Abema TV, a Japanese OTT service jointly owned by entertainment company Cyberagent and commercial broadcaster TV Asahi, has been offering viewers live streams of all 51 games of UEFA’s Euro 2024 tournament for free, counter to the broader trend in Japan where major sports events are usually behind the paywall.

This latest move follows Abema’s previous streaming of the 2022 FIFA World Cup, as well as other sports events such as MLB and Tour de France, which it claims contributed to an 87% growth in Weekly Active Users and a 52% increase in advertising revenue between 2021 and 2022. Building on this momentum,  Abema is hoping to continue leveraging advertising revenue (rather than subscriptions) to generate a return on its sports investment, suggesting a potentially profitable new model for free streaming of major sports events in Japan.

Abema TV’s free streaming strategy is based on several distinctive factors. First, around 90% of Abema TV’s users, or 21.2m, are on the free tier. Therefore, putting tentpole sports events for free enables the monetisation via advertising of a sizeable consumer group. Secondly, as a subsidiary of a major free-to-air broadcaster, Abema TV shares the advantage of TV Asahi’s advanced advertising technique and rich advertiser resources. The result to date has been an increase in both viewership and advertising revenue.

Abema TV claims its Weekly Active Users exceeded 20m during and after FIFA 2022, while Ampere’s Consumer survey shows the share of consumers watching Abema TV at least monthly increased from 11% to 15% between Q3 2022 and Q3 2023, the largest increase across all video streaming services in Japan. Alongside this, Abema TV’s advertisement revenue also grew by 52% from JPY 13.1bn (~$120m) in 2021 to JPY 19.9bn (~$151m) in 2022.

Moreover, given the Japanese market’s strong free viewing culture, due to the dominance of linear TV, Abema’s free streaming strategy fits the viewing preference of the vast Japanese audience base. Indeed, across the >$1bn sports rights sold in Japan in 2023, 26.6% is spent by free-to-air broadcasters, much higher than the average of 10% across the EU Big 5 markets, by comparison.