Digital Media in East Asia: National Innovation and the Transform ...

of the music industry and are starting to have deep effects on television and movie viewing as well.²⁰ For the most part, regional shortcomings in digital management systems mirror the larger and global challenges of the Internet.

Conversely, East Asian systems for e-commerce and Internet-based payments have proven significantly more successful than those in use in many other countries. Again, NTT DoCoMo’s successful i-mode system built a whole e-business sector on telephone-bill-based payments. This, in turn, allowed for the rapid introduction of point-of-sale mobile phone payment arrangements. South Korea, Hong Kong, and Taiwan quickly adopted the Japanese-style approach, with comparable results in terms of ease of use and widespread consumer acceptance. E-commerce, therefore, has expanded rapidly in East Asia in the past decade, supported by the ease of use of Internet-enabled phones and the retailers’ and consumers’ willingness to use cell phone systems for payments. Importantly, the early use of micropayment systems—where consumers pay very small sums for the use or downloading of small digital items (ringtones, screensavers, and portions of newspapers and specialized content)—provided small businesses in a wide variety of sectors the opportunity to capitalize on the availability of the new Internet commercial ecosystem.²¹

Digital Production and Formatting

East Asia has long had a flourishing creative production sector, known for the production of many of the world’s top video games and high-end animation. Japanese production capabilities—despite the misleading impressions given by low-technology Japanese newscasts—have long been among the best in the world, with Sony, Panasonic, and others dominating much of the world’s studio equipment market. Taiwanese and South Korean companies have made significant inroads into this sector as well, competing for international consumers while providing additional support to local production houses. The efforts made (particularly in Taiwan) to