Data: Vivant was Asia’s most watched streaming title in August
September 16, 2026



ampd Analytics, the streaming measurement and analytics platform of Media Partners Asia (MPA), has released its ampd Vision insight, Vivant: A TV Broadcast Hit, Streamed. In August, Vivant, the TBS Sunday Theater drama that launched its second season the month before, became the most watched title across APAC excluding China and India, the first Japanese drama to lead the regional chart since ampd measurement began. The title reached 15.6 million unique viewers, 15.1 million of them in Japan, equal to a quarter of the country’s tracked VoD audience of 61.4 million.

TVer, the free ad-supported service of Japan’s broadcasters, accounted for 10.2 million of those viewers, only the third time a title has crossed 10 million on a single platform in one market in one month, after the World Baseball Classic in Japan and Teach You a Lesson in South Korea, both on Netflix.


Season 2 was released on TVer for free, with paid VoD exclusive to U-NEXT, within an hour of the Sunday 21:00 broadcast. The weekly cadence built a new streaming prime time on Monday at 22:00, and 92 per cent of returning viewers had watched each episode before the next aired. Demand spilled over to season one on other services: Netflix’s Vivant audience climbed from 0.3 million in May to 2.5 million in August, and U-NEXT’s from 0.1 million to 2 million. One in eight Prime Video users and one in ten Netflix users in Japan watched Vivant on TVer, a title both services carried.

The show also ran a parallel life beyond the platforms. Vivant content reached 13.2 million people on YouTube, close to its VoD audience, across more than 1,600 videos from 450 channels, generating 8.8 million hours of watch time at nearly 40 minutes per viewer. A TBS companion show, Villains’ Meeting Room, averaged more than 1.3 million viewers per episode. Outside Japan, however, the title barely travelled: 97 per cent of viewing was domestic, consistent with Japanese dramas averaging 0.3 titles per month in Netflix’s Top 10 outside Japan, against 4.1 for Korean dramas and 1.4 for Japanese anime.

“Vivant is a distribution story as much as a content story,” said Sam Yousif, Managing Director, ampd Analytics, an MPA company. “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.”