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Hulu, known outside Japan as Hulu Japan, is a Japanese subscription Streaming media owned and operated by HJ Holdings, a subsidiary of Nippon Television Network Corporation. Launched in September 2011, Hulu was the Japanese counterpart to the Hulu. The service was acquired by Nippon Television in 2014, and has since branched off from its US counterpart.
Hulu Japan offers a library of television series from Nippon TV and other broadcasters (including NHK, TBS Television, Fuji Television, TV Asahi, and TV Tokyo among others), as well as original programming.
By March 2015, Hulu subscription's numbers had risen to 1 million memberships. , Hulu Japan has a total of 2.8 million subscribers. As of 2022, the service was also the sixth highest-grossing subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) service in Japan.
In January 2012, Hulu Japan began streaming films owned by Toho, a distribution company primarily responsible for the release of Universal films in Japan. The following month, Hulu Japan announced that it had signed contracts to distribute content from Japanese film distributors Asmik Ace, Kadokawa Shoten, Shochiku, Toei Company, Nikkatsu, and AMG Entertainment to distribute their content.
The fee was reduced to 980 yen in April 2012. The number of users of the service exceeded 1.85 million as of March, seven months after its launch. In November 2013, Hulu Japan announced a partnership with TBS Television to distribute over 3,000 episodes of TBS content. At the time, the service delivered approximately 14,000 titles.
In June 2015, Hulu Japan released its first original drama series, The Last Cop, a remake of the German drama series Der letzte Bulle. In October, a sequel drama series was co-produced with Nippon TV and broadcast on Nippon TV. A sequel was released in theaters on May 3, 2017, as Last Cop The Movie and grossed 400 million yen at the box office.
On February 16, 2016, Hulu Japan announced that it had signed an exclusive contract with the American cable channel HBO for a subscription video on demand (SVOD) service in Japan.
On May 8, 2017, Nippon TV announced a revamp of Hulu Japan streaming service with the reasoning for the revamp being that, despite Nippon TV's acquisition of Hulu Japan, Hulu Japan's distribution system was common with that of the United States, and thus could not undergo Japan-specific modifications. In addition, the URL of "hulu.jp" has been changed to "happyon.jp" which was later revert back to "hulu.jp" in 2019. The reason for the change was to reduce risk during the system migration, and to make the transition without stopping the service. This sudden change in the URL made users anxious that the name of the service might be changed, or that the service structure might be drastically altered.
On May 17, 2017, the revamp took place, but the service could not be used properly for several days. Also, without notice, changes were made to the copyright protection rules, and some users who had externally connected their displays were unable to view the service. This situation caused Hulu to offer users "Hulu 1 month free ticket", "Amazon gift certificate (1000 yen)" or "ITunes Store code (1000 yen)", and also caused the first decrease in users since the acquisition.
In July 2017, Hulu Japan conducted a third-party allotment of shares with Yahoo! Japan, Toho, Yomiuri TV, and Chukyo TV as subscribers of the service with the purpose being to strengthen the management foundation and enable the production and procurement of more attractive content and significantly improve promotional capabilities.
Hulu Japan launched its TVOD service, Hulu Store, on June 10, 2020. The store being available for SVOD members. In June 2022, Hulu Japan introduced a new feature called "Points" which would allow users to rent or purchase videos from the Hulu Store on the Hulu app for Android and iOS devices with that feature enabling users to make one-time purchases of content within the app.
On July 12, 2023, Nippon TV and The Walt Disney Company announced and launched the first-ever bundled plan between Hulu Japan and Disney+ called "Hulu | Disney+ Set Plan". The new plan offers a monthly subscription price of 1,490 yen, which represented a savings of approximately 26% compared to subscribing to them separately.
In addition, Hulu Japan has its own programming that is feed from its parent company Nippon TV that is available through the service.
Starting from August 2022, Hulu Japan signed a multi-year domestic distribution partnership agreement with Eredivisie to broadcast games from 2022–23 season onwards mainly AFC Ajax and AZ Alkmaar games.
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