TV Asia MIPTV 2018

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TVASIA

WWW.TVASIA.WS

APRIL 2018

MIPTV & APOS EDITION

Asian Content / Pay-TV Channels Turner’s Ricky Ow / Astro’s Rohana Rozhan

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CONTENTS FEATURES

The Legacy Equation

10 EMBRACING THE FUTURE A look at the key trends at play in Asia’s fast-moving pay-TV space.

The issue of legacy—coping with it, or not having it at all—was a recurring theme at APOS in Bali last year. It’s still a subject that looms large for anyone operating in this rapidly shifting media business.

Ricardo Seguin Guise Publisher Anna Carugati Group Editorial Director Mansha Daswani Editor Kristin Brzoznowski Executive Editor Joanna Padovano Tong Managing Editor Sara Alessi Associate Editor Victor L. Cuevas Production & Design Director Phyllis Q. Busell Art Director Simon Weaver Online Director Dana Mattison Senior Sales & Marketing Manager Nathalia Lopez Sales & Marketing Coordinator Andrea Moreno Business Affairs Manager

Ricardo Seguin Guise President Anna Carugati Executive VP Mansha Daswani Associate Publisher & VP of Strategic Development TV Asia © 2018 WSN INC. 1123 Broadway, #1207 New York, NY 10010 Phone: (212) 924-7620 Fax: (212) 924-6940 Website: www.tvasia.ws

Take Astro, which has dominated Malaysia’s pay-TV segment for more than two decades. When the service launched, it needed to give consumers something they hadn’t had before: an abundance of choice in their entertainment options. Today, with OTT services proliferating, the problem is too much choice. So how does a legacy business navigate that? “We now have to use technology wisely to simplify, to be intuitive, to be personalized and to aptly address whatever aspirational lifestyle the customer has,” Rohana Rozhan, Astro’s CEO, told me in an interview that you can find later in this edition.

For FOX Networks Group Asia, its legacy business is delivering a portfolio of channels to pay-TV providers.

It’s still doing that, but it can’t just be business as usual anymore. Zubin Gandevia, the president of FOX Networks Group Asia, spoke to me about the rollout of the FOX+ OTT service and how the company is finding ways to “innovate in every area” of its business. It’s the same story at Turner Asia Pacific, which, as Ricky Ow says in this edition, is looking to cater to its fans on every platform possible, on-screen and off.

“The beauty of our brand is we don’t have any legacy issues,” Avi Himatsinghani, the CEO of Rewind Networks, said when I spoke to him for the piece in this issue on the state of the region’s pay-TV business. “We have not exclusively associated ourselves with a particular studio brand name. In a non-OTT world [a studio brand name] meant an established seal of quality. But in this world, you never say, Today I’m going to watch a studio X movie or a studio Y movie.”

As channels and platforms come to grips with an industry in flux, the basic tenet of delivering the best programming possible remains a constant. And Asian content has become more valuable than ever—in Asia, and elsewhere, as you’ll see in a report on how shows from the region are finding their way to new markets across the globe. You’ll see it at MIPTV too, with a host of sessions putting Asian content creators front and center.

—Mansha Daswani

10 14 MAKING AN ENTRANCE Distributors from across Asia are opening new markets with drama series, formats and more.

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INTERVIEWS

18 Turner’s Ricky Ow

20 Astro’s Rohana Rozhan

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all3media international White Dragon/ Celebrity Undercover/24 Hours to Hell and Back Shot in Hong Kong, White Dragon is an international thriller written by Jack and Harry Williams. The show is among the highlights that all3media international believes will appeal to buyers across Asia, along with Celebrity Undercover, which follows on from the success of Undercover Boss. From Gordon Ramsay’s Studio Ramsay comes 24 Hours to Hell and Back. “Our clients in AsiaPac love Gordon Ramsay, and we have eight new prime-time episodes for FOX in the U.S. of this factual-entertainment program,” says Sabrina Duguet, the executive VP for the Asia Pacific at all3media international.

The company is also eyeing format adaptations in the region for titles such as Catch Me Out, Wedding Day Winners and Hit It. Catch Me Out is being launched in Thailand this year, “and the feedback has been fantastic,” says Duguet.

“2017 was our first full year for the new Singapore team and office, and it has been a fantastic start.”

—Sabrina Duguet

AsiaSat

AsiaSat satellite

Satellite connectivity / Media solutions AsiaSat is celebrating 30 years in the business of offering satellite connectivity and media solutions to clients in the broadcast and telecom sectors. “We have continued to invest in expanding our satellite fleet and ground solutions to meet customers’ evolving needs,” says Barrie Woolston, chief commercial officer. “The latest offering is our most powerful satellite, AsiaSat 9, which carries advanced satellite technologies and features to provide customers with the highest ever performance in terms of power and efficiency.

The latest addition to AsiaSat’s extensive range of valueadded services from our Tai Po Earth Station in Hong Kong is our new IP-based hybrid delivery solutions and OTT CDN in the Sky service.” AsiaSat now serves more than 250 television and radio broadcasters.

“Amid the dynamic Asian market, we will put evolving client demands at the center of our product and service development.”

