Television broadcasting in Japan started in 1950, making the country one of the first in the world with an experimental television service, although the first television tests were conducted as early as 1926 using a combined mechanical Nipkow disk and electronic Braun tube system, later switching to an all-electronic system in the 1930s using a domestically developed iconoscope system. In spite of that, because of the beginning of World War II in the Pacific region, this first full-fledged TV broadcast experimentation lasted only a few months. Regular television broadcasts only started several years after the war, in 1953, when the public NHK General TV and the commercial Nippon Television were launched in the span of a few months.