Over 100 industry delegates from across Asia gathered at the Asia Video Industry Association’s (AVIA) Vietnam in View conference, opened by the Deputy Director General of the Authority for Broadcast and Electronic Information (ABEI), Nguyen Ha Yen, on 9 October in Ho Chi Minh City.

Despite the challenges of 2023 in the post-Covid landscape, the pay TV market in Vietnam continued to evolve, achieving a 4% increase in revenue and a 14% rise in subscriptions compared to 2022, as noted by Deputy Director General Nguyen. He emphasized that, amid fierce competition and rapid changes in consumer behaviour and technology, developing new business models for sustainable growth was essential for the future of pay TV. Both regulatory bodies and industry leaders will play crucial roles in shaping this strategic direction, he added.

This was further reiterated by Thanh Vu, Deputy Regional Managing Director and Representative, US-ASEAN Business Council, in his market overview of Vietnam. Vietnam was fast approaching market maturity, with total subscriptions at almost 20 million, with 5.8% annual growth since 2018. And with pay TV penetration at 66%, there was still lots of room for growth, shared Thanh Vu. However, the clear winner was OTT and IPTV, which had become mainstream, and its revenue share accelerating from just 11% in 2019 to 45% by end of 2023, almost catching up with cable TV. Despite a sharp decline in subscriptions over the past 4 years and a modest subscription share of only 20% today, cable still accounted for over 50% of total Pay TV revenue.

However regardless of platform, content very much remained the key driver for consumers, and critical to the business, said Pham Thanh Phuong, Managing Director, Viettel TV360. Offering the largest mobile and fixed-line network infrastructure in the Vietnamese market, with up to 80 million mobile broadband subscribers, bundling television and fixed broadband services was essential for them, and the smartest and fastest way to acquire the largest television customer base at the lowest cost and in the shortest time. But to keep their customers in the ecosystem, differentiation was important, especially from the international OTT platforms. “When we invest in local content, we can create a difference,” said Phuong.

This sentiment was also clearly presented in the data from Kantar Media, on Who’s Watching What, Where and How in Vietnam. Local content reigned supreme across linear viewing, rounding up the top 10 most watched titles, with local Vietnamese series also driving over 30% of non-linear viewing. And from a platform perspective, the two most important devices were the Connected TV (CTV) and the smartphone, with CTV penetration at a striking 91% in the market. “It’s not a case of linear TV being replaced by video on demand, but that they complement each other. For the TV industry to develop, we must find out a way to serve the target audience according to their needs,” said c, General Director, Kantar Media Vietnam.

For Esther Nguyen, Founder & CEO, POPS Worldwide, their content strategy was always to look at the audience first, and the lifetime value of that audience, and serving the content that they want to watch, when they want to watch and on the platform of their choice. However, “playing in the digital world and operating among many different platforms is a double-edged sword,” shared Nguyen. “Platforms are global and have democratized content and what audiences watch. Audiences are now open to watching content from all over the world. We are no longer competing with just local content, but with global content,” she surmised in her closing keynote session.