—Barrie Woolston

Astro

DOSA

Nusantara / Horror / eSports Astro has carved out differentiated content verticals, including Nusantara, Horror and eSports. “We aspire to champion premium IP with regional appeal, and we are currently working with like-minded partners on several co-production collaborations to target ASEAN audiences and millennials,” says Agnes Rozario, VP of content management at Astro. The Nusantara vertical includes the miniseries DOSA, an action drama that features both Malaysian and Indonesian cast and crew members, while the Horror vertical is home to the 3 A.M. Bangkok Ghost Stories franchise. In the way of eSports, Astro offers eGG Network, a channel that takes a 360-degree approach to maximizing fan engagement. In December, Astro and Huomao, China’s leading eSports live-streaming platform, launched Tamago, a new live-streaming platform targeted at millennials.

“Astro is embracing change brought about by digital, online and mobile while staying true to our core as a consumer-focused company.”

—Agnes Rozario 386 WORLD SCREEN 4/18

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Emma Fielding Mysteries

Bomanbridge Media Inazuma Eleven Ares / Emma Fielding Mysteries / Gamerz This year, Bomanbridge Media has stepped into the market with Japanese animation for the first time, “which has been incredibly exciting,” says CEO Sonia Fleck. “It is an extremely competitive environment. We are enjoying the dynamic energy the kids’ buyers bring to the landscape and are pleased with the deals we are closing so far.”

Inazuma Eleven Ares, the third in the soccer trilogy by LEVEL-5 abby, follows the story of a group of passionate sports lovers who together are preventing their soccer team from being disbanded. Inazuma Eleven Ares will be released right before the World Cup. The company is also offering the detective series Emma Fielding Mysteries, as well as the Gamerz format. Gamerz taps into the eSports phenomenon.

“We always focus on bringing the best, most relevant content to our buyers in Asia.”

—Sonia Fleck

Busan Contents Market

Busan, South Korea

May 9-11 / Busan, South Korea The upcoming 12th edition of Busan Contents Market (BCM2018) will be opening its doors from May 9 to 11. Taking place at the Busan Exhibition & Convention Center, the event is sponsored by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism of Busan Metropolitan City. BCM2018 continues to invite local broadcasting companies, production enterprises and international content specialists to Korea. It will provide attendees with special lectures, such as the BCM Academy, as well as a diverse array of seminars and forums. Through the BCM Global Pitching session, the event is offering an opportunity to pitch content to international and domestic broadcasters, investors, buyers and sellers. The Asia Next Generation Contents Forum Seminar will focus on the current state of and future developments in the area of OTT programming.

FremantleMedia International American Idol / My Brilliant Friend / Hang Ups The popular singing competition American Idol has returned to the small screen, this time on ABC in the U.S. “American Idol’s profound effect on the music industry is far-reaching and continually growing,” says Ganesh Rajaram, the executive VP of sales for Asia at FremantleMedia International. “We’ve had amazing success with the franchise, and this reboot is even more spectacular with the amazing new judges—Katy Perry, Lionel Richie and Luke Bryan—and some pretty incredible talent. It’s going to be a tremendous success in the region.” Also for AsiaPac buyers, the company is offering up My Brilliant Friend, an eight-part drama based on Elena Ferrante’s best-selling book of the same name, and Hang Ups, a six-part comedy adapted from the Emmynominated series Web Therapy.

American Idol

“We are super excited to be bringing American Idol back to the world—it’s the show that started the whole reality-entertainment genre.”

—Ganesh Rajaram 4/18 WORLD SCREEN 387

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The Good, the Bad and the Ugly on the HITS Movies Presents block on HITS

Rewind Networks HITS Rewind Networks’ HITS channel is now available in 10 million homes across eight markets: Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Brunei and Myanmar.

The service is dedicated to all-time great drama and comedy series from past decades. HITS has recently added to its lineup a teaser block called HITS Movies Presents, which “serves as a lead-up to the full-fledged HITS Movies channel,” explains Avi Himatsinghani, CEO of Rewind Networks. “We are very different from other networks that drop movies into the schedule to drive up ratings but overall offer an unclear core proposition. With HITS Movies, we are going to showcase movies that you can’t easily find elsewhere. It’s a beautiful curation of handpicked movies from the 1960s to the 1990s.”

“From our perspective, there are new markets to launch in, including Vietnam, as well as Laos and Cambodia.”

—Avi Himatsinghani

Turner Asia Pacific MondoTV / TABI Channel At the end of January 2018, Turner Japan launched three new channels on dTV Channel, the streaming service from NTT DOCOMO. It marks the first time that the Boomerang brand is available in Japan and introduces two new services: MONDO Mah-jong TV and Tabi Tele. They joined Turner’s portfolio of channels already available in Japan, including Cartoon Network, MondoTV, TABI Channel and CNN International. “Turner is the largest foreign producer of TV programming in Japan, and we produce almost 400 hours of original programming every year for our local brands MondoTV and TABI Channel,” says Tom Perry, general manager of Turner Japan. MondoTV is a leading maleskewed lifestyle channel, while TABI Channel is dedicated to showcasing unique travel experiences.

Shikoku Walking Pilgrimage on TABI Channel

“Content syndication is going to be a really big priority for us in the months ahead.”

