Japan’s No.1 TV web portal acTVila tops 1 million subscribers
It took 28 months, but now it has happened. Japan’s answer of sorts to American video platform Hulu, a content-on-demand service called acTVila, has racked up one million subscribers [JP, PDF].
acTVila is surely benefiting from the sharp rise in popularity of Internet-enabled TV sets, which are required to used the video-on-demand service. Users can download movies or TV series and watch them directly on their TVs without going through a PC first.
But in contrast to Hulu, for example, the service also comprises news, games, weather information and a lot of additional content that acTVila users have access to. Even Japan’s No. 1 online shopping site Rakuten, has a slot on the top menu. The service is designed to be more like a web portal (instead of a mere video-on-demand service), only optimized for consumption on a TV.
What I found interesting in the press release linked to above is that acTVila says 90% of customers are male and that the average age of their customers is 40.1 years. The service is a joint venture between Sony, Matsushita, Sharp, Hitachi and Toshiba.
Author Information Dr. Serkan Toto is a German based in Tokyo. Like us, he is passionate about introducing Japanese IT to the rest of the world.
Serkan is an author for mega tech blog network TechCrunch, covering Japan-related technology and web trends.
Follow Serkan on Twitter here. 
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