Image Courtesy: Photo by Tyson Moultrie
The share of viewing time going to locally produced content varied more across Netflix's three measured APAC markets in 2025 than across any other region the service operates in.
In Australia, local content accounted for 3.6% of all Netflix viewing time. In Japan, 57.0%. In South Korea, 63.9%.
Those three numbers describe three different relationships with the platform. Australia used Netflix predominantly as an import service. Japan and South Korea used Netflix predominantly as a domestic platform, with international titles as a secondary layer. For teams making catalogue, distribution, or commissioning decisions across the region, the markets were not variants of one another. They were different commercial environments.
A closer look at three signals shows how much those differences mattered when the question moved from regional summary to individual market: how the headline global titles performed in each market, what the biggest titles in each market were, and what new subscribers watched first upon signing up.
What the headline global titles looked like in APAC
Digital i measured first-28-day reach for three recent high-reach global releases: Wednesday, Fallout, and Adolescence. All three are platform Originals, made available across territories by default rather than through market-by-market distribution decisions.
Across most measured markets, all three reached a substantial share of active subscribers in their first month. The three APAC markets showed sharply different pictures from each other:
- Wednesday: 59.8% in Australia, 39.8% in South Korea, 20.7% in Japan, compared with 55.4 to 83.3% across most other markets. Australia sat comfortably within the range. Japan and South Korea sat well below it.
- Adolescence: 51.1% in Australia, 15.3% in South Korea, 8.8% in Japan, compared with 50.6 to 70.9% in its strongest markets. Same pattern.
- Fallout: 46.9% in Australia, 8.6% in Japan. Fallout's strongest Netflix market was Poland at 62.5%.
For platform Originals released globally, smaller market-level reach does not reflect a commercial decision not to release them there. It reflects what subscribers chose to watch once the titles were available. Australia behaved like a Western market on all three titles. Japan and South Korea did not.
For content strategy teams, that distinction matters: in local-led markets, the more useful question was rarely whether a global title travelled. It was what the rest of the catalogue was doing alongside it.
The biggest titles in each market
The top-reaching Netflix titles in each APAC market in 2025 show how differently each catalogue functioned:
- In South Korea, the four highest-reaching titles were When Life Gives You Tangerines (7.7 million subscribers reached), The Trauma Code: Heroes on Call (7.2 million), KPop Demon Hunters (6.9 million), and Squid Game (6.7 million). All locally produced, apart from KPop Demon Hunters, a US production with Korean cultural roots.
- In Japan, the top three were Bullet Train Explosion (5.6 million), The Apothecary Diaries (4.2 million), and Last Samurai Standing (4.1 million). All Japanese productions. Squid Game appeared at #4 with 3.7 million.
- In Australia, the top four were Adolescence (4.1 million), Happy Gilmore 2 (3.9 million), Wednesday (3.9 million), and Stranger Things (3.6 million). All imports.
The biggest title in Korea reached almost double the audience of the biggest title in Australia in absolute terms. For teams thinking about where content investment delivered commercial weight in each market, the absolute scale of the local catalogue layer in Korea was the kind of figure that changed the framing of what counted as a meaningful regional title.
What new subscribers watched first
A clearer view of what drove subscription comes from looking at the first title a new subscriber streamed after signing up, which is a useful proxy for what brought them to the platform.
- In South Korea, the top first-stream titles in 2025 were The Trauma Code: Heroes on Call (266,000 first streams), When Life Gives You Tangerines (235,000), and Squid Game (203,000). All local or Korean language.
- In Japan, the top first-stream titles were Tokyo Swindlers (155,000), Squid Game (133,000), and How Do You Like Wednesday? (77,000). All local or Korean.
- In Australia, the top first-stream titles were Emily in Paris (36,000), Happy Gilmore 2 (27,000), The Rookie (26,000), Squid Game (24,000), and The Night Agent (23,000). All imports, except for Squid Game.
Two observations are worth holding. The first is the scale gap: new Korean subscribers were watching local content first at roughly seven times the volume new Australian subscribers were watching their top import first. The second is that Squid Game was the only title appearing as a top 5 first-stream driver across all three markets. For acquisition and content strategy teams, that is a useful read on which titles were doing platform-bringing work in each market, and which single title was doing it across all three.
What can we learn from different consumer behaviour across markets?
Australia, Japan, and South Korea operated as three different Netflix markets in 2025. Australia consumed Netflix predominantly as an import service. Japan and South Korea consumed Netflix predominantly as a domestic platform. Korean content occupied a particular position within that: the dominant local layer in its home market, a meaningful flow into neighbouring markets, and the single Korean title that crossed into Australia on first-stream behaviour as well.
Treating APAC as a region with a shared streaming needs obscures more than it reveals. The differences across these three measured markets were large enough that market-level reads produced substantially different pictures from any regional rollup.
Digital i works with global streaming and content strategy teams on exactly these questions. If your work involves understanding how audiences in individual markets actually behave, what they watch, what brings them to the platform, and what the local and global layers of a catalogue are doing relative to each other, then that is the kind of analysis the Digital i panel is built to support.
Speak to the team about what market-level behavioural measurement looks like applied to your content strategy.
.jpg)
