‘Vivant’ Tops Asia Streaming Chart, First Japanese Drama to Lead, Report Finds

TBS drama “Vivant” outdrew every other streaming title across Asia last month, excluding China and India, becoming the first Japanese show to top ampd Analytics’ regional monthly ranking since the measurement firm began tracking the market.

The finding comes from a new ampd Vision report titled “Vivant: A TV Broadcast Hit, Streamed.”

“Vivant,” which launched its second season in July as part of TBS’s Sunday Theater slot, pulled in 15.6 million unique viewers regionwide in August, with 15.1 million watching in Japan alone. That figure equals a quarter of the 61.4 million viewers ampd tracks across Japanese VOD, according to the report from ampd Analytics, the streaming measurement arm of Media Partners Asia (MPA).

The series follows Yusuke Nogi, a Japanese trading company employee drawn into an international conspiracy tied to a shadowy government intelligence unit known as Beppan. Season 2 picks up immediately after the first season’s cliffhanger and was shot partly on location in Azerbaijan.

Much of that reach came through TVer, the free platform operated by Japan’s broadcast networks, which drew 10.2 million of the show’s viewers. Only two other titles have ever pulled 10 million viewers on one platform in a single market within a month, according to ampd: broadcasts of the World Baseball Classic in Japan and the Korean drama “Teach You a Lesson,” both distributed on Netflix. TBS made the new season available on TVer at no cost within an hour of its Sunday broadcast, reserving paid streaming exclusively for U-Next. That arrangement created a second viewing peak each week, on Monday nights, and 92% of viewers who came back for a new episode had already watched the previous one by the time it aired.

The show’s popularity also lifted viewership of its first season elsewhere. Netflix’s audience for “Vivant” grew more than eightfold between May and August, from 300,000 viewers to 2.5 million, while U-Next’s viewership rose over the same period from 100,000 to 2 million. That shift happened even among subscribers who already had access to the show elsewhere: an estimated one in eight Prime Video subscribers and one in 10 Netflix subscribers in Japan chose to watch “Vivant” on TVer rather than on the services they already pay for.

Beyond the streaming platforms, “Vivant” built a substantial following on YouTube, where related content drew 13.2 million viewers, nearly matching its VOD reach. That audience was spread across more than 1,600 videos posted by 450 channels, totaling 8.8 million hours watched at an average of almost 40 minutes per viewer. A companion show TBS produced alongside the drama, “Villains’ Meeting Room,” averaged more than 1.3 million viewers an episode.

“‘Vivant’ is a distribution story as much as a content story,” said Sam Yousif, managing director of ampd Analytics. “A quarter of Japan’s tracked VOD audience watched one drama in a single month, and premium subscribers moved to a free platform to follow it. Japan is the largest VOD market we measure, with the closest relationship between broadcast and streaming anywhere in the region, and measuring a title today means measuring it everywhere it lives, including YouTube, where ‘Vivant’ reached almost as many people as it did on VOD.”

The drama’s success did not extend much beyond Japan’s borders. Some 97% of all “Vivant” viewing came from local audiences, ampd found, a pattern consistent with Japanese dramas’ broader struggles abroad: they land in Netflix’s global top 10 outside Japan just 0.3 times a month on average, well behind Korean dramas at 4.1 times and Japanese anime at 1.4.