—Tom Perry

TV5MONDE Asia-Pacific TV5MONDE Asie /TV5MONDE Pacifique /TV5MONDE Style HD Within the TV5MONDE Asia-Pacific bouquet, TV5MONDE Asie is available across the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia, while TV5MONDE Pacifique reaches Japan, Korea and Australasia. There is also TV5MONDE Style HD, a French lifestyle channel. “2017 was another good year for TV5MONDE in the Asia Pacific,” says Alexandre Muller, the managing director of TV5MONDE Asia-Pacific. “We have renewed our current contracts and extended the reach of all three channels to an additional 130 pay-TV operators in the region, reaching over 93 million pay-TV homes in AsiaPac.” The Style HD channel launched in seven markets over the last year, including Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore, while TV5MONDE Asie strengthened its position in India, Thailand, Taiwan, the Philippines and Indonesia.

Rugby Top 14 on TV5MONDE

“As always, we have a lot of exciting and unique content coming up.”

—Alexandre Muller 388 WORLD SCREEN 4/18

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The King in Love on SPTNA’s ONE. 390 WORLD SCREEN 4/18

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Mansha Daswani explores the key trends at play in Asia’s fast-moving pay-TV space. or the global media companies that own payTV channels in Asia, 2017 was a surprisingly good year. Regional channel revenues for the likes of 21st Century Fox, Sony Pictures Television and Viacom hit about $5 billion, according to a study by Media Partners Asia (MPA).

Those gains, however, came from highly local businesses in India, which contributed 65 percent of revenues for regional pay-TV channels in 2017. Southeast Asia contributed just 15 percent, Japan 7 percent and Australia 5 percent. In fact, excluding local channel businesses in India, revenues for pan-Asian broadcasters fell by 1 percent to $2.2 billion.

“Success in a large-scale market such as India shows that regional broadcasters that invest in IP and local businesses can create a lot of long-term value,” says Vivek Couto, executive director and co-founder of MPA. “These bets are starting to percolate across Southeast Asia, Korea and Japan. At the same time, businesses are starting to tap more growth from streaming platforms, including partnerships with online video and telco services.”

Channels are expanding their slates of partnerships because they have to. The industry, leading executives agree, is in a state of flux amid a shift to online and mobile video consumption.

“Household consumption is moving to individual users, there’s no doubt about that,” Couto says. “That is challenging for content providers. It’s exciting if you’re an AVOD model, but it’s not so exciting if you’re expecting subscription fees to be the majority of your revenue stream. What people spend on mobile is a fraction of what they spend as a household on broadband and the competition for that watch time is significant. When you’re competing with mobile you’re competing with a digital ecosystem.”

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BACK TO BASICS Add to that global consolidation moves happening, or pending, in the background, and the result is a state of uncertainty. But with that, channels are focusing on the basics: great programming delivered in every mode the consumer desires, local relevance, smart marketing campaigns and full-service offerings to advertisers.

“We put everything under two buckets—there’s business as usual and there’s innovation,” says Zubin Gandevia, the president of FOX Networks Group Asia (FNGA). “It’s difficult

sometimes to tell what is business as usual and what is innovation because you tend to be innovating all the time. We are a subscription business, which, you could argue, would be business as usual. We’ve enhanced it by innovating and introducing [the OTT service] FOX+, which will help to [extend] the life of this traditional business, not just for us but for our platform partners. Now they have access to amazing content on demand. It also allows us to take a step into the digital future of understanding our consumers more directly and more intimately, and therefore creating a better product.”

Virginia Lim, senior VP and head of content, production and marketing at Sony Pictures Television Networks, Asia (SPTNA), says that embracing digital has helped her portfolio of channels remain relevant in an increasingly ondemand environment. “Nonlinear strategies have become an integral part of our overall programming strategy to increase the availability of our products to various audience segments,” Lim says. “So when we’re negotiating acquisitions, digital rights are now very much a [necessary] factor. We offer stacking catch-up VOD and prior full season catch-up wherever possible. We offer full-episode free views to affiliate partners to increase their reach and sampling in a very fragmented audience market. We work to ensure new shows premiering on our channels are available for catch-up as early as the next day on affiliate platforms. And increasingly, our original content is formatted to be snackable, digital extensions that are available on demand and via our branded social-media platforms.”

LINEAR APPEAL But as it turns out, there is still an opportunity to launch 24/7 linear channel brands. “The world around us is changing rapidly and it was changing even when we launched,” says Avi Himatsinghani, founder and CEO of Rewind Networks, which rolled out the HITS network in 2013. “There were already signs in the West in 2012/13 that OTT and other forms of content distribution were the new way. Fundamentally it comes down to the kind of service offered. Platforms know what works well with them.

Unless there is a clear proposition offered, platforms aren’t willing to carry those services. The size of a [portfolio] no longer determines what channels get carried. This is a very good sign as it creates a more level playing field and helps platforms put out more compelling services.”

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Thalassa is among the shows airing on French-language broadcaster TV5MONDE Asie.

