If you go to the official Japanese website of a show and look up where you can watch it, almost every time you’re presented with a list of close to two dozen streaming services. The exception is when one particular service (always an American one like Netflix or Amazon Prime) has exclusivity rights to it, but they’re the minority.

Exclusivity deals aside, this seems to me like a much better setup, at least from a consumer perspective. Shows are for the most part not dotted across different services, but there’s no market consolidation. And even if something isn’t on the service you’re subscribed to, it will probably be available on a service where you can just rent an individual show or episode instead of having yet another subscription. And I imagine that if they’re not competing on hostage-taking, that would mean they’re competing more on price and quality of service instead.