With focus on strategic alliances, Viu, ViacomCBS and iQiyi International, highlighted at ATF 2021 the strategies lead in the field of VOD and linear TV within the APAC region. The three players confirmed key partnerships with local companies to promote content and their D2C platforms.
The conversation, organized virtual & physical at Marina Bay Sands, was led by Anna Pak Burdi, head of business development at iQiyi International, Anson Tan, Country Head at Viu Singapore, and Catherine Park, SVP, head of office & streaming (Asia) at ViacomCBS Networks International.
Tan highlighted Viu‘s hybrid model, and its availability in 16 global markets: ‘Alliances are fundamental for us. We have an aggressive plan of partnerships with local companies and local telcos to be able to distribute the platform in more regions of Asia. We put a priority on supporting business partners’ key performance indexes. Given that most telcos have invested heavily in the deployment of 4G and 5G networks, Viu aims to drive engagement that can translate into data usage for our telco partners. In terms of content, we also collaborated with partners on local content production. In 2020, the platform co-produced and jointly launched two originals with Thailand-based telco PCL. The originals were made available on both Viu and AIS platforms at the same time’.
ParkemphasizedViacomCBS‘s commitment to its Pay TV signals, although he assured that 2022 will come with a strong focus on D2C: ‘Our mission is currently to empower our brand’s content in the Asian market, whether for Streaming, channels or for the web, and that is why we are focused on alliances to promote these contents or experiences, as we prefer to call them. Although our current leadership resides in Pay TV, with the syndication of programming, we are moving towards a D2C strategy with streaming. We are analyzing our roll out in Asia of our D2C on Paramount + strategy as head’.
Meanwhile, Burdi of iQiyiunderlined: ‘We are past our stage of improving our platform. Now we are growing as a service in terms of content and this is thanks to a distribution strategy with telcos, because basically we have to get our content to complicated places in Asia. We must think about the variety of access that the audience has in Asia, such as currency exchange, credit card payments, internet access, so the best thing is to partner with strategic companies to simplify these processes’.
