The company is headquartered in Tokyo and Barcelona and currently operates in Japan as well as several countries around Europe; Aaland Islands, Albania, Austria, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Faroe Islands, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Greenland, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, North Macedonia, Malta, Montenegro, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom, and Ukraine.[10]
Rakuten also operates another global video-on-demand (VOD) streaming service called Rakuten Viki which is headquartered in San Mateo, California with additional offices in Tokyo, Japan, Seoul, South Korea, and Singapore.[11] Rakuten Viki focuses on distributing content from parts of Asia to the rest of the world. This includes drama, variety shows, and animation from Japan, Korea, mainland China, Taiwan, and Thailand.[12]
History
In 2010, the service was launched in Spain under the name Wuaki.tv,[13] and later expanded to Andorra. By 2013, it had entered the markets in Britain, as well as Italy, France, and Germany later that same year.[14]
In June 2012, e-commerce company Rakuten acquired the company, previously known as Wuaki.tv.[15] In July 2017, Wuaki.tv changed its name to Rakuten TV.[16] Rakuten took over the user base from TalkTalk TV Store (previously Blinkbox) including migration of user purchased titles, in June 2018.[17]
Rakuten Sports
On 11 June 2019, Rakuten announced the launch of Rakuten Sports, a new live streaming and video on demand (VOD) sports entertainment platform to expand and deliver sports content to several countries around the world, after eleven countries across Europe.[18]
From November 2019, Rakuten Sports provided the subscription streaming coverage of Davis Cup for two seasons 2019 and 2020, also as the part of main sponsorship, starting from the 2019 finals.[19]
