Abstract
Three years have passed since two American OTT services, NETFLIX and Amazon Prime Video, debuted in Japan. Japanese broadcasters have launched their own fee-based video streaming services to counter them, but at the same time they are deepening partnerships with these service providers. This article looks into the number of users and discusses how far these services will expand, by analyzing the results of the Survey on Media Use—public opinion survey annually conducted by the NHK Broadcasting Culture Research Institute since 2016. To predict the future of fee-based streaming services, the author analyzed the survey results from two perspectives. One is subscribers to fee-based multichannel broadcasting services such as WOWOW and SKY PerfecTV!, and the other is users of free-of-charge video streaming services such as YouTube; the author delved into the responses of these two groups to see how likely they will subscribe to fee-based streaming services in the future. Even now we can observe a trend that subscribers to fee-based multichannel broadcasting services sign up for fee-based streaming services, and the trend is likely to continue in the future. Nevertheless, presumably, code-cutting (switching from pay multichannel television to pay streaming services), which is prevailing in the U.S., is unlikely to occur in Japan for the time being. In regards to free-of-charge video streaming service users, no specific indication of their future subscriptions to fee-based streaming services was found, which suggests free-of-charge streaming services may be able to prevent users from signing up for fee-based streaming services by enriching the content they provide.
