The Asian Market in 45 Minutes

APAC TRACKING “People love Koreans (throughout the region), they think they’re cool. They trend incredibly well socially,” says Couto.

Today’s podcast is the third of four in our “What the World Watches” audio series recorded at Singapore’s APOS conference, for paid subscribers only. You can listen to earlier conversations with Formula 1’s Director of Media Rights and Content Creation Ian Holmes here, and Warner Bros. Discovery International President Gerhard Zeiler here.

Amazon Prime leads in Japan; Netflix in South Korea; Disney+ in India. Nowhere is the growth opportunity (some might say only opportunity) for American streamers as significant as it is in Asia. But it’s not as simple as ordering up more Squid Game. Consigliere to many an entertainment C-suite exec, Vivek Couto, Executive Director and Co-Founder of Media Partners Asia, recently hosted regional players including Amazon’s VP, Prime Video International Kelly Day, Netflix’s Vice President, Content APAC (ex-India) Minyoung Kim and Uday Shankar, investor with James Murdoch in Viacom18, at the APOS conference in Singapore. From there, he joined hosts Janice Min and The Wakeup’s Sean McNulty to discuss what will determine who wins (and how) the most important front of the streaming wars.

Among the topics:

• The immense scale of opportunity vs. the U.S. and Europe (9:22)

• Current misassumptions about the quantity of local content necessary to win (multiple mentions)

• Who has first-mover advantage where

• Regional players — and potential acquisition targets for American players (multiple mentions)

• Sports rights as loss leaders in the region — including cricket (33:14)

• The region’s wide disparity in ARPU (average revenue per user) (10:58)

• Potential for imminent streaming consolidation in the Asian market (43:43)

• How Warner Bros. has “one of the best libraries to monetize in…the world” (17:57)

A transcript of the conversation is available here.