The streaming era gives people so many options that it fragments the audience.
chuck212
The MLB has decided they’ve reached a certain level of market saturation in Japan, and it’s time to start extracting more value for these media rights. It feels crazy to me to want to risk killing their momentum in the most baseball devoted country just to chase short term revenue. We just watched this exact scenario play out with Japanese soccer, the move to fully paywalled streaming killed a ton of its cultural relevance, and they lost a lot of their viewers.
BaystarRoyco
Wow, paywalling something important behind an online paywall leads to less appeal.
The previous deal was better.
BaystarRoyco
« The problem is that Japan is not the United States, and the subscription model that feels unremarkable here looks very different there. According to Blum, a December 2024 study by Asahi Shimbun put Netflix’s subscriber base in Japan at roughly 10 million. A survey conducted by the Sports Management Research Institute at Sanno University found that only 4.9 percent of respondents said they signed up for Netflix because of the WBC, while 68 percent said they had no plans to sign up at all. Japanese fans are accustomed to watching their national team on free-to-air television, and the move to a subscription paywall — even at about $3 for the entire 47-game tournament — represents a cultural shift that not everyone is willing or able to make. »
haydez
Definitely much less places showing it than last time. Hopefully they ditch this shitty model. I did have a nice chopped cheese while watching the USA blow it against Italy on a projector. Haha.
natguy2016
Tower Records closed in America in 2006. The Japanese Towers were another division with local management. There are currently 38 Towers locations in Japan. Says it all
6 Comments
The streaming era gives people so many options that it fragments the audience.
The MLB has decided they’ve reached a certain level of market saturation in Japan, and it’s time to start extracting more value for these media rights.
It feels crazy to me to want to risk killing their momentum in the most baseball devoted country just to chase short term revenue.
We just watched this exact scenario play out with Japanese soccer, the move to fully paywalled streaming killed a ton of its cultural relevance, and they lost a lot of their viewers.
Wow, paywalling something important behind an online paywall leads to less appeal.
The previous deal was better.
« The problem is that Japan is not the United States, and the subscription model that feels unremarkable here looks very different there. According to Blum, a December 2024 study by Asahi Shimbun put Netflix’s subscriber base in Japan at roughly 10 million. A survey conducted by the Sports Management Research Institute at Sanno University found that only 4.9 percent of respondents said they signed up for Netflix because of the WBC, while 68 percent said they had no plans to sign up at all. Japanese fans are accustomed to watching their national team on free-to-air television, and the move to a subscription paywall — even at about $3 for the entire 47-game tournament — represents a cultural shift that not everyone is willing or able to make. »
Definitely much less places showing it than last time. Hopefully they ditch this shitty model. I did have a nice chopped cheese while watching the USA blow it against Italy on a projector. Haha.
Tower Records closed in America in 2006. The Japanese Towers were another division with local management. There are currently 38 Towers locations in Japan. Says it all