TVASIA
Warner Bros. Discovery has renewed its SVOD content licensing deal with Japanese platform U-NEXT, keeping the service as the local streaming home of HBO.
The deal covers the exclusive content rights for HBO, HBO originals and HBO Max originals, including current and future seasons of House of the Dragon, The Last of Us and Succession. The pact also includes True Detective: Night Country, Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty and And Just Like That…; and the upcoming The Idol, White House Plumbers and Love & Death. U-NEXT will also deliver the exclusive Japanese premiere of Steven Soderbergh’s Full Circle and will be home to a slate of HBO library content of more than 2,300 episodes.
Tenshin Tsutsumi, CEO of U-NEXT, said: “The collaboration with Warner Bros. Discovery, which began in April 2021, has produced great results as a strategic partnership. We have been able to deliver high-quality titles from HBO and HBO Max, the pinnacle of U.S. entertainment, to audiences as quickly as possible, and we feel that the number of opportunities for people to engage with our service through these titles has also increased. We will continue to add to the HBO lineup with a growing library of over 2,300 episodes, while major titles are in the pipeline.”
James Gibbons, president and managing director for the Western Pacific at Warner Bros. Discovery, added: “Warner Bros. Discovery’s world-leading entertainment continues to be extremely popular with Japanese audiences and we are pleased to extend our partnership with U-NEXT, which has delivered strong success to date. This renewed deal reflects our ambition to build further scale across the entire ecosystem of our business, with future optionality that enables us to reach as broad an audience as possible across multiple platforms.”
