TBS drama “Vivant” topped streaming viewership across Asia in August, excluding China and India, marking the first time a Japanese television series has led ampd Analytics’ regional monthly ranking since the firm began tracking the market.
The show’s second season launched in July as part of TBS’s Sunday Theater programming slot and accumulated 15.6 million unique viewers across the region, with 15.1 million watching in Japan. This figure represented approximately one-quarter of the 61.4 million viewers tracked across Japanese video-on-demand platforms during the period. The drama centers on Yusuke Nogi, an employee at a Japanese trading company who becomes entangled in an international conspiracy involving a secretive government intelligence organization called Beppan. The new season continued directly from the previous season’s ending and included location filming in Azerbaijan.
Much of the viewership came through TVer, a free streaming platform operated by Japan’s broadcast networks, which accounted for 10.2 million viewers. TBS released new episodes on TVer at no cost within one hour of their Sunday broadcast, while restricting paid streaming access to U-Next subscribers. This distribution strategy generated secondary viewing spikes on Monday nights, with 92% of returning viewers having watched the previous episode by air time. The success also boosted earlier seasons on other platforms, with Netflix viewership growing from 300,000 to 2.5 million viewers between May and August, while U-Next viewership rose from 100,000 to 2 million.
Beyond traditional streaming platforms, the drama attracted substantial engagement on YouTube, where related content reached 13.2 million viewers across more than 1,600 videos from 450 channels. A companion series produced by TBS titled “Villains’ Meeting Room” averaged over 1.3 million viewers per episode. However, the show’s appeal remained largely concentrated domestically, with approximately 97% of viewing originating from Japan, consistent with broader patterns showing Japanese dramas rarely achieve comparable international success compared to Korean television content.
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