Image Courtesy: Photo by Ciaran O'Brien
For studios, rights holders, and content sales teams evaluating where to place bets on non-English IP, the headline figures around Korean content are difficult to ignore. In 2025, Korean content was viewed for approximately 10 billion hours outside South Korea across 20 measured Netflix markets.
That is a large number, but it has a specific shape inside it. 1.5 billion of those hours, or 15.2% of the total, were viewed on Squid Game alone. Korean content is reaching audiences across many regions. It is also, in 2025, disproportionately shaped by one title. Squid Game was one of many Korean titles in the measured set, yet it accounted for 15.2% of the total on its own.
For teams making content acquisition, licensing, or co-production decisions, the question isn't whether Korean content travels. It clearly does. The more useful questions are how widely it travels, how much of the total any single title is producing, and what the supporting signals say about how durable that picture is.
Where Korean content is being watched outside Korea
The 10 billion hours of Korean viewing in 2025 was spread across four regions: Europe (UK, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Nordics, Netherlands, Poland), North America (US, Canada), Latin America (Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico), and APAC (Australia, Japan). Korean content viewing inside South Korea is not included here, since this figure measures travel outside the home market.
Even setting Squid Game aside, the remaining 8.5 billion hours of Korean content viewed outside Korea reached audiences across Europe, North America, Latin America, and APAC.
How Korea compares to Japan and Australia
Korea exports content at scale that our other two measured APAC markets do not match. In the same set of measured markets, Japanese content generated 7.3 billion hours of non-local viewing in 2025, and Australian content generated 1.3 billion hours. Historically, Japanese content, anime in particular, exported at greater volume than Korean content across international Netflix markets, but that is no longer the case.
Korea is exporting roughly 7.7 times the volume Australia is. Japan sits between, exporting at scale but with a different mix. No single Japanese title plays a Squid Game-sized role in its outbound viewing, but Japan's total is also smaller. For teams thinking about non-English IP investment across APAC, the three measured markets are not three variants of the same opportunity. They are three different shapes of content economy, with three different scales of worldwide demand.
What the sign-up data adds
Looking at the first title a new Netflix subscriber streams after signing up, which is a useful proxy for what brought them to the platform, Squid Game is the only title that appears as a top-5 first-stream driver across all three measured APAC markets: 203,000 first streams in South Korea, 133,000 in Japan, and 24,000 in Australia.
In Korea itself, two other local titles outranked Squid Game on first streams: The Trauma Code: Heroes on Call (266,000) and When Life Gives You Tangerines (235,000). Both registered substantially less outbound demand than Squid Game did.
For acquisition teams evaluating Korean IP, that's the gap worth holding in view. Titles that drive subscriptions in Korea aren't automatically the titles that travel. The data lets you separate the two questions.
What this means for content decisions
The Korean content export picture in 2025 is large, multi-region, and asymmetric, both relative to other APAC markets and relative to what individual titles inside it are contributing. For studios, rights holders, content sales teams, and acquisition teams, that combination raises a set of practical questions that headline figures alone can't answer:
- How much of any non-English content category's worldwide viewing is driven by a single title, and what does that mean for valuation?
- Which titles in a country's catalogue are actually travelling, and which are domestic-only, and how stable is that split year on year?
- For markets that don't yet regularly export globally successful content, generate large outbound viewing, what are the supporting signals that would change that picture, and how should they be tracked?
These aren't questions Digital i answers in a single chart. They are the questions independent behavioural measurement at title-level, across markets, is built to support.
The data above is from the 2025 review of South Korea, Japan, and Australia. The same measurement framework applies to all 20 markets Digital i covers, across Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, HBO Max, and Disney+.
If your team is making content acquisition, licensing, or IP valuation decisions where non-English content is a meaningful part of the mix, the conversation worth having is what the title-level, market-level data actually shows for the specific decisions in front of you.
Speak to the Digital i team about what cross-market behavioural measurement looks like applied to your content strategy.
