due to its cheap selling price and productive output. In fact, Italy imported the most anime outside of Japan. These mass imports influenced anime popularity in South American, Arabic and German markets. The beginning of 1980 saw the introduction of Japanese anime series into the American culture. In the 1990s, Japanese animation slowly gained popularity in America. Media companies such as Viz and Mixx began publishing and releasing animation into the American market. The 1988 film Akira is largely credited with popularizing anime in the Western world during the early 1990s, before anime was further popularized by television shows such as Pokémon and Dragon Ball Z in the late 1990s. By 1997, Japanese anime was the fastest-growing genre in the American video industry. The growth of the Internet later provided international audiences an easy way to access Japanese content. Early on, online piracy played a major role in this, through over time many legal alternatives appeared. Since the 2010s various streaming services have become increasingly involved in the production and licensing of anime for the international markets. This is especially the case with net services such as Netflix and Crunchyroll which have large catalogs in Western countries, although as of 2020 anime fans in many developing non-Western countries, such as India and Philippines, have fewer options of obtaining access to legal content, and therefore still turn to online piracy. However beginning with the early 2020s anime has been experiencing yet another boom in global popularity and demand due to the COVID-19 pandemic and streaming services like Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, HBO Max, Hulu and anime-only services like Crunchyroll, increasing the international availability of the amount of new licensed anime shows as well as the size of their catalogs. Netflix reported that, between October 2019 and September 2020, more than member households worldwide had watched at least one anime title on the platform. Anime titles appeared on the streaming platforms top 10 lists in almost 100 countries within the 1-year period. As of 2021, Japanese anime are the most demanded foreign language shows in the United States accounting for 30.5% of the market share(In comparison, Spanish and Korean shows account for 21% and 11% of the market share). In 2021 more than half of Netflix's global members watched anime. In 2022, the anime series Attack on Titan won the award of "Most In-Demand TV Series in the World 2021" in the