Indeed, Himatsinghani is so encouraged by opportunities in the market, with both traditional pay-TV operators and OTT platforms looking at bundled services of linear channels, he is planning a new network, HITS Movies. The service will launch first as a weekend block on HITS, delivering films from the ’60s through the ’90s. “People often ask, Why are you launching another linear channel with HITS Movies? Because [these movies] don’t get consumed through on-demand that easily. Deep library competes for a share of time with first-run and exclusive blockbusters like Game of Thrones or Narcos. When a consumer is in an on-demand environment, they tend not to choose to consume deep library, even if the movies are timeless hits.”

UNTAPPED POTENTIAL Alexandre Muller, managing director for Asia-Pacific at Frenchlanguage broadcaster TV5MONDE, has also seen growth in his channels business over the last year. “TV5MONDE Asie and TV5MONDE Pacifique, our general-entertainment channels, have seen strong growth in markets such as India, Sri Lanka and Korea. And TV5MONDE Style HD, our thematic channel focusing on French [lifestyle], was launched with many partners in the Asia Pacific, including Thailand, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong.”

Rewind’s Himatsinghani points out that there are still territories to expand to. “Many of these emerging markets are highly populated, dense areas and are not necessarily evolved in terms of broadband or mobile. Pay TV is still the bread and butter, bundling strong local fare alongside select international content that people can afford on a mass-scale basis. From our perspective, there are new markets to launch in, including Vietnam, as well as Laos and Cambodia. Even in evolved markets there are new opportunities, including broadband providers looking at bundling their service with content. The ecosystem will evolve into a marketplace with several master aggregators, be it telcos, device players, traditional pay-TV operators going into the OTT space or SVOD services offering linear propositions. So the runway for us is to tap into all of these opportunities and continue to grow.”

TV5MONDE’s Muller observes, “We are lucky to be evolving in a market that still has a lot of growth [to come] for the next couple of years. There are still plenty of opportunities in the region for us and our priority for the coming 18 months will be to strengthen the distribution in mature markets through TV5MONDE Style HD

while growing the availability of TV5MONDE Asie/Pacifique.”

For many channels, a primary growth area has been original content creation. “It’s about creating unique content that is only available on our services,” says SPTNA’s Lim. “We have grown in the original IP space with our own formats and our own characters that are available for merchandising and to be produced into animated series and vignettes.”

AXN has long been in the originalcontent space with shows like The Amazing Race Asia and Asia’s Got Talent. More recently, AXN launched The Elements: Cosentino, and sister network Sony Channel has also expanded into original IP with The Apartment, an interior design reality competition.

ONE, meanwhile, features popular Korean shows like The King in Love. AXN also launched a show specifically for the key market of the Philippines, Adventure Your Way. “This is an interesting concept as it bridges the gap between the linear and social spheres,” Lim explains. “Essentially, the series is fully crowd-sourced—AXN viewers in the Philippines get to advise the show host on where he should travel to next and the adventures he should experience, via Facebook and Twitter.”

Lim adds that this social-media strategy is crucial. “We don’t see social as an after-thought and a marketing campaign; we treat it as part of the series experience, extending the show beyond TV to digital so that fans can consume more and engage more deeply with the untold stories.”

LET’S GET SOCIAL Social media engagement has been helpful to Rewind.

“We’re in the business of listening to our customers,” Himatsinghani says. “Consumers—because they know what the HITS proposition is—provide us with reams of recommendations. They trust our curation, but they also want to be involved in the process by being our programmers. Sandie Lee, Rewind’s VP and channel head, and our team feel like DJs listening to requests. Shows like MacGyver, Three’s Company, Airwolf, Baywatch and Knight Rider were all suggested to us on our Facebook page. That’s unique to us and something we have not seen happen anywhere else. We need to see ourselves as playlists. In the world of Spotify and Apple Music, there is a certain proposition you need to live up to. If your playlist is not strong enough, you’re not going to have followers.”

Advertisers also want to see channels embracing digital so they can get a 360-degree offering that reaches audiences wherever they are. “We’re seeing keen interest in digital extensions and brands wanting to leverage our social platforms to reach and influence new audiences,” says SPTNA’s Lim. The general view among pay-TV channel operators is that as the business is changing, being agile and flexible is key.

“The overall theme is, continue business as usual and keep innovating because we have to move forward and march ahead,” FNGA’s Gandevia says. “The world is moving very quickly and we want to continue to be at the forefront of that progress.”

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Nippon TV’s I’m Mita, Your Housekeeper.

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Distributors from across Asia are opening new markets with drama series, formats and more.

By Mansha Daswani t is strangely appropriate that of all the television markets in the world, Turkey has become a microcosm of the present state of, and prospects for, Asian content exports. A bridge between two continents, Turkey has an incredibly prolific domestic programming infrastructure in its own right, so it’s not the most accessible market. But for Asian distributors, developments in Turkey are not only boding well for content exports beyond the Asia-Pacific region—they are also giving regional sellers a preview of what their businesses could look like in the years to come.

Turkish producers, eager to generate the next big hit, have been looking further afield for ideas, resulting in a number of Asian series being adapted in the market.

Some of those local adaptations have gone on to sell well globally, as was the case with Mother, based on a Japanese drama. On the flip side, Turkish broadcasters looking to differentiate themselves have been acquiring foreign product to counterprogram against local series. Kanal 7, for example, saw its ratings soar off the back of the Indian romantic drama Iss Pyaar Ko Kya Naam Doon.

