Taking over Hulu’s Japanese business and entering subscription video (2014)

The author’s view

The option of building a service from scratch was not taken. Hulu, which had entered Japan in 2011, had already gathered 13,000 titles from close to fifty suppliers and reached compatibility with ninety million devices. What Nippon Television took over in 2014 was at once a loss-making business a foreign owner was about to fold and a bundle of subscribers, technology and contracts. As President Okubo Yoshio put it conditionally — if the exit for content other than broadcast is the internet — the core of this decision lies in having bought, rather than built, the route by which its programmes leave the airwaves.

It is hard to argue that what was bought grew into a thick pillar. Subscribers fell in net terms once, at the end of June 2017, and the business could not stand alone: Yahoo, Toho and affiliate stations were brought in as shareholders. Operating profit in the year to March 2023 was ¥242 million, less than 1% of revenue of ¥33.0 billion. The difficulty of internet businesses that Ujiie Seiichiro dismissed in 2009 with “they are all in the red” did not disappear merely because a finished platform was taken over whole. Even so, the meaning of having a decade’s head start with a distribution route of its own outside broadcasting can only be measured against the labour of assembling one late.