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.
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.
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.