“It broke many viewership records by quadrupling the channel ratings in that slot,” says Gurjeev Kapoor, the president of international business at Star India. “This paved the way for many more Indian series on local Turkish television and Turkey continues to be a growth market for us.”

“Turkey has become our gateway to the regions we never reached before,” says Cindy Chino, the senior director of international business development at Nippon TV, rights holder of the previously mentioned Japanese drama Mother.

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EUROPEAN AMBITIONS Europe has mostly been a tricky market for Asian content distributors, but formats are seen as one of the best ways in.

“Our focus for Europe is non-scripted formats,” reports Motoko Nakai, director of the international business department at Japan’s TV Asahi, which has also established a significant business in Europe with its anime titles like Doraemon and Shin Chan.

“We find that our format concepts are highly regarded as they are unique, fresh and often just simply fun. Our formats

have also all been proven in Japan and we know they work.

However, in many cases, the structure or set-up of our program seems to be too unfamiliar or strange to European audiences. As such, we have lately been focusing on identifying and working with partners that value our format concepts and ideas and also have the ability to translate them to European tastes, which often is about re-conceptualizing the feel of the program.”

FOLLOWING THE FORMAT As examples, Nakai references TV Asahi’s pact with FremantleMedia on vs KIDS and a relationship with Small World IFT on Experts Versus Experts. “We are also currently co-developing a new format with a London producer and look forward to launching the title this year,” Nakai notes.

As Nippon TV’s Chino referenced, scripted formats have become a major growth area for a number of Asian distributors, even as tape sales continue to dominate their businesses. “Our two pillars are animation tape sales and formats, both scripted and non-scripted,” Chino says, adding, “The demand for scripted is accelerating this past year and opening up new opportunities for us.”

Sunita Uchil, the chief business officer for global syndication and production and international ad sales at Zee Entertainment Enterprises, mentions Lala’s Ladiez, which is based on the classic Indian serial Hum Paanch.

“Kulvinder Ghir of Goodness Gracious Me [a BBC comedy that aired in the ’90s] is Mr. Lala and he has five daughters, each one of them unique in their own way. His wife is English. So it’s an Indo-British sitcom. We’re very happy about that because it’s an original produced in the U.K. by Endemol Shine. We are hoping to get some traction with it.”

TV Asahi is exploring the scripted format sector as well, says Nakai. “Japanese drama series are typically short with approximately ten episodes per season and only a few are produced for several seasons. However, the themes portrayed, the quality of the storytelling and character depictions are exceptional and distinctive and we are finding that most scripts can be further developed into longer series.”

Nakai adds, “Stories with strong characters tackling universal socio-political issues attract much interest. Our storytelling techniques not only elucidate the prevailing social issues but

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also incorporate comedic, cynical or provocative methods to shed light on the human condition. Several Asian countries that are interested in boosting their own drama productions are eyeing our scripts, but we are also in discussions with North American and Turkish producers.”

Star India’s Kapoor identifies format sales as being “key to driving the next level of growth for the business. They allow good stories to root themselves in the local and cultural context and successfully drive relevance and viewership. There is a lot of interest in many of our shows for local adaptations.”

LATIN EXPANSION

Asian dramas on offer at MIPTV include, from top, GMA’s The Other Mrs. Real, TV Asahi’s Ossan’s Love, Zee’s Jeet Gayi Toh Piya Morey and Star India’s Love Ka Hai Intezar.

Like their Turkish counterparts, Asian scripted powerhouses are finding keen demand for their titles from Latin America.

Roxanne Barcelona, VP of GMA Worldwide, a division of the Filipino broadcast group, notes, “GMA dramas are slowly breaking ground in Latin America. To date, seven drama formats were sold to Mexico and four canned dramas did very well in Peru and Ecuador.”

Latin America is also becoming a promising area for Indian dramas. Kapoor says that Star India is gaining traction in the region following the sale of Saras & Kumud to seven markets.

“Saras & Kumud has driven viewership for our broadcast partners in leading markets like Chile and Peru,” he says.

“Yours Truly, Paakhi is another show that has been received favorably in Peru. We are now looking at investing in dubbing a few of our key shows to derive maximum value.”

Zee’s Uchil has also found a host of opportunities in the region. “In most markets, we might tailor [the content] according to that particular audience and its customs,” says Uchil on the challenges of selling Indian drama worldwide. “There are many times we have to do a particular kind of editing on a season. We see Latin America as so close to what we have to offer, we can almost take our programs and just have them fit in there. You just have to choose the right ones—not the religious types of shows, but all the other ones. Today, a lot of Latin America is talking about women’s empowerment, hope, growth, giving them more power, more promise, and that’s exactly what the Zee India proposition is. It’s all about hope.

That’s where we are when we’re producing new stories in India. Latin America should be another big market for us.”

As they expand further globally, distributors from across Asia are also maintaining their strong content-sales businesses within the region. “China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Korea have a high demand for Japanese dramas,” says TV Asahi’s Nakai. “Doctors and police forces exist in all countries, which is a factor that makes our dramas travel well internationally.”

