Netflix becomes exclusive home of WWE programming in Japan, ending Abema's three-year run

Netflix will become the exclusive streaming home of WWE programming in Japan starting October 1, the company confirmed Tuesday, closing out a three-year run for AbemaTV as the promotion's Japanese broadcast partner and completing a rollout that began when Netflix first struck a global rights deal with the wrestling promotion nearly two years ago.

The change means Japanese fans will get Raw, SmackDown and NXT, along with WWE's premium live events and its full archive library, on the streamer at no added cost across all Netflix plans, according to Netflix's official announcement. It is a modest-sounding scheduling update by industry standards, but it closes one of the last remaining gaps in Netflix's attempt to become WWE's single global streaming home, a project that has been assembled market by market since early 2025.

How the new arrangement works

Under the new schedule, SmackDown premieres in Japan on Saturday, October 3, at 9 a.m. local time, with Raw following on Tuesday, October 6, and NXT on Wednesday, October 7, each streaming live weekly at the same hour afterward. Netflix says the live broadcasts will carry both original English commentary and a Japanese-language commentary track, and that premium live events such as WrestleMania, the Royal Rumble, SummerSlam and Money in the Bank will stream alongside the archive of past matches and specials.

Neither company has disclosed financial terms. The handoff is immediate: WWE's existing agreement with Abema, the Japanese streaming service owned by CyberAgent, expires September 30, and Netflix's exclusivity begins the following day, according to reporting by the wrestling trade outlets Wrestling Observer/F4W and Ringside News.

The move also changes the economics of watching WWE in Japan. Abema had carried Raw and SmackDown as free, ad-supported broadcasts, a rarity for WWE's flagship shows outside the United States. Netflix's plans in Japan all require a paid subscription, meaning viewers who relied on Abema's free tier will now need a Netflix account to keep following the weekly shows, even as the content itself expands to include the full archive and every premium live event rather than a subset of on-demand replays.

A three-year detour through Abema

Japan had been something of an outlier in WWE's streaming footprint. Abema signed its own rights agreement with WWE in September 2023, putting Raw and SmackDown on free, ad-supported streams with same-day Japanese commentary for the first time, plus on-demand access to NXT and every premium live event. That deal predated, and initially survived, Netflix's much larger move into wrestling.

Netflix's entry came in January 2024, when it agreed to pay roughly $500 million a year over a decade — about $5 billion in total — to bring Raw in-house starting in January 2025, according to Variety's reporting at the time. That agreement made Netflix the exclusive home of Raw in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Latin America, and the home of essentially all other WWE programming outside the U.S. — with Japan carved out because of Abema's still-running contract. WWE said its January 2025 debut on the service, an episode of Raw, drew 4.9 million global views, a figure the company touted in its own newsroom release at the time. A year later, Netflix additionally absorbed the U.S. rights to WWE's video library, which had been split across services, under a deal WWE announced in January of this year.

"Netflix is not in the business of announcing deals in two small countries. They wanted global rights," WWE president Nick Khan said, recalling how a Netflix executive urged the company years earlier to consolidate its international streaming rights rather than sell them off piecemeal.

Khan made the comment in an appearance on the wrestling-industry podcast The Varsity, describing conversations that predated the pandemic, long before Netflix had entered live sports programming at all. The remark, since recirculated by wrestling outlets covering the Japan announcement, frames Tuesday's news less as a standalone deal and more as the last piece of a strategy Netflix had been executing for years.

Who is affected

The shift is largely a Japanese-market story, but it has ripple effects. For Abema and its parent, CyberAgent, losing WWE comes as the company has been reorienting toward homegrown wrestling: CyberAgent, alongside TV Asahi, took over ownership of New Japan Pro-Wrestling from Bushiroad this past May, adding to a roster of Japanese promotions — Pro Wrestling NOAH, DDT Pro-Wrestling and Tokyo Joshi Pro — that CyberAgent already controls through its CyberFight subsidiary. Trade coverage of the transition, including from the industry outlet Advanced Television, has read the move as consistent with that broader pivot toward homegrown promotions rather than a rejection of WWE specifically.

For WWE, the deal extends the promotion's visibility in a market with an outsized roster presence: Japanese-born performers including Asuka, IYO SKY and Shinsuke Nakamura are prominent in the company's promotional material for the Netflix launch, and WWE has long treated Japan as a priority touring and merchandising market. For Netflix, the addition is a small but symbolically useful step in a broader live-sports push that has also included NFL games, boxing and other rights deals since 2024.

What happens next

The practical test begins October 1, when Abema's WWE programming goes dark in Japan and Netflix's coverage starts a few days later with SmackDown's October 3 premiere. Neither Netflix nor WWE has said whether the arrangement includes a fixed term matching the broader 10-year U.S. agreement, and both companies have so far declined to disclose the value of the Japan-specific rights.

What is clear is that the list of major territories where WWE programming sits outside Netflix's umbrella has grown very short — a fact WWE has increasingly leaned on in describing its streaming partner as a genuinely global home for its programming rather than a market-by-market patchwork. For Netflix, which has spent nearly two years building out a live-sports slate that also includes NFL games and boxing, folding in one of the last outstanding WWE territories is a low-cost way to tidy up that pitch to advertisers and subscribers ahead of the next round of live events on its calendar.