Italian Doraemon Incident

The Italian Doraemon Incident was an unintentional broadcast that occurred on the 11th of April 2016.

Perpetrators
ABS Televisione Italia S.p.A. is a division of Kabushiki Gaisha ABS operated in tandem with Italian broadcasting company MediaSet.

Founded on the 10th of April 2016, the station broadcasts localised Japanese programming with Italian and English subtitles, Doraemon being an exception to this with MediaSet having produced its own dub. The same show also carries English subtitles.

Lead-up to incident
ABS Televisione Italia commenced operations at 12:00 CET on the 10th of April 2016. Kabushiki Gaisha ABS, however, did not realise that their international satellite feed was left under the control of their newly-formed Italian affiliate.

Doraemon broadcasts were drawn from the feed for TV Asahi's All-Nippon News Network affiliates, which also unofficially forms a network of stations operating under the affiliation and supervision of TV Asahi Corporation.

An ABS engineer in Lucca (ABS Televisione Italia's headquarter city) however noticed that what he described as the "wrong opening sequence" (which was actually the correct standard Doraemon opening used for ABS' international broadcasts) was to precede the episode "Takeshi's Bum-ba-dum Birthday", which was scheduled to air as a rerun on TV Asahi and ABS International at 5:00pm JST, whilst another episode (which was dubbed in Italian) was scheduled to run at the exact same time (5:00pm JST = 9:00am CET) on Televisione Italia.

The engineer attempted to "fix" the "discrepancy" by placing the Italian Doraemon opening in the place of the Japanese OP. However, he was unaware that he was actually altering ABS' International feed, and TV Asahi's own domestic Japanese feed.

Incident
At 5:00pm JST, the show officially began, the original opening running for a mere 4 seconds before cutting to a complete black screen for two seconds (the TV Asahi logo disappearing approximately 1 second into this blank slide before reappearing a second later) before fading into the Italian opening. TV Asahi's logo was still present throughout the opening. Other engineers in Japan failed to notice the fault as they were "too busy yelling down the phone demanding to know what was happening".

One minute and 20 seconds later, the episode began as normal, however with the title card and opening sequence omitted after being overridden by the Italian OP.

Immediately at the same time, tweets began appearing accusing ABS of a "shocking, unexpected change" to the opening sequence. Kabushiki Gaisha ABS declined to comment, as they too were unaware of the incident, despite being the parent of ABS Televisione Italia, who was responsible for the incident. Media began dubbing the event as the "Italian Doraemon Incident". Some of the tweets and e-mails were forwarded from TV Asahi Corporation and its affiliated networks, suggesting that other ANN channels were affected as well.

Aftermath
Kabushiki Gaisha ABS, after analysing the broadcast, concluded that the opening song was indeed the one intended for use in Italy, leading to the subsequent summoning of ABS Televisione Italia. At the same time, a map showing the areas affected by the incident was placed on ABS' Doraemon website (doraemon.abs.jp) to show which parts of Japan had reported incidences of the intrusion.

ABS Televisione Italia issued a memo to all broadcast engineers stating that it would surrender all control of ABS' international satellite transponders whilst it took sanctions against the individual responsible, and measures to prevent the incident from being repeated on such a scale.

TV Asahi Corporation received notices from at least 20 of its television channels who confirmed that they were affected by the Italian Doraemon Incident.