Netflix Suffers Major Problem After $100 Million Move

Every four years, the World Baseball Classic (WBC) allows 20 national baseball teams made up of both Major League Baseball and international league players to compete in what has emerged as the world's most prestigious international tournament, and it always draws massive viewership numbers, especially for the teams favored to win.

Last WBC, Japan won the tournament title while receiving massive support from its fans as nearly 100 million of the country's 125 million people watched at least some of the team's tournament run.

With Japan among the favorites to win the WBC again this year, the country's broadcast rights for the tournament were obviously quite lucrative, leading Netflix to pay a massive sum of money for exclusive rights to broadcast the tournament in Japan. However, it's safe to say that things have not worked the way they planned.

Netflix Makes a Big Bet on Japan

Japan's run through the 2023 World Baseball Classic was a cultural event throughout the entire country on a scale that rarely happens in American sports, with nearly 100 million people watching at least some of the team's games.

According to the Sports Business Journal, six of Japan's seven games averaged more than 30 million viewers, making the broadcast rights extremely valuable heading into the 2026 WBC. As a result, Netflix swooped in.

According to Sam Blum of The Athletic, Netflix paid around $100 million for exclusive broadcast rights to the tournament in Japan, which is about three to five times what the broadcast rights cost back in 2023.

Netflix Faces Major Problems

While this might have seemed like a good move on paper, given the massive popularity of the last tournament in the country. However, the problem is that the culture around streaming is quite a bit different in Japan than in the United States.

According to Blum, a recent study by Asahi Shimbun found that Netflix's subscriber base in Japan was roughly 10 million, which is far fewer than the approximately 80 million in the United States.

With its decision to pay around $100 millino for exclusive broadcast rights for the WBC in Japan, Netflix was obviously hoping that fans would sign up for the service to watch the team throughout the tournament. However, there are some serious doubts that was actually the case.

According to a survey conducted by the Sports Management Research Institute at Sanno University, 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.

To make matters worse, Japan did not perform all that well in the tournament, either. Despite entering the tournament as one of the favorites to win the title, Japan was eliminated from the WBC in the quarterfinals after an 8-5 loss to Venezuela. So the Japanese baseball fans who signed up just for the tournament were left disappointed.

In fact, shortly after Japan's loss, "Cancel Netflix" was trending on X across the country as users flocked to cancel their subscriptions rather than continue to pay for the service.

Needless to say, it's pretty clear that this gamble did not pay off for Netflix.