Wowow restructures Japan and US operations

Japanese pay TV broadcaster Wowow has restructured and split programming and production into two separate divisions.

The new structure was introduced by company president Nobuya Wazaki.

The programming division includes Wowow’s Los Angeles office, will be overseen by Tsutomu Makino, who recently joined the company from NHK. Kayo Washio will run the LA office.

The new production division will be run by producer Eiji Omura, who will oversee the movies, sports, drama and music production departments.

Digital boss Hitoshi Yamamoto adds supervision of marketing activity to his role while the promotions department is now part of the wider sales division, which is run by Masanori Gunji.

Nobuya Wazaki said: “To continue meeting the demands of customers and drive new membership to Wowow, we are making marketing a core activity within each sales department and allowing our programming and production divisions to operate separately.”

Wowow, which is listed in Japan, has 2.6 million subscribers. It operates a bouquet of pay TV channels, including general entertainment offering Prime, live events channel Live and movies service Cinema.