In addition, it is possible to provide special administrative information on laws and notices from the national government that are useful for local administration, and information on training courses for local public officials.
(6) Financial support for satellite communications network
The establishment of an earth station corresponds to a town development project. 75% of the required cost is funded by bonds for overall improvement of the region and 15% is funded by local allocation tax. Between 30% and 55% of the redemption cost is also funded by local allocation tax depending on the financial situation of each local authority. The cost of providing reception equipment is funded by local allocation tax. \4 million over 5 years is funded as a unit cost, since 1991 in the prefectures and since 1992 in the municipalities. Theprefectures are introducing project for sending image information. \23.1 million of the cost was funded as a unit cost by local allocation tax in 1996.
4. Regional CATV
CATV has long been one of the cable broadcasting communications facilities. It is possible to send a large quantity of information, engage in mutual communication and deal with many kinds of new media. For this reason,CATV is attracting a lot of attention recently.
The number of CATV contracts in Japan exceeds 10 million. Most are small scale contracts that only have a channel for re-broadcasting programs to areas where reception is poor. Some well-favoured areas have comparatively large scale projects that re-transmit programs outside the area, but such cases are still the exception all over the country Programs for CATV began to be broadcast using satellites launched by the private sector in 1989. At that time the conditions were established for popularizing CATV with 30-50 channels.In future, CATV is expected to spread as rapidly as in the United States.
However it is important that programs provided by CATV are attractive enough to make people join, even if theyhave to pay a contract fee of about \50,000 and a license fee of several thousand yen a month. In that sense, it is not certain that multichannel CATV will spread rapidly. If CATV spreads steadily mainly in towns and cities
