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Japanese Home Video Sales Down by 16.1% in 2022

The DVD and Blu-ray Disc physical home video market's annual revenue amounted to 114.819 billion yen (about US$869 million) with 30,982,000 total discs sold, a 16.1% decrease from last year. 43.617 billion yen (about US$330 million) of that revenue was from DVDs with 18,319,000 discs, and Blu-ray Disc releases accounted for the remaining 71.202 billion yen (about US$539 million) with 12,663,000 discs. DVD sales were down 22.1% year-on-year, while Blu-ray Disc sales were also down 12% year-on-year.

The revenue marks the 17th 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$2.84 billion in current conversion). The JVA also records 2,527 video rental stores in business as of December 2022, only around a fifth of the peak number of stores in 1995, when there were 12,452 such stores recorded.

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's website, Animation Business Journal (Tadashi Sudo)