Though formally ATF 2023 starts today, yesterday was a key day for getting a picture of audiovisuals in Asia, especially APAC: technology applied to content, strategic alliances and FAST as a new big streaming model were the hot topics of ‘The ATF Leaders Dialogue’, the full pre-day program. For the whole market, RX Global has confirmed the preliminary figures of 715 selling companies, 15 official pavilions, and 866 in-person buyers till December 8. These numbers are not definitive, but a good signal that the Asian market is booming again.

The Dialogues? With focus on India, Jio Entertainment Services (Viacom18) participated in the conference “Entertainment Evolution: Fueling India's Appetite for Entertainment” where recounted the enormous growth of the Indian TV industry. 'In India, we think consumer behavior is evolving, pre-pandemic and post-pandemic. So, the ecosystem strategy comes from the point of view that we make it very easy for our customers to access the content they want to watch, and a touch point where it's available’, said Khushboo Yadav, CEO.

The Philippines: Julius Renzo Pagtalunan, Rica Arevalo, Daniel David Morales, Tirso Cruz III, Jose Javier Reyes, Mario Rivero, all from Film Development Council of the Philippines

Meanwhile, in the session “Thailand's Boost, affecting the Asian Landscape”, Patompong Sirachairat, CEO, MonoNext, the Thai media content conglomerate that now offers original titles through its Monomax platform, said: ‘MonoNext has expanded its business subsequently to meet customer's expectations in terms of movies and series, both domestically and internationally. We lead the operations both in movie business and SVOD (Monomax). The new challenging chapter of MonoNext is that we are committed to producing our original content under ‘Mono Original’ label with world-class standards, prompt to offer customers our top-notch contents from our famous producers, film directors, and Thailand's leading actors and actresses'.

What are executives looking for at ATF edition? Ekin Koyuncu Karaman, director of OGM (Turkey): 'In the Asian market, the needs and tastes are very different compared to the Hispanic market in the U.S., Latin America and Europe. Here, I think genres with crime, fantasy are more an upfront compared to regular Turkish dramas’.

Pia Lin, content acquisition from Chunghwa Telecom (Taiwan): ‘We are looking for Japanese and Korean drama series. We also want to find investors for a drama series we are producing in Taiwan. We can include investors from different nations, as Singapore or Hong Kong’.

Stefan Knobloch, director, Superwiss (Singapore) expressed: 'I am a representative of Motovision TV, a TV channel that publishes content related to motorcycles and cars. I am always looking for new trends, especially on green technology for the automotive future. My main goal is to find platforms and channels to carry my TV channel across Asia or to cooperate’.

Xin Lu, Founder at Pan Universe International (China): 'We are looking at all genres for CCTV, including movies, drama series, animation, future movies and animation series, and entertainment programs. Compared to other markets, ATF is different. In others, the main visitors, I mean distributors, mostly come from Europe and America. But in ATF, mainly, they come from different countries of Asia. So that's why we chose this market, here we find varied Asian content’.

Francisco Ferreyra, from Singapore

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