For GMA Worldwide, on the heels of a prosperous 2017 that saw it crack new territories like Papua New Guinea, Myanmar, Indonesia and Ghana, further global expansion is critical. “We constantly try to add more territories to our portfolio of clients,” says Barcelona. “Our goal is to make GMA the premier source of Filipino content and scripted dramas. Of course, some territories are harder to penetrate than others, but our goal is to get Filipino content to as many territories as possible. This is a never-ending process that makes the international distribution of Filipino content very challenging.”

Ultimately, says Star India’s Kapoor, “good storytelling can traverse borders,” which bodes well for Asian distributors eager to make an impact on the global content stage.

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By Mansha Daswani

Whether it’s coding workshops for kids or fan events around Korean heartthrobs and comic-book heroes, Turner Asia Pacific has been intently focused on making sure that it is engaging with its fans wherever they are. Under the leadership of its president, Ricky Ow, Turner Asia Pacific has been steadily expanding its regional business, launching new brands, investing in original IP, aligning with OTT operators and extending its key franchises into consumer products, social media and on-the-ground events. Ow talks to TV Asia about fan engagement, remaining relevant and growth opportunities for Cartoon Network, Oh!K, Warner TV and more.

TV ASIA: What have been the major developments in your Asia-Pacific business over the last year?

OW: Our global CEO, John Martin, says Turner has become a fan-first company. The fan-first strategy and investment in local IP are the key areas that we’ve been driving. We believe that they will continue to serve us, regardless of the future developments in television. They are still the basic elements that will get us to where we want to be.

I can give you some examples. We have turned Warner TV into a first-run channel for the DC [Comics] audience.

We’ve entered into a partnership with Astro Malaysia and widened Warner TV’s distribution across Asia. In Japan, a stable and mature market, we are launching Boomerang, MONDO Mah-jong TV and Tabi Tele on NTT DOCOMO’s dTV Channel streaming service. So while people are cutting down on channels, we are still launching services that are local and relevant to the market.

TV ASIA: Speaking of local entertainment, your Korean channel Oh!K has been a big success. In that competitive market, how are you maintaining a steady supply of top programming?

OW: Oh!K is doing extremely well. It’s the number one Korean GE channel in prime time on weekdays in Singapore.

It increased viewership by 20 percent in 2017. In Malaysia, it increased by 37 percent. It’s going from strength to strength. We have a long-term partnership with MBC. They produce some of the best shows, such as the recent tentpoles Hospital Ship and I’m Not a Robot. Our key goal for Oh!K is really trying to expand the reach of Korean drama.

Korean drama has been popular for many, many years. By localizing the shows with high-quality dubbing and subtitles, we have widened the target audience. And by crosspromoting with channels like Warner TV we are trying to attract a younger, more sophisticated audience to Korean shows. MBC also helps us to do a year-end live awards show, and for the first time we broadcast it with English commentary. So you can see the efforts we’re putting into widening the appeal of the Korean wave in Southeast Asia.

TV ASIA: You recently restructured your Southeast Asian business. What led to that?

OW: The Southeast Asia office was part of the Hong Kong office. Hong Kong and Singapore are only three and a half hours apart. But Southeast Asia is still a market with 640 million people, Indonesia being a big part of that.

It is very attractive to us as a whole because of its size.

It’s going through a change, and it’s not homogenous.

Having a Southeast Asian office will put us in a better position to understand the [region]. We have a Warner TV Pop Expo [in the Philippines], similar to Comic-Con. We do work with the IMDA in Singapore to engage the local community to foster the animation industry and create new IP. We did a coding workshop in the Philippines for kids and tied it up with The Powerpuff Girls. We had more pop-up restaurants and pop-up cafes in Southeast Asia last year. Our YouTube channels are localized in various Southeast Asian markets. And we have more linear channel partners and more OTT partners. So the amount of activity has grown significantly enough for us to put more focus there.

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TV ASIA: You’ve expanded your presence in Japan as well.

Are you seeing new opportunities there that weren’t available in the past?

OW: When you see a big player like NTT launching a streaming service in Japan, it’s good news for all of us. It gives us a chance to tap into a whole new audience. We made sure the channels we put there are differentiated—they are not the same ones as on cable. There is no cannibalization for us.

They are uniquely different in a lot of ways. We can leverage the brand and do sub-brands that don’t cannibalize, so we can attract a totally different audience and grow the marketplace. Japan has been good to us. It’s a high ARPU market with a very stable environment, so having a new launch is very exciting for all of us. And having three channels [on NTT], as an international broadcaster, is very exciting.

TV ASIA: What kinds of opportunities are your finding with OTT platforms across the region?

OW: We have put our Cartoon Network shows on iflix, we are with Tribe, we are on Netflix, HOOQ and Stan, to name a few. We have our content with a good number of the big operators. By having our content with them, we continue to put our fans first. We need to be where our fans are. And we need to take care of our core business. We need to make sure that the first-runs remain very much with our pay-TV partners, but the [Cartoon Network] franchises expand beyond linear TV. We are learning from our partners—they are sharing with us what works and what doesn’t work. A lot of partners have found that when they have kids’ content like Cartoon Network, it reduces churn. The kids continue to watch, even after the adult has watched what they want to watch. I’m not saying we know everything at this point, but the learning is good for us as Asia is experimenting with many models.

