Streaming platforms in Japan

DAZN Japan is the country’s home of live sport: every J.League football match, B.League basketball, NPB baseball, Matchroom boxing and, in 2026, all 104 FIFA World Cup games. The subscription is sold only inside Japan and works in just 1 country, so abroad the streams go dark. A VPN with a Japanese IP address restores the full live line-up in up to 1080p.

ABEMA is a Japanese FAST (Free Ad-supported Streaming TV) network launched in April 2016 as a joint venture between CyberAgent (55.2%) and TV Asahi (36.8%). The free service runs more than 25 linear channels around the clock, covering news, anime, sport, variety, reality and original commissions. Paid Premium tiers, available both with and without ads, unlock the full archive and upgraded live coverage. Content is mostly in Japanese and the service is built for the domestic Japanese market.

TVer is the official Japanese catch-up platform, launched in October 2015 as a joint venture between the country’s five major commercial broadcasters: Nippon TV, TV Asahi, TBS, TV Tokyo and Fuji TV. The service is ad-supported and free, adding around 500 new programs every week across drama, variety, news and selected sports. After several years of rapid growth it now reports roughly 44.7 million monthly active users, which makes it one of the country’s most-used video services.

FOD (Fuji TV On Demand) is the streaming platform of Japan’s Fuji Television Network, running since 2005. A single app bundles the Fuji TV live feeds, catch-up for reality and variety shows and, perhaps most importantly, the prestigious Monday-night Getsu9 (月9) drama slot, which is a cultural institution in Japan. The paid FOD Premium tier adds an extended archive, exclusive programming and digital editions of selected magazines. Access is tied to Japanese IP addresses.

d Anime Store is the anime-only video library operated by Japanese mobile carrier NTT Docomo, running since 2012 and originally launched as a joint venture with publisher Kadokawa. A single subscription at 660 yen per month unlocks more than 7,200 titles, including simulcasts arriving within hours of Japanese TV broadcast, canonical classics and a long tail of OVAs and short features. No side catalogues, no tiers, just one flat price and a library that is almost entirely Japanese-language. It is one of the cheapest premium services on the market and Japan-only.

Lemino is the streaming service of Japanese mobile operator NTT Docomo, launched in April 2023 as a replacement for the older dTV product. The catalogue holds more than 180,000 titles and splits into an ad-supported free tier and paid Lemino Premium, which rose to 1,540 yen per month in February 2026. The mix leans heavily on anime, Japanese drama, cinema and live concert and sports broadcasts. The service is limited to Japan and billing is in yen.

Niconico (niconico douga) is the Japanese video platform launched in 2006 and owned since 2014 by the Kadokawa group. It is the oldest and most influential Japanese service of its kind and the one that introduced live, on-screen scrolling comments known as danmaku, a convention since copied across Asia. The mix spans user-generated video, anime streams, live concerts, otaku and Vocaloid culture and community creativity. The free tier is partly reachable from abroad, though since October 2024 the service blocks many videos and live streams from outside Japan. The paid Premium plan at 790 yen removes resolution caps and peak-hour queuing.

U-NEXT is Japan’s largest premium on-demand video library, run since 2007 by a company now under the USEN-NEXT HOLDINGS umbrella. With more than 440,000 titles, it is the broadest legal source of anime, Japanese cinema, Asian drama and Hollywood film in the country. The monthly subscription, priced at 2,189 yen, bundles a 1,200-point credit that can be spent on newer releases that have not yet rotated into the regular catalogue. Access is restricted to Japan.

WOWOW is a Japanese premium broadcaster that has been Japan’s first subscription-based satellite channel since 1991, gradually adding a full streaming service on top of its linear distribution. Its catalogue spans exclusive Japanese drama and film, theatrical premieres, filmed stage productions, world-class live concerts (WOWOW notably covers the finals of the tennis Grand Slams) and homegrown originals often compared to HBO in terms of editorial ambition. The service is available in Japan only.

DAZN is a sports-first streaming service built to compete with traditional pay-TV sports channels. The schedule shifts dramatically from country to country: in Germany it carries the Bundesliga and Champions League matches, in Italy it owns the majority of Serie A, in Japan it runs baseball and boxing. The global side of DAZN remains its combat sports division, where it has become one of the biggest buyers of marquee boxing pay-per-view events.

Netflix didn’t invent streaming but it set the rules everyone else now plays by. With 325 million paying subscribers across 190 countries and a stable of shows like Squid Game, Stranger Things and Wednesday, it still defines what mainstream streaming looks like. Recent pushes into live sports and ad-supported plans show the company is willing to bend its own playbook when the market demands it.

Max is Warner Bros. Discovery’s attempt to keep everything important in one app: HBO’s prestige catalogue, the DC Universe, Warner Bros. theatrical slate and the reality-heavy Discovery library. The product still leans on HBO’s reputation for Sunday-night event TV (Succession, The Last of Us, House of the Dragon) but the expanded library means there is something for almost every household.

Apple TV+ takes the opposite approach to almost everyone else: no licensed back catalogue, only original productions. The result is a comparatively small library where misses are rare and hits like Ted Lasso, Severance, Slow Horses and For All Mankind have picked up Emmys. A single tier covers 4K HDR with Dolby Atmos, and the service is bundled into Apple One for households already invested in the Apple ecosystem.

