Trends drive the television industry, and so it’s not unusual when a new one arises to see a lot
of companies rushing to do the same thing. When OTT service was launched in Asia in 2015,
broadcasters, operators and telcos rushed to the need of the new found audience (millennias)
by collaborating with respective partners for content and streaming service. An entire new
ecosystem was established to bring television content to mobiles and tablets, with a gold rush
for streaming contents. Programming across genres and languages saw a sudden boom.

Hum…, did Netflix the US subscription video-on- demand (SVoD) propel the impetus? In
early 2016, when Netflix roll-out into another 132 territories, it was impossible for regional
competitors not to feel the impact of it’s the huge spending power. Since its expansion
announcement, Netflix has made rapid growth in Asia. Other OTT services are going to be
trailing far behind if they do not secure their niche audience. According to research from
London-based Ovum, the Asia’s OTT market will be worth US$62 billion by 2020, and on
that basis alone it stands to reason that there must be windows of opportunity for regional
services to take on the US streaming juggernaut.

With large funds and an existing customer base to tap into, Asian telecom operators are in a
better position than most to do this, despite OTT being a fairly new component in their VoD
strategies. Telcos will have to start investing over the next three to five years as these
services start to take off; otherwise they are going to hit the ceiling in capacity, according to
Ovum.

The sheer number of telcos moving on to OTT turf in Asia suggests things are changing.
South-East Asia, in particular, has been a battleground for telco-backed streamers during the
last few years with Celcom’s Escape entertainment portal (Malaysia), Mediacorp’s Toggle
OTT service (Singapore) and Singtel-backed HOOQ (Asia) to name just three.

Elsewhere, Hulu, a joint venture between Comcast’s NBCUniversal, 21 st Century Fox, Time
Warner and The Walt Disney Company, launched a SVoD service in Japan in 2011 before
selling the venture to Nippon Television Network in 2014. Youth-skewing network Vice,
backed by 21 st Century Fox, A+E Networks and Disney, have now expanded into Indonesia
and pledged that it would produce local content and offer creative agency service, while
Korean OTT service POOQ, operated by Content Alliance Platform and a JV between KBS,
MBC and SBS, is also gaining traction in the country.