OTT Summit Ends with Much Optimism for Growth in Asia and a Strong Focus on Content and the Consumer

The Asia Video Industry Association (AVIA) hosted over 850 delegates and featured over 80 industry leaders at the recent OTT Summit, with conversations revolving a lot on the subject of growth, from subscriber and revenue growth to increased local content investment and an intense focus on the customer.

In discussing the outlook for the video industry in Asia, Vivek Couto, Executive Director and Co-Founder of Media Partners Asia (MPA), indicated there remained a lot of room for growth. With most markets having an SVOD household penetration of less than 50%, there was certainly an upside for Southeast Asia and some parts of North Asia as well. However, while the region remained bullish on growth, the Average Revenue Per User remained low, particularly in the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, and India. As such, some tiers and price increases would be introduced along the way, especially when premium sport started to be added to the platforms.

The adage of “Content is King” was very much heard throughout the summit. In MPA’s review of share of first-title consumption, premium local content was a key driver for customer acquisition, particularly in Indonesia and Thailand, with local content that showed some travelability, and as expected, with Korean content traveling very well, and some Japanese content as well.

This focus on content continued through to the fireside chat with Catherine Park, SVP, Head of Office & Streaming for Asia, Paramount Global, where she reiterated that their “mission is to unleash the power of the content with the belief that content is king.” With different go-to-market strategies to unlock maximum value, Paramount Plus planned to launch first in Korea with CJ ENM, then Japan as the next market followed by Southeast Asia in 2023. Park also shared Paramount’s “glocal” strategy – to have global vision but with local execution.

The importance of being local was also echoed by many panellists, as Asia could not be seen as one homogenous market. Sagar Pandit, Associate Director, Business Development, Asia Pacific, Discovery, Inc., said, “When you gun for growth, especially in Asia, it’s about tailoring your approach for every region but keeping your consumer at the front and centre of whatever you are doing.”

And with increasing fragmentation in Asia, customer obsession became a key part of the strategy, as more platforms leveraged technology to deliver personalised experiences. For Parminder Singh, Chief Commercial and Digital Officer, Mediacorp, the three things a customer looked for were highly personalized and relevant content, and new virtual interactive experiences, all built into one single experience, with the use of technology that would allow you to bring all of this to the customer. “If you are only delivering a straightforward service, you are going to be left behind,” added Akash Saxena, Head of Technology, Disney+ Hotstar India.

However, the challenge to integrate it all into an operator’s platform for a seamless experience very much remained, calling for perhaps greater aggregation and bundling for the OTT industry, as we started to see some fatigue from consumers working with multiple services to meet their content needs.

Closing off the summit with Bold Predictions for the Future of Streaming, Gourav Rakshit, COO, Viacom18 Digital Ventures, remained very optimistic, sharing that a large bet that platforms had not fully capitalised on was the area of media becoming social, with the opportunity to build communities. “We’ve really made rapid strides in the last five years . . . the next five will be focusing a lot more on delivering consumer delight,” said Rakshit.

The OTT Summit is generously supported by Gold Sponsors Brightcove, Lumen Technologies, Synamedia, TV5MONDE, Xandr and Silver Sponsors Akamai, Amagi, Broadpeak, BytePlus, Discovery, Encoding.com, Endeavor Streaming, Irdeto, Magnite, Mediacorp, Mirada, NAGRA, Nielsen, PubMatic and Vindicia.

About the Asia Video Industry Association

The Asia Video Industry Association (AVIA) is the trade association for the video industry and ecosystem in Asia Pacific. It serves to make the video industry stronger and healthier through promoting the common interests of its members. AVIA is the interlocutor for the industry with governments across the region, leads the fight against video piracy through its Coalition Against Piracy (CAP) and provides insight into the video industry through reports and conferences aimed to support a vibrant video industry.

For media enquiries and additional background please contact:
Charmaine Kwan
Head of Marketing and Communications
Email: charmaine@avia.org
Website: www.avia.org
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/asiavideoia
Twitter: @AsiaVideoIA






Topic: Press release summary

Optimism and Imagination Are the Answers to Our Wicked Problems – and You Can Help

A pessimistic narrative about the future of the planet and its people makes us believe we cannot take the action necessary to build a better world for coming generations; that it is “already too late.” Using optimistic speculation will not only free us to believe that we can make a positive difference, but will also let us imagine what that better future looks like, so we can plan exactly how we will build it.

There is already widespread awareness of human impacts on the planet, the negative impacts on people of inequality, racism and other forms of discrimination, and many other “wicked problems” are making their presence known. More people than ever want positive action (67% of people expressed a desire for climate action in a YouGov poll in November 2020), but the narrative around these issues is relentlessly negative. This leaves those who want to take action clear on what they don’t want to happen, but unclear on the positive steps they can take. There is plenty of armchair activism, where we only have to continually reiterate what is wrong and who is to blame, but little progress towards positive solutions. Inaction is justified by the idea that it is “already too late,” and that action is futile.

Ludogogy.co.uk – a UK-based games-based learning magazine has launched a project which aims to approach wicked problems playfully, creatively, and above all, optimistically.

Sarah Le-Fevre, Ludogogy’s editor, said, “We can start to believe that the future is already written, not something which we can proactively influence, and build according to our own needs, and the needs of future generations. The first step into the realisation of our agency is to imagine what we want the future to look like.”

Speculative Optimism welcomes anyone to participate in a co-creation project, which seeks first to imagine better futures, then provide a platform for projects to move towards those futures, and finally to create an approach to organisational learning to spread the practice of Speculative Optimism so that businesses and other organisations can find ways to innovate for their own future success, finding opportunities in areas that move social, planetary and economic systems towards greater health.

Participants in the project will not only learn skills in Futures Thinking, specifically Foresight techniques, writing craft and other creative skills, but they will build a resilient mindset, to help them face the future more optimistically, as well as an enhanced ability to spot and exploit opportunities for ethical innovation. The project takes the form of a structured set of tasks which gradually build skills and a body of work of Speculative Optimism.

The project is seeking participants who want to join in with the first stage, the creation and publication of a book of Speculative Optimism stories, letters, poems and other written word messages from the future – as well as more concrete artifacts which illustrate a better tomorrow. We are also seeking Futurists, Writers, Editors, Graphic Artists and anyone else with skills that could support the project.

We intend that the project should be as financially self-sustaining as possible, with proceeds from sales of the book and some proceeds from organisational learning programmes being ploughed back into the project to support the platform and also possibly to provide small grants to support innovation and activism projects inspired by the speculative fiction written by participants.

Sarah Le-Fevre said, “Much as we all love ‘Black Mirror’ there is a need, and appetite for, work that inspires because you read it and think ‘I want this’. Speculative fiction has always inspired innovation, and I think if we actively bring the SF and the innovation together in one place, we could start to see projects that make a real difference.”

Participation is free for anyone who wants to join in, but participants can choose to pay, if they can afford to, and if they want to help cover the costs of maintaining the project platform, the publication of the book and other project related costs. We would also welcome sponsors who wish to support this project without participating

Speculative Optimism is a co-created project, open to all, regardless of location, or previous experience of writing or futurist practice. It is being run on a Mighty Networks platform at https://speculative-optimism.mn.co/