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OTT platforms in Asia under pressure as appetite for local content grows

As streaming platforms in Asia are looking to diversify and expand their catalogs and with local content becoming a great differentiator, costs are on the rise and players have been forced to consolidate.

Homegrown productions are increasingly dominating Asia's over-the-top landscape, with platforms like Netflix Inc. and Amazon.com Inc., as well as regional competitors like HOOQ and iflix, racing to strike deals for content in local languages and for regional audiences.

Netflix recently acquired its first Filipino titles, which includes a feature-length film and a miniseries. The streaming giant added to its content library Mikhail Red's "Birdshot," a coming-of-age thriller that won the Best Asian Future Film Award at the 2016 Tokyo International Film Festival, and Brillante Mendoza's 13-part "Amo," which tackles the Philippine government's war on drugs.

SNL ImageMary Joy Apostol as Maya in "Birdshot"
Source: Birdshot/TBA Studios

Regional OTT player HOOQ is also ramping up its local content offering, having backed a remake of the South Korean comedy "Miss Granny" in 2017, as well as Indonesia's "Marlina The Murderer in Four Acts," which was screened at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival.

In October 2017, the company announced six finalists for its HOOQ Filmmakers Guild; six screenplays across Asia will be turned into a pilot episode.

India's "Bhak," about two Indian filmmakers who set out to make a movie, was crowned the winner and has been green-lighted for a full season.

The shift towards local content is a break with the past, according to industry analyst Aravind Venugopal, vice president of Singapore-based Media Partners Asia.

"A lot of the online video operators, when they launched [in Asia], were all focused on Hollywood content," Venugopal said in an interview.

The challenge for streaming platforms is the race for the same content since online video players are in a bidding war with their rivals as well as with traditional players like cable providers and pay TV channels, according to Venugopal.

This leads to increasing costs amid fierce bidding wars for the most popular content pieces.

A good example of a streamer's spending spree was at the recently concluded industry conference APOS 2018, when PCCW Ltd.'s Viu commissioned 70 titles and more than 900 episodes of local content, including a remake of international TV series "The Bridge."

Meanwhile, digital media group WebTVAsia launched its LUVE multichannel network in Taiwan. LUVE claims to host 3,000 of the most popular Asian creator channels and has a monthly viewership of 170 million Asian millennials.

Streamers' willingness to spend more on local and regional content means production houses benefit, so content creators should strike while the iron is hot, according to Tristan Zinampan, a Manila-based industry observer and editor-in-chief of Film Police Reviews, an online database of film content reviews.

"Filmmakers should get off their high horse and emulate Mikhail Red," Zinampan said in an interview.

He added that theaters will not disappear, but streaming platforms are "the future," urging content creators to actively team up with platforms like Netflix as they need to "think of the exposure streaming could lead to."

SNL ImageSofia Helin in "The Bridge"
Source: Filmlance International/Jens Juncker

However, Asia's streaming market is still relatively immature.

“The revenue and business models are constantly evolving because there is no one size fits all when it comes to the online video market,” Venugopal said.

Looking ahead, Venugopal anticipates a consolidation of streaming platforms in the region.

"The number of online video platforms in each market will decline … in some countries in Southeast Asia and North Asia, we are starting to see smaller platforms coming together to try and take on Google Inc. and Facebook Inc. in creating better advertising platforms," he concluded.