How to Watch the NHK Cup Live

After trying many methods, and requesting the help of my friend and fluent Japanese speaker Simão Gonçalves 4d EGF, I've finally found a simple and reproducible way of watching the NHK Cup over the internet.

Unexpectedly, watching the NHK Cup Live requires much less than I thought. At first, I tried to find a way of watching it on regular cable TV, but it seemed very impractical overall. Simão then pointed me to the NHK+ online streaming service, which was a good hint, but, as per the paradoxical Japanese way of being 19th century bureaucratic while having some of the best tech in the world, they require you to have a mailing address in Japan, through which they are going to check your application, via paperwork. Wtf indeed.

Then, I accidentally stumbled upon this comment on Reddit. And, to my surprise, it was as easy as it gets to watch public Japanese TV. The software I recommend so far is YoiTV — available for Windows, Mac, and Android, at least — for which you will need key codes you can find in this post — or, if the original author ends up deleting it, I've saved it on the Wayback Machine.

The NHK Cup's typical schedule is streaming one game per week on sundays, 12h30 to 14h, Japan time, of course. The channel is 2 or NHK E (Eテレ).

Ever since I was able to watch it, I've also been recording the games. I would like to share them on YouTube, but I'm afraid I would be quickly shut down, as some other NHK Cup archive channels have been in the not so distant past. At any rate, I think I'm going to share at least one match, at most I'm gonna get only one strike. In parallel, I've created an archive channel on Odyssey, where I believe I'm going to have some more leeway to share this type of content — Simão is helping me with the Japanese kanji of the players. Right before the streaming of the game, the NHK channel is having a 30 min program with Go miscellanea, I'm also going to try to record and archive it.

So, to recap, all you have to do is:

1. Download and install YoiTV. You can also find if from this post or here.
   • It is possible to run YoiTV on Wine, in Linux, and it does run pretty smoothly. However, you may need to add some special packages first (see this Wine Forum article or this UNIX StackExchange question).
2. Then unlock it with the keycodes:
   • Install YoiTV + Key Codes
   • Install YoiTV + Key Codes Archived on Wayback Machine
   • If your account expires, create a new one with one of the key codes. If you're getting blocked anyway, then use a VPN to go to another country with another IP and then repeat the procedure.
3. Finally, go to channel 2 or NHK E (Eテレ) on Sundays between 12h30 to 14h. Here is their schedule.