1977, the Mainichi Shimbun sold most of its TBS shares due to a financial crisis, causing TBS to become less popular among the core newspaper bureaus, after MBS affiliation was transferred from ANN to JNN in 1975.

In 1979, TBS introduced the promotional slogan "TBS for the BEST," marking its peak performance and ratings at the turn of the 1970s and 1980s. During audience rating surveys in the spring and autumn of 1978, all 24 JNN-affiliated stations achieved top rankings in both prime-time and full-day audience ratings. From 1977 to 1980, TBS held first place in turnover among all flagship stations for four consecutive years. In 1980, the turnover of the TBS TV department exceeded 95 billion yen.

TBS also made technological innovations, beginning in 1976 with the gradual introduction of the Electronic News Gathering (ENG) system, which enhanced news interviewing and editing capabilities. In November 1978, TBS began broadcasting stereo programs.

1980s and 1990s: "Triple Crown ratings"