JAITS

The Japanese Association of Independent Television Stations (JAITS; ) is a group of Japan's reception fee-free commercial terrestrial television stations which are not members of the major national television networks. The association was established on 4 November 1977.

Its members sell to, buy from, and co-produce programmes with other members. While a few of them, namely Tokyo MX, TVK and Sun TV and sell more than the others, it does not mean the former control the others in programming. Meanwhile, some JAITS members (GBS, MTV, BBC, TVN, WTV) broadcast a lot of TV Tokyo's programs. It forms a loose broadcast network without exclusivity. They form permanent and ''ad hoc'' subgroups for production and sales of advertising opportunity.Tokyo-Osaka-Nagoya Intermetropolitan Network
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Name

The English name of the group is provisional. The Japanese documents for the association refer to the acronym JAITS but the fully spelled English name has not been disclosed yet.

In Japanese, the group was previously known as (), bearing the term UHF as all of the member stations broadcast on the UHF band in analogue, in contrast to major networks that primarily broadcast on the VHF band in analogue. All the Japanese terrestrial television stations switched to UHF digital when all analogue television transmissions (both VHF and UHF) were shut down between 24 July 2011 and 31 March 2012.

List of members

Stations are listed in Japanese order of prefectures which is mirrored in ISO 3166-2:JP.

Characteristics of the independent stations

Degree of independence

In the strict (North American) definition of "not affiliated with any networks", the only independent terrestrial television station in Japan in recent times would have been The Open University of Japan, which produces almost all its programs in-house. In addition, most of the JAITS independent stations have investments from the Chunichi Shimbun Co.

The JAITS and the Japanese public take "Independent UHF Station" () for not being members of large networks, in which the Tokyo's stations almost control other members' programming. Those networks are also affiliated with large national newspapers. On the other hands, the JAITS stations are often affiliated with prefectural or metropolitan newspapers and prefectural governments, whose degree of influence may vary.

MTV, GBS, BBC, TVN, and WTV broadcast certain programmes from TV Tokyo

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