Netflix’s exclusive deal to broadcast the World Baseball Classic in Japan is raising real questions about how many people in the country are actually watching, according to The Athletic’s Sam Blum.
The streamer paid somewhere in the neighborhood of $100 million for exclusive broadcast rights to the tournament in Japan, which Blum notes is roughly three to five times what the rights cost in 2023. The appeal was obvious from Netflix’s side. Japan’s 2023 WBC run was a cultural event on a scale American sports rarely reach, as nearly 100 million of the country’s 125 million people watched at least some of it. Per the Sports Business Journal, six of Japan’s seven games averaged over 30 million viewers. Those numbers made Japan’s rights among the most valuable properties MLB had to offer when it returned to the market, and Netflix moved aggressively to secure them.
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.
For those without a subscription, watching with a crowd wasn’t a straightforward alternative either. The Japan Times reported before the tournament that bars and restaurants were uncertain about whether they could legally air the games under Netflix’s terms of service, which prohibit commercial use. Netflix told Blum it wouldn’t take action against businesses streaming on personal accounts, but the initial ambiguity was enough to cause confusion.
“Without terrestrial coverage, the overall national excitement around the WBC may become more limited, which may reduce the tournament’s mass appeal,” Nobby Ito, executive advisor for Nippon Professional Baseball, told The Athletic.
MLB’s position is that the low cost and Netflix’s 325-million-subscriber global footprint make this a net positive for access. But the survey data and reactions from Japanese fans and the media suggest the gap between what MLB believes it accomplished and what the audience actually experienced is real, and actual viewership numbers — which haven’t been made public — are the only thing that will settle it.