Inside the Surging Demand for Foreign-Language Streaming Shows | Charts
Streaming platforms have been relying more and more on foreign language content. Worldwide hits like “La Casa de Papel (Money Heist),” “Squid Game” and “Dark” have been very successful in the U.S., paving the way for non-English-language shows in a market that historically has been hard to penetrate.
In the third quarter of 2022, shows in languages other than English were responsible for 8% of the demand for streaming originals in the U.S., according to Parrot Analytics‘ data, which takes into account consumer research, streaming, downloads and social media, among other engagement. That’s impressive growth, up from 6% in the first quarter of 2020.
Netflix has been most successful when it comes to foreign language content. That platform dominates the top foreign-language streaming originals list, with 8 out of 10 shows. That includes the top two slots, Japan’s “Cyberpunk: Edgerunners” and Germany’s “Dark.”
“Edgerunners” is one of Netflix’s top releases of the third quarter and part of the Cyberpunk universe, while “Dark” is the most successful German streaming original so far, still highly in demand even almost two years after the last season’s release. “Money Heist” and “Squid Game,” two of the most well-known Netflix shows also appear in the ranking as 5th and 6th places.
Only two shows managed to break Netflix’s dominance and find a place among the top 10 foreign language streaming originals. Disney+’s Japanese anime series “Summer Time Rendering” and Apple TV+’s (mostly) Korean-language saga “Pachinko.” Those shows are also an example of the high demand for Korean and Japanese language shows. Seven out of the 10 shows in that ranking are in one of these languages.
Of the main subscription video-on-demand platforms, Netflix has had a higher share of demand for foreign-language streaming originals over the last years, with the exception of a brief period at the end of 2020 when Amazon Prime Video briefly took the lead. In the third quarter of 2022, foreign-language shows make up 10.8% of the demand for Netflix’s originals. That’s almost twice the demand share for that kind of show on Prime Video, 5.4%.
While the demand share for foreign-language shows has been dropping on platforms like Amazon Prime and Hulu, it has been surging on Disney+ and Apple TV+. Until the second quarter of 2021, the demand share for foreign-language Disney+ originals was less than 2%. One year later, in the second quarter of 2022, that demand share peaked at 5.8%. That growth is the direct outcome of the release of successful shows like “Summer Time Rendering” and “Star Wars: Visions,” two Japanese language animations. In the case of Apple TV+, the demand share is lower but the growth is still imprecise, from 0.5% in the last quarter of 2021 to 2.9% in Q3 of this year, thanks mostly to “Pachinko.”
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