CNN and Cartoon Network are available through the AIS PLAY app and AIS PLAYBOX in Thailand. They join other Turner channels already on AIS Play: Warner TV, HLN and Boomerang. Also in February, the linear channels Cartoon Network and Warner TV secured carriage on the new Indonesian OTT platform ForjiFlix.

TV ASIA: What have been some of your major localprogramming initiatives?

OW: Investment in local IP has been a big development for us, in every region. In Southeast Asia we have a partnership with mm2 Entertainment to produce five movies over a three-year period. These movies will play on our channel and we’ll be able to syndicate them. Monster Beach (the series) was announced at MIPJunior last year as a production from Asia Pacific for the international market. India has continued to invest in local IP. Turner produces 400 hours of original programming in Japan every year. In China we have produced a lot of shorts featuring Tuzki, our emoji rabbit IP. We are doubling down on our efforts. There are movies with Tencent for Tuzki and we will be doing more. You can see the breadth and the width of the things we’ve been doing, from local IP to short-form to animation. Not many of the international players have such a wide local production plan.

TV ASIA: What are some of the things you have to do today to drive awareness of your brands and your content in such a crowded environment?

OW: On the kids’ side, we look at the franchise—The Powerpuff Girls, Ben 10—and we plan the whole 360-degree attack.

Linear TV, games, apps, YouTube, OTT, Facebook. We ensure that whether it’s social, digital or linear TV, our franchises are well represented and our fans can consume a version of them. Last year we claimed 1.7 billion touch points for Cartoon Network. This year we have grown it to 2.3 billion. This is excluding China. Cartoon Network Wave, our branded cruise ship, is another touch point, as well as the award-winning Cartoon Network Amazone waterpark in Thailand.

On the entertainment side, Warner TV has the advantage of the DC fan base, which we can connect with through social or a mechanism like the fan expo. They are the influencers who will push your IP out there. We focus a lot on social. But we also make sure we have onthe-ground events that tie back to social, tie back to the linear channel. It’s similar for Oh!K—social, plus visits by Korean talent. You can’t just shout louder. You have to be consistent in surrounding and engaging your fans throughout the year. You can’t shout and then be quiet for six months and then shout again. In six months, if their eyes aren’t on you, they’ve forgotten about you.

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Hospital Ship is one of the flagship dramas on Turner’s Oh!K Korean content channel.

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Across the globe, traditional pay-TV platforms are finding new ways to re-energize their businesses, and Astro in Malaysia is no exception. Delivering content packages to subscribers, made up of both local and international channel brands, is still a core proposition. But as CEO Rohana Rozhan tells TV Asia, reinvention is key. Astro is investing in technology to improve the customer experience, ramping up original content creation and looking at ways to expand across Southeast Asia.

TV ASIA: In an evolving ecosystem, what are you focusing on at Astro?

ROZHAN: Our success over the last 23 years has been premised on primarily three things. The first has always been that we do not compromise on the fact that we are a premium service. We have all the tools within the premium service to serve the premium homes and premium customers and not be second to anyone else. That has always been our ambition, and that’s why we’ve always been the one who innovates in our market, introducing HD, VOD and so on.

The second has been, once we invested in the premium platform and the capabilities thereof, we had the tools to deal with the mass market. That’s where we’ve introduced NJOI [a free satellite platform]. If you have the infrastructure and technology, you can deploy it across the whole market and get scale.

And third is original content, primarily in vernacular. That has become our strong differentiator.

So going forward, it’s about looking at the market landscape and understanding what those three tenets mean and how we are going to deploy them within the new landscape.

Our strategy from this year on will be to reinforce [our position]. We still feel like there are a lot of opportunities for growth. And the question is how you reinvest in order to deliver on that promise. All these three things are intertwined.

We don’t talk about content as if it’s stand-alone. We feel like in the new world order we have to build an ecosystem with the consumers in mind that is enabling and seamless. Within that has to be the position for premium, the position for mass, which is scale, and the position for content, which for us means vernacular. So that’s where we’re going.

We also feel like we need to supplement and complement the skills that we have, so we’ve set up a fund that invests in organic growth opportunities. It is meant to make strategic investments. Our key focus is to build on a portfolio of investments that prioritizes ecosystem build-ups.

We want to be present and have a seat at the table in new technologies that can gain traction with our customers and maybe overnight gain global scale. That’s required. There are so many little disruptors, so many new start-ups, and they give us real ideas in terms of how to complement and supplement our capabilities.

So these are our core strategies going forward. Our job is not only to defend where we are, but it’s also to use the digital capabilities to engage our customers better, to be more seamless in that, to get to know our customers better than anyone else. We have a real plan. You heard from us last year about how we tied up Amazon Web Services in a three-year transformation. So we’re starting to find our feet in the new world order. It takes time. Astro was built on the premise that we’re a tech company and we give best-inclass experiences to our customers. We lost some ground there. This year is going to be us going back to the market to reclaim that position. We will reclaim that position in the home based on a new tech platform for the set-top boxes.

We will reclaim that ground by having all the content in its various forms: day and date, live, first window, box sets, portability, on-demand, all of that.

