🌏 Japanese Drama Vivant Sets Asia Streaming Record

The second season of TBS’s drama series Vivant became the most-watched title in the Asia-Pacific region (excluding China and India). This marks the first time in ampd’s tracking history that a Japanese drama has topped the regional charts.

In August, the show’s cumulative reach hit 15.6 million unique viewers, with 15.1 million originating from Japan. The project successfully engaged a quarter of the country’s total tracked VoD audience (61.4 million people).

The free AVoD service TVer generated the vast majority of views, accounting for 10.2 million viewers. Across all measurement history, the 10-million single-platform monthly viewer threshold within a single market had only ever been crossed twice before: by the World Baseball Classic broadcast in Japan and the show Teach You a Lesson in South Korea (both streaming on Netflix).

The release’s triumph stems from a well-executed hybrid distribution model. New episodes aired on Sundays at 9:00 PM, becoming available an hour later for free on TVer and via paid subscription on U-NEXT. This schedule cultivated a new “streaming prime time,” shifting peak viewing to Mondays at 10:00 PM. Furthermore, 92% of regular viewers caught up on the current episode before the next one dropped.

Season 2’s momentum also catalyzed interest in the flagship season: Vivant’s Season 1 audience on Netflix surged from 0.3 million in May to 2.5 million in August, while U-NEXT saw an increase from 0.1 million to 2 million. Additionally, one in eight Prime Video users and one in ten Netflix subscribers in Japan watched the new season on the third-party free platform TVer.

Simultaneously, the title established a massive audience hub on YouTube: Vivant-related content reached 13.2 million viewers across 450 channels (spanning over 1,600 videos), tallying more than 8.8 million hours of watch time. TBS’s official companion show, Villains’ Meeting Room, averaged over 1.3 million viewers per episode.

Despite its impressive domestic victory, the show’s international reach remained modest, with 97% of total views originating within Japan. This aligns with broader trends for Japanese live-action dramas, which average just 0.3 monthly Top 10 appearances on Netflix outside Japan—compared to 4.1 for K-dramas and 1.4 for anime.