Prime Video lives inside the wider Prime bundle, so streaming is only part of what you’re paying for. The content mix is unusual: splashy originals (The Boys, The Rings of Power, Reacher) sit next to a huge catalogue of movies available to rent or buy and a growing set of optional add-on Channels. Prime has also turned into a heavyweight in live sports, from Thursday Night Football to Champions League in select markets.

Paramount+ gathers the Paramount Pictures film vault, CBS prime-time drama, Nickelodeon kids programming and MTV reality into one subscription. The backbone is Taylor Sheridan’s growing slate of originals (the Yellowstone spin-offs 1923 and Lawman: Bass Reeves, plus Tulsa King), with Star Trek carrying the sci-fi side and South Park providing the decades-old evergreen. In select regions the service also carries NFL games and UEFA Champions League, blurring the line with traditional sports packages.

Disney+ is the one place where Disney, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars and National Geographic sit alongside the general-entertainment hub Star. It launched globally in November 2019 and reached the Czech Republic in June 2022. Most markets now offer three tiers: an ad-supported entry plan plus the ad-free Standard (Full HD) and Premium (4K HDR with Dolby Atmos), while a few countries such as the Czech Republic keep only the two ad-free plans. Annual billing trims roughly two months off the yearly cost.

EuroLeague TV is the official streaming home of European basketball, operated by the league itself through Euroleague Ventures, an IMG partnership run out of Barcelona. The service carries every Turkish Airlines EuroLeague and BKT EuroCup game live and on demand, plus a deep archive of classic encounters and a round-the-clock EL 24/7 channel. There are some hard limits to know about. Coverage is fully blacked out in Spain, Italy, the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada, where FloSports holds North American rights. German club matches air on a delay, with MagentaSport carrying them live, and France got the platform back as the primary route in March 2026. Access comes as an annual Season Pass.

FIAWEC+ is the official streaming home of the FIA World Endurance Championship, the global stage for long-distance motorsport. It is run jointly by the championship and the Automobile Club de l’Ouest, the ACO in Le Mans, France, which means the feeds come straight from the people behind the racing. The service carries every WEC session and the complete 24 Hours of Le Mans, with onboard cameras, Live Timing Pro and a multi-season archive on top. You also get WEC Originals and the behind-the-scenes WEC Insider documentaries, all in crisp 1080p HD. There is no built-in smart-TV app, but Chromecast and AirPlay push it to the big screen.

FIFA+ is FIFA’s free, ad-supported football platform, and since June 2026 it lives inside DAZN after the standalone FIFA+ app was retired. At no cost it opens up the complete men’s and women’s World Cup archive, the original FIFA+ documentaries, and, in selected territories, thousands of live grassroots, women’s and lower-division matches. Note that FIFA+ does not carry the main 2026 World Cup fixtures, which stay with national broadcasters.

MotoGP VideoPass is the official streaming service of the road racing world championship, operated by Dorna Sports (renamed MotoGP Sports Entertainment Group in 2026, majority-owned by Liberty Media and headquartered in Madrid). It carries every MotoGP, Moto2, Moto3 and MotoE session live, from practice and qualifying through sprints to the races themselves, across all 22 Grands Prix of the 2026 season. A six-angle Multifeed lets you switch between camera views, including onboard shots, while Multiview stacks several feeds on one screen and a deep archive reaches back to 1992. Everything streams in 1080p on the web, mobiles, tablets, and the major connected-TV platforms.

NWSL+ is the National Women’s Soccer League’s own free, ad-supported streaming app, built on Endeavor Streaming technology. Sign up with an email and you can watch live matches, replays and highlights from every game across more than 130 countries. The 2026 season grew to 16 teams, including new clubs Denver Summit FC and Boston Legacy FC. In the United States many marquee fixtures sit with partners like Prime Video and ESPN, so NWSL+ carries only the leftover live games at home. A VPN simply changes your location.

The Inner Circle is the official streaming home of ONE Championship, the Singapore-based Asian combat promotion run by Group ONE Holdings. It carries live cards across MMA, Muay Thai, kickboxing and submission grappling, including the Friday-night ONE Friday Fights from Bangkok’s Lumpinee Stadium, ONE Fight Night events, numbered shows, plus replays and a deep archive. As of June 2026 it runs as a global subscription. Be aware that the platform applies strict VPN checks at purchase and during playback, and blacks out events where local broadcasters hold the live rights, so what you can watch live depends on the country you connect from.

RugbyPass TV is World Rugby’s own free, ad-supported streaming service, run out of the governing body’s Dublin headquarters and launched back in August 2023, a fortnight before that year’s World Cup kicked off. There’s no fee at all; you just create a free account and start watching. The catalogue spans the men’s and women’s Rugby World Cup, WXV, the Pacific Nations Cup, the U20 Championship and HSBC SVNS sevens plus qualifiers, topped up with more than 10,000 hours of archive and World Rugby Studios originals. One catch: individual fixtures get blacked out wherever a local broadcaster holds the rights, such as Stan in Australia or Peacock in the States.

Tennis TV is the official live streaming home of the ATP Tour, men’s professional tennis, run by ATP Media out of Wimbledon in London. It carries every ATP Masters 1000, ATP 500 and ATP 250 event, plus the Nitto ATP Finals and the Next Gen ATP Finals, adding up to more than 2,500 matches a year and over 40,000 hours of replays in the archive. One subscription works across 200 plus territories, everything streams in HD, and a spoiler-free mode keeps results hidden until you press play. What you won’t find here are the four Grand Slams or the women’s WTA tour.