Hulu Japan Chief Content Officer has been the driving force for the company and has established key partnerships with both content and device partners. He oversees all content related activities for the service including the production of original series, programming and operations. Besides his responsibility as CCO, he also plays instrumental roles in strategic planning and in overall business activities for the company. He gives K. Dass a health report of Hulu Japan.
Hulu Japan remade the German drama format The Last Cop. The production represents Hulu Japan’s first step into original content production. Remake rights were acquired by Nippon TV, the parent company of Hulu Japan, from Germany’s Red Arrow International. The deal was completed at MIP-TV market in Cannes.
The new version will star Toshiaki Karasawa as a detective who wakes in 2015 after being in a coma for 30 years. Hulu Japan aired the first season of the original German show with almost immediate.
We have also announced an original six-part drama Daisho (translation: compensation). Based on a novel of the same title by award-winning mystery writer Jun Ioka, the series focuses on the relationship of a hotshot lawyer (Shun Oguri) and a psychopathic client (Tsutomu Takahashi) — a former boyhood friend who occupies a dark chapter in the lawyer’s past.
This is an important new phase for Hulu, providing our users with an even greater range of entertainment content. We are planning to premiere more foreign content on our service and we look forward to producing more original remakes of foreign shows and collaborating with the terrestrial broadcast business to maximise each show’s value. The Last Cop is produced by ITV Studios Germany, and is SAT.1 Germany’s most successful crime series. It is distributed by Red Arrow International as both a scripted format and a finished program. We have 50% domestic and 50% international content. We started producing our own regional content 3 years ago and right now we are producing 10 shows per year, the number of episodes ranges about 50-100. We are mostly producing scripted dramas with some variety as well.
We do have some Korean and Chinese content. We are interested in expanding as well. We are preparing to announce the Russian drama series in Japan this year. It will take a while because we have to localise it and it’s pretty heavy. We have to add subtitles although we would like to prepare to dub at some point.
Korean dramas are common here on all platforms. We are not really keen as we are interested in acquiring content from all over the world, especially the hit series from each territory. We are interested in acquiring everything but we are very selective of course.
Amazon Prime is our biggest threat to our business model; it costs USD$35 for an annual subscription. It also has free shipping and early delivery. Our subscription is on the monthly basis. They have a very good line-up too.
We have some overlap but we are keen on acquiring selected number of premiere Japanese content from the studios and other independent production companies. We also have exclusive deals with HBO and FOX sports. More than 80% of our budget is allocated to buying content both English and Japanese. The rest of the 20% goes to production.
We have to realise the one-stop shopping for consumers, so it means pure export service may not be enough to satisfy all the need. We already introduced the live streaming function and we only covered PC so we’re thinking of expanding to TV and mobile. In terms of revenue, we are trying to break even in 2017. If we try to be profitable right away, it means spending less on the marketing and content. We have prioritised on the growth because the market is really crowded and competitive. The market is very crowded, but more importantly, the awareness of the name of Hulu is over 70%. But still, I’d say less than 10% know what it really is, what can be watched and how. So the real challenge is to educate consumers about the service. That will take a while.
