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The story
The Asahi Shimbun reported that page views for NHK’s web news have plummeted. The topic blew up on 5ch after posters pointed out that NHK’s news site had switched to a registration system that’s essentially “paid access except in emergencies.” The thread filled with comments like “It’s scary — just looking at it feels like it’ll turn into a receiver-fee contract” and “I’m staying away from anything NHK-related now.” At the same time, some pushed back, arguing there’s no problem as long as you don’t actually register, while others explained the backstory: the change itself came as a response to newspapers and commercial broadcasters complaining that NHK’s free online distribution was “unfair competition against private business.” So what looked like simple “NHK fatigue” turned out to be a more tangled picture.
NHK’s Web News Views Plummet — Is There a Path to Cooperation with Newspapers and Commercial Broadcasters?: Asahi Shimbun
September 19, 2026, 7:00 AM — Paid article
By Emi Tadama, Senior Staff Writer
Source: asahi.com / Original article here
What people said
Too scary — I've started avoiding anything NHK-related online altogether.
Just don't make an account. Simply clicking through doesn't do anything.
Agreed.
During the Noto earthquake, the gap between
the Defense Ministry's site
the MLIT Hokuriku regional office site
the Ishikawa prefectural government site
and
what you guys understood from social media
vs. the media coverage
was brutal.
NHK's Once-Free News Site Goes "Paid Except in Emergencies"
Social media reacts: "If it needs a receiver fee, I'm not watching" / "Cheapskates"
Yeah, this is obviously why NHK's traffic tanked.
People are ditching their TVs because of NHK.
NHK should either drop the receiver fee, fold into the government budget, and become a state broadcaster, or just go private. Those are the only two options.
Originally, newspapers and commercial broadcasters complained that NHK already has an unfair edge since it collects receiver fees, so it shouldn't also stream news free online — they argued it was siphoning off their page views and amounted to unfair competition against private business.
That led to a revision of the Broadcast Act, and the resulting registration/verification requirements made everything a pain to use — which is why traffic to NHK's news and video sites dropped.
But the article in Re: #1 is basically asking: is now really the time to be fighting over that?
Not something the "Akahi" has any business saying lol (Akahi = a mocking nickname for Asahi Shimbun, playing on "red"/leftist bias)
Such a classic media move…
Basically means "give commercial broadcasters a cut of the receiver fee too."
Who'd even watch TV like that?
If you don't like being treated like a civil servant, well, that's the deal you signed up for.
If we're talking bias, Sankei's just as guilty. Oh wait, Sankei isn't really a news outlet — more like a fan zine (lol)
When there's an incident or accident, some random bystander can just film an interview with the victim on their phone.
Just let ordinary people freely cover the Diet, companies, the entertainment world, whatever.
That's a non-starter in its own way.
Yeah, that's when everyone just stopped checking it altogether. It's a bit more viewable now, but it's too late — as a news site, it's dead.
What's even the deal with that, huh?
They upload tons of drama trailers and promo videos though.
It's basically a tax at this point.
The only thing saving it is that owning a TV isn't technically mandatory.
And on top of that, what they're actually doing amounts to information manipulation and political activism.
Background and Key Points of This Topic
As comment 213 in the thread points out, NHK’s news and video sites shifting to a mandatory-registration model has roots in longstanding criticism from newspapers and commercial broadcasters, who argued that NHK’s free online distribution — funded by receiver fees — amounted to unfair competition against private business. The original Asahi Shimbun article appears to explore the possibility of “cooperation” between the two sides as an extension of this structural conflict. Opinions in the thread split over what actually caused the drop in page views: some blame the sheer inconvenience of the registration system, while others read it as a sign of distrust toward NHK itself. The former lines up with the technical explanation quoted from the itmedia article in comment 18, while the latter tends to shade into more emotional criticism — and the fact that the two get blended together makes the thread easy to misread. When writing this up, it’s worth keeping the factual part (the shift to paid registration and the resulting drop in views) separate from any judgment about NHK’s stance itself.
*This article was compiled and summarized from the 5ch (Newsflash+) thread “NHK’s Web News Views Plummet — Is There a Path to Cooperation with Newspapers and Commercial Broadcasters?: Asahi Shimbun.”
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