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We don’t often cover new TV sets, but I couldn’t help noticing the latest round of Viera LCDs, due to hit shops here in July.

NTT DoCoMo’s corporate videos have long been a Big Deal for the 800lb gorilla of a phone company, so it’s always worth checking out the latest to see the public face it wants to present to the world.

From today Japanese TV drama fans get a new way to sample the pabulum churned out by big media here in the form of something called ‘Pair Movies.’

Reader Matt asked what anime the still featured here comes from and - whaddya know - it just happens to be on YouTube.

We’ve all heard about Sony’s strategy meeting in Tokyo yesterday (read my report here, if you’re bored), but even more interesting than the news that everything’s going to be connected in Sony’s Brave New World and movies will be streaming left and right were a couple of demo videos unleashed on the underwhelmed journos assembled at the event.

One other cool thing I saw at the super-funky Panasonic Center last week was the company’s take on a wall-mounted surface computer.

Anyone familiar with the conservative nature of big Japanese business will tell you that Toshiba’s decision to drop HD DVD like a hot brick was almost unseemly in its haste, even though the firm had little choice.

One of the marketing bigwigs behind Blu-ray has gone public with an astonishing claim that Toshiba has only itself to blame for the flop that was HD DVD.

Even though we’ve heard of some fantastic customer service for Japanese early adopters of the failed HD DVD format, it seems not everyone’s happy with the brave face being put on by Toshiba.

Amid the rush to wring the last few pennies out of HD DVD’s rancid and yellowing corpse, at least one retailer has had the decency to front up and look after its unfortunate customers.

Should you happen to be one of those people who arranges the books on their shelves alphabetically, you’ll probably like the new recordable media from Panasonic that allow you to record the summer Olympics on Olympic-branded disks.

Regular readers will have noticed a fair sprinkling of the odd term ‘1-seg’ in news items over the last year or so, with all referring to Japanese products in some way. From Sony’s PSP and video Walkman to car sat-nav systems and mobile phones, this strangely named digital TV standard is popping up everywhere in the Far East, but what exactly is it?

Whatever your opinion of the ever-increasing number of surveillance cameras pointed at us, their proliferation creates a tricky logistical problem for those doing the watching – how do we make sense of the information overload of so much video?

Panasonic Japan has come up with an intriguing solution to a problem no one knew we had – a device that can grab and print stills from a high-definition video file.

The copyright-protection technology currently being trialled by YouTube has had a most unexpected result in the shape of an old-fashioned content owner embracing fan uploads to promote itself on the video-sharing site.

We’re not quite sure why anyone would need it, but NEC’s latest piece of biometric wizardry is a face-recognition system that can look at video clips and rank people according to how frequently they appear.

We saw recently how Japanese sales figures for high-definition video recorders make worrying reading for the backers of HD DVD, so it’s no surprise that the latest data on the market for players and recorders as a whole shows more of the same.

People with stiff necks and particularly short drivers are likely to rejoice when they see the latest car-safety innovation from Panasonic Japan – a rear-view camera and monitor rig.

We’d have thought that most people who watch movies and TV shows on their iPods have probably moved on from carrying about portable DVD players as well, but apparently - judging by its latest product - Polaroid Japan missed that meeting.

Although it beats the pants of the competition on the sales front, Nintendo’s DS Lite has never been anything more than a games machine, leading anyone interested in mobile media to opt for the PSP. Come March, however, that’s set to change with the launch of an official movie download service for the DS.

It’s hard to know what to make of the latest statistics on the battle for supremacy between Blu-ray and HD DVD because of the fact that they’re from Japan, home of so many of Blu-ray’s biggest backers. Nevertheless, the degree to which HD DVD has fallen behind in Japan in sales of the crucial high-end HD TV recorders is stark.

We recently speculated that YouTube might one day soon be delivering high-definition online video instead of the grainy clips that proliferate now, but Sony Japan’s eyeVio video-sharing site has beaten the Google company to the punch by starting an HD TV service yesterday.

Japanese researchers have come up with a rather snooty technique for detecting online pirated video content in places where it shouldn’t be. By analyzing clips for ’amateur-looking techniques’ KDDI reckons it can sort the professional stuff out from the garbage the rest of us produce.

When it comes to internet speeds, we’ve long-since consigned the humble kilobit-class connection to the dustbin, so a mathematics-based breakthrough has us wondering if megabit- and even gigabit-level connections will one day sound as quaintly archaic.

KDDI, the company that recently started an online service delivering DVD-quality movies to domestic customers has upped the ante to send quad-HD films down the same pipe.

With the increasing number of audio-visual gadgets in our living rooms that require HDMI to be seen to best effect, Fujitsu Japan has announced a hardware solution to help keep costs down.

As this latest piece of sci-fi-style research has appeared only in a rather traditional Japanese newspaper we haven’t been able to get many details yet, but thought we’d mention it in passing, as everyone loves a good yarn.

Currently a Japan-only project, Yahoo Videocast launched here today with a strong emphasis on allowing users to upload and watch videos from their mobile phones.

Another day at CEATEC, another amazing piece of technology; this time in the realm of higher-than-high-definition video. JVC’s stand at the Japanese electronics show is dominated by a boxy-looking camera that can shoot video at four times the resolution of standard HD TV.

To pimp the Japanese HD DVD release of all 1,450 minutes of the original Star Trek in 1080p glory, the HD DVD promo body has decked out its booth attendants in appropriate regalia at CEATEC this week.

Toshiba has been showing off its new, powerful SpursEngine processor at the CEATEC 2007 electronics show just outside Tokyo and we were there to take a look.

The Tekkonkinkreet anime made its North American home video debut earlier this week, and we decided to celebrate with three bits of Tekkon goodness.

Standard domestic internet connections in Japan have long been fast enough to deliver a lot more than most people use, with average ADSL download speeds maxing out at around 50Mbps and fiber connections typically twice that.

Sony Japan has been busy of late on the Walkman front, so it’s no surprise to see yet another new lineup announced in Japan this morning - the 1-seg digital TV toting, credit-card sized NW-A910 series.

If there’s a product as bizarre as the Segnity pocket television from E-Revolution then we’ve yet to see it.

Thanko is one of those small Japanese electronics companies that comes up with the goods time after time and always at a price that makes even frivolous gadgets seem sensible. The latest piece of Thanko kit is surprisingly sensible, however, being a wireless audio-visual streamer.

Sony’s attempt to create a video-sharing website to rival YouTube took a step forward this week when it announced that its eyeVio service was opening its doors to companies wishing to place video advertising.

When Google bought YouTube in all its video-sharing goodness last year it was only a matter of time before its own Google Video site would see some major changes. So, the company’s recent announcement that it was no longer renting or selling videos for a fee was no surprise.

Although today’s Panasonic Japan launch of seven new 1080p high-definition televisions introduced the world to plenty of quality new hardware, one of the more intriguing announcements was buried well below the headline.

Just two weeks after we caught whiff of a rumor that Hitachi would be releasing a Blu-ray camcorder in the fall, the Japanese company has announced that the portable high-definition technology is, in fact, ready now.