Japan to create TV broadcast for smartphones and tablets

Japan’s phones usually come equipped with TV tuners, but now it looks like they will be taking it one step further by actually creating a television broadcast that will only be viewable from smartphones and tablets. They plan to make it an interactive broadcast, meaning that live commenting will be enabled over Twitter and Facebook during its broadcast.

Japanese broadcast, nottv, said that they’re currently awaiting the governments approval for use of public airwaves, but expects to launch this new service in April 2012. Smartphones will require a special TV tuner built into the device, but NTT DoCoMo is one of the main investors behind this project and is expected to be able to convince manufacturers to include the additional hardware.