 Before the station began operations, Iwate Prefecture was the only area of northeastern Japan that lacked a full affiliate of the All-Nippon News Network (ANN, which in general is an affiliation with TV Asahi).JODF-TV and JOII-TV functioned as secondary affiliates of ANN (formerly NET) between the early 1970s and the fall of 1996.The Asahi network's full schedule was available on some local cable television providers via JOEM-TV (from Sendai), which was receivable over the air in portions of the prefecture's southern areas.