Jme TV

Posted about one year ago to voice my dissatisfaction with the service because there were no Japanese language subtitles. The app developer responded with something along the lines of “we’re working on it”. Several months later, there are now English subtitles for a few select shows. But the lack of English subs was NOT my complaint. My wife is a hearing-impaired Japanese native speaker, and I am a bilingual English/Japanese speaker. Why are there no subtitles in Japanese for any of the shows? Are the not broadcast with subtitles in Japan? Does NHK not care about deaf/hearing-impaired native speakers of Japanese? I live in North America and would like to watch many of the shows, but find the dialogue much easier to follow when there are subtitles with Kanji—this makes things much easier to comprehend. I find it laughable that I can download many of these shows from the internet WITH JAPANESE subtitles, in many cases the next day after the Japanese airdate. It can’t be that large a technological challenge to include the subtitles in your streaming, as they are clearly there when the show airs in Japan on TV.

My family and friends who have been able to figure out how to transition from the old TV Japan broadcast network to steaming have been grateful JME exists as the official replacement. The programming is great with 3 live streaming feeds and daily news shows, series, and movies on-demand. I’m glad that the the major bugs have been fixed in the AppleTV app (as of March 2025). However there is a new bug that was just introduced in the latest release, the pause / play button has stopped working, erg. Will give the app 5 stars when JME fixes this problem, will lower the rating if it’s not fixed in a timely manner. The JME app seems to work perfectly on our Fire Stick. That’s both nice but also frustrating because Apple TV will run both JME and Spectrum but Fire Still does not. The Apple tv tbypasses the need for a HDMI switcher or switching between TV inputs in the TV menu. I would love to for JME to release a fully working app on Apple TV (like I was mentioning earlier, it is currently mostly working but with one bug) . It would also bw great if JME developed an app for Samsung TV, that would cut out the need for spectrum users to buy a Fire Stick and or Apple TV.

The JME App is the ONLY way to get streaming content from NHK and affiliates. It is region specific and the subscription fee is huge at $350 plus per year. For that amount you would expect a high-quality app for Apple TV or for iOS devices. It is one of the worst. The menus are inconsistent between app. The menu system requires you to choose 4 times to get to an actual episode to watch. Selecting a different date often results in the menu option popping back to current date. The app is buggy and can crash or simply refuse to let you select a scheduled program, instead returning you to a higher level menu. To fix you have to restart the AppleTV app or even delete the JME app and re-download - that suggests the JME app programmers do not know how to program and cannot properly clear cache between app usage. In all, a very lame app - but we we feel we are being held hostage: it is the only way to see a lot of NHK related programs and TV series and movies, many with english subtitles, many without.