An OVA (Original Video Animation) is an anime episode or short series released directly to home video, or today to a disc bundle or platform, without a prior television broadcast or cinema run. OVAs historically allowed higher budgets and content broadcast television would not carry.
The OVA era of the 1980s and 1990s was anime's first great second market. Freed from broadcast standards and timeslots, studios made OVAs as prestige objects and experiments: darker stories, higher budgets per minute, sequels and side stories for series with proven fanbases, and early works by directors who later defined the medium. Video rental shops and fan conventions spread them abroad.
The format never disappeared; it changed jobs. Modern OVAs are most often bonus episodes bundled with manga volumes or Blu-ray sets, side stories and epilogues sold to committed fans. The streaming era blurred the category further, since a direct-to-platform special is functionally an OVA wearing new distribution.
For viewers, the practical point is placement. An OVA may continue a series, retell it, or sit entirely outside its continuity, and its position is rarely obvious from a streaming menu. A series' canon sheet, not the release format, decides what an OVA counts as. Collectors still treat landmark OVAs as artefacts in their own right, and anniversary reissues of the era's major works continue to sell on the strength of the format's reputation for craft.
In use"A bonus episode sold with a manga volume, never aired on TV, is an OVA."