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Japan's Animation Home Video Sales Decrease Again by 8% in 2023
posted on by Alex Mateo
Home video sales for anime, which account for over 80% of animation sales, decreased from last year by 4.5% to 22.4 billion yen (about US$145 million). Home video sales for animation outside Japan decreased by 23.7%, for children's anime decreased by 23.2%, and for overseas children's animation decreased by 38.6%. Rental sales also fell 17.8% from last year, with overall animation rental sales amounting to 2.4 billion yen (about US$15.5 million).
The overall DVD and Blu-ray Disc physical home video market's annual revenue amounted to 115.235 billion yen (about US$744 million) with 26,806,000 total discs sold, a 0.4% decrease from last year. About 41.324 billion yen (about US$267 million) of that revenue was from DVDs with 14,397,000 discs, and Blu-ray Disc releases accounted for the remaining 73.911 billion yen (about US$477 million) with 12,410,000 discs. DVD sales were down 5.3% year-on-year, while Blu-ray Disc sales were up 3.8% year-on-year.
The revenue marks the 18th consecutive year of decline for the Japanese home video market, ever since the market reached its 2004 peak at 375.4 billion yen (about US$2.42 billion in current conversion). This year's decrease was narrower than last year's.
In 2019, paid digital video content's revenue overtook physical home video sales for the first time. 2020 marked the first time the digital video content market has surpassed the worth of the combined physical home video and rental markets.
Japan's overall video market had been declining until it fell to 480.2 billion yen (about US$4.416 billion) in 2012. However, the JVA (with DEG Japan) began including paid digital content in the report in 2013, and has reported a mostly growing market since then.
Sources: JVA, Animation Business Journal (Tadashi Sudo)
