One of the relaxing yet captivating broadcast. Their dedicated app makes it easy to watch so much of their content without ads. For me this channel is a quick daily visit to Japan. Wish features like video player quick skip back or forward by 5 or 10 seconds and mark videos for watch later are included.

I was glad to find this app on the iTunes App Store for both Apple TV & iPhone, but was a bit disappointed to discover that although the picture quality is significantly-better than it is provided by Spectrum cable on one of their channels, unfortunately the Apple TV app doesn’t support fast-forward or rewinding using the Apple TV remote (the pause, volume buttons and mute functions as expected). Worse, exiting the program stream means the user has to start over from the beginning of the stream (it doesn’t remember where you exited the stream); this makes it impractical to use. Out of curiosity, I downloaded the iPhone app, and although it supports Chromecast in app (& iPhone app allows fast-forwarding and rewinding), the video quality is significantly worse than when watching with the Apple TV app. And although the iPhone iOS app supports Chromecast (which I have on my TV), surprisingly it doesn’t offer or support Airplay (which obviously is the preferred choice for Apple TV). The NHK app strikes me as a good app, but as if the developers lost interest in Apple support, so they failed to add even basic features to make it useable.

The only big complaint is that is missing many of the basic video app 101 functions: you can’t save or bookmark videos. You can’t make an account, so even if you could, say, make a playlist on your phone app it wouldn’t then be accessible in your AppleTV app. It’s just kind of as rudimentary a video app as one could possibly make. It plays videos, that’s it. Great content, though it would be nice to see more back-catalog stuff made available (like Takeshi Art Beat, say)