Japan: leading paid video streaming genres

According to an online survey conducted in April 2021, more than 55 percent of paid video streaming service users in Japan often watched Western or international movies. Foreign movies were followed in popularity by Japanese movies, anime, and Japanese dramas.

The paid video streaming market in Japan

Paid video streaming services have seen an increase in popularity in Japan in the recent years. A major indicator for this is the estimated size of the paid video streaming market, which showed a clear growth trajectory throughout the 2010s. One important impetus during that time period was the entry of Amazon Prime Video and Netflix into the Japanese market in September 2015. While there had been a number of services prior to this date, such as GYAO! and Hulu, the competition intensified with the entry of these two major players. In October of that year, TVer INC. introduced the online television portal TVer, a joint project of several of Japan’s largest television stations and advertising companies. AbemaTV, which is part of the media business of CyberAgent, Inc., followed in 2016. Disney Deluxe was launched in early 2019 and later rebranded as Disney+. A ranking of the most commonly used paid video streaming services shows that Amazon Prime Video enjoys a particularly high popularity in Japan.

High demand for animated content

While the survey at hand suggests that Japanese viewers prefer international and domestic movies, a different survey on the most popular content among subscription video-on-demand (SVoD) users indicates that many of the leading shows in Japan are either anime themselves or titles based on anime properties. Japan is a major producer of animation worldwide, and the increasing popularity of streaming services has exerted positive effects on the country’s anime industry. Content providers such as Netflix have sought more and more cooperations with Japanese producers, which in turn enjoy an improved bargaining power when it comes to compensations. The sales revenue of the anime streaming market in Japan overtook the sales revenue of the television anime broadcasting market for the first time in 2020. Considering that television has been one of the pillars of the anime industry for decades, this development can be interpreted as a further indicator for the increased importance of streaming services among Japanese consumers and producers of content.