This is what happens when you’re an incumbent—when we started this business it was premised on a different landscape, a different problem that we had to solve for the customers. There was no multichannel TV. There were regulations for free to air that called for about 80 percent of the content to be in the Malay language. There were only three or four free-to-air channels then. The problem we had to solve for the customers back then was to bring choice—in international content, in vernacular content. We solved that. We brought a multichannel TV proposition, the best of international, the best of vernacular in Hokkien, Mandarin, Tamil and other dialects. That was the low hanging fruit then. Those are no longer problems. What are the problems of the customers today? Complexity. It’s such a crowded marketplace, there’s so much noise, and they have so many choices. We now have to use technology wisely to simplify, to be intuitive, to be personalized and to aptly address whatever aspirational lifestyle the customer has.

That is what we’re doing in Malaysia.

TV ASIA: Tell us about your original IP strategy.

ROZHAN: Core to our business, first and foremost, is Malay content for the Malaysian market. Malays form about 70 percent of the population. So we have every intention of being a very significant content player among the Malay vernacular. And we already are. We’re going to reinforce that even further across the ecosystem. It’s not just dramas. It has to be allencompassing. We are embracing a world where people want short form and clips and so on. So we’re strengthening and building on what we already have. The second track has to be Nusantara [Indonesia and wider Southeast Asia]. That is part of our growth engine for tomorrow. We used to think that if we build for Malaysia, we can take it for granted that it will be relevant for a bigger audience. But the reality is, 4/18 WORLD SCREEN 401

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Astro collaborated with partners in Southeast Asia to stage a regional version of The Voice.

it doesn’t work that way. We have to build for Nusantara, from the ideation of any stories. It has to be done in collaboration with others. For instance, last year, our production capabilities did things like the SEA Games. In today’s world, it’s about halving your costs but also addressing a bigger market. So in the SEA Games, our team went around to other broadcasters in the region—Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia— and said, let’s produce it once and share the costs, and each localize it for our own markets. There will be a lot more collaborations like that from our production capabilities.

Nobody wants to go out there and just build for your own market. You need to deal with the cost structures as well.

We also did The Voice, Asia’s Got Talent, that kind of thing, for this region. We have the ambition to build on our production capabilities and skills so we can address a bigger market. That gives us revenue opportunities. Equally important to us is that we start building our skillsets.

Back to the IP, we have a lot in the pipeline with Indonesia, with Thailand, as well as with China and India. For Indonesia, for instance, we have DOSA, which is a miniseries, Heist and Polis Evo2. We have 3 A.M. Bangkok Ghost Stories and Door with Thailand. And we have a remake of [the Chinese film] The Journey as well. You’ll see us out there a lot more.

TV ASIA: How is the OTT platform Tribe performing?

ROZHAN: We’re at 3.1 million users in the Philippines, Indonesia, Singapore and Thailand. We’re not going out the way that other [OTTs] have gone out. We are targeting a different demographic, the younger segment. We look at content slightly differently for Tribe. And we’re not going to play this game where people are just land-grabbing and it is a cash burn. We’re trying to build communities of fans. It’s about building content IPs and building differentiators within them.

A lot of our ambition with Tribe underpins our content IP story. A lot of it will be building an IP presence and a pipeline together with Astro Malaysia and the Nusantara ambition.

TV ASIA: How do you determine what those must-have brands are for your customers?

ROZHAN: This is a debate even among ourselves. Clarity is a good thing, right? What we’ve landed on is that absolute clarity is going back to the drawing board and saying, by accident and by design, we are where we are. There is an

Astro that is privileged to be in a very strong position in Malaysia. We play the premium, the mass and the vernacular games. We are in 75 percent of total households; it’s not an issue for us to be at 80 or 85 percent in a very short time.

We’ve got 17 million [weekly] radio listeners. All Malaysians are touched by Astro because we have assets across digital, radio and TV. We touch people’s lives 10 to 12 hours a day!

That’s well and good, but now we have the technologies to understand our consumers better by data sciences and by having the ability to pull together and personalize. So that’s what we’ve embarked on with Amazon Web Services. We will get to know our customers better. We will break down the 30 million people into more than 20 customer personas. And then we’ll individualize a playlist for each one of them. Once we know who the customer personas are, we size up the opportunity for each of them. What is the size of their collective wallet? What is the size of the ad expenditure opportunity for each segment? And then we try to match them against the media assets that we have. Maybe we’re doing too much to address someone who already has too much to watch. Where are the bubbles of opportunity or gaps that we can opportunistically address using our content IPs, our channel collaborations and other experiences? There is a science and an art to this. The whole idea is to rationalize our media investments, assets, channel collaborations and so on, to optimize the spend to the opportunity. That is something we are doing now, understanding that where we want to spend the most money, what we want to spend the most time on, is what differentiates us.

What clearly differentiates us is the vernacular content, the Malay content, the Nusantara content. Let us solve the problems that we’re good at and that differentiate us and [provide the content] that a customer values and will pay for and that advertisers need to reach the customers.

So we cannot just have more and more channels when you know that people are shifting to on-demand. We have to be clear about what role the channels play and that’s where data is extremely important in various ways.

Matching the data supply and the data demand is extremely important. And understanding the customers enough, and our advertisers enough, to know the customer personas and how much they can be valued at, where the real gaps are and where our real strengths are.

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