With a focus on the content needs of new players in APAC, Victoria de Kerdrel, APAC consultant at K7 Media, in conversation with Ryan Lee, Senior Content Development & Acquisition Exec at Sarawak Media Group (Malaysia), Krishi Dutt, director of VROTT (India), with Yesim Sezdirmez, Deputy General Manager at Kanal 7 (Turkey), offered their impressions of the market in a new panel during the eighth day of LA Virtual Screenings.
Lee from Sarawak Media Group, a brand new TV station in Malaysia which are based at East Malaysia Park, the Borneo Island, where started back in 2018, expressed the company’s mission in the Asian market: ‘We want to establish ourselves as a media hub in the region and accelerate the growth of the creative media industry here. In 2020, we launched our terrestrial TV broadcast formulations to watch and we capture about eight million unique views and we do our own content production work’. The executive explained that they sell airtime slots billboards and commission local production houses to pitch their ideas to create original content on TV platforms: ‘So i would target audience varies depending on the platform we use for terrestrial TV. There are people of age 20 and above, basically youngs’. The signal seeks to capture international views, and has deployed a whole media strategy that includes Social Networks and YouTube.
Kanal 7’s Sezdirmez commented on the channel’s position in Turkey: ‘We are one of the leading commercial channels and we are based in Istanbul. We are an entertainment TV channel, and we position ourselves as the family channel of Turkey appeal to the general audience’. The company makes various genres available, such as local series, non scripted, travel shows, and in the future, films and turkish dramas programs. ‘The content market is very dynamic: you have to be very relevant and innovative in order to stand out. Our main pillar of content is to present high quality long running daily series on prime time. In this aspect, we have content with a strong female presence and with relevance to family values. The other pillar is our daytime content block, which is very important in Turkey, because there are many reality shows in this block competing with weekly drama series, and to make a difference from other channels, we are acquiring drama series’. The executive said that they are looking for content from different markets, from innovative proposals and have decided to include content from regional countries, especially India.
As for VROTT, Dutt expressed ‘we are an India-based company based out of Mumbai and we are more than 20 years old in the market’. The company operates with three business verticals, explained the director, the first is dedicated to acquiring and distributing international films from major studios in Hollywood and films from the Far East and from the UK: ‘usually we acquire all the rights and exploit such content on theatrical, on tv, or VOD and other digital platforms.
As a second business vertical they have dubbing and localization services: ‘We have a dubbing studio in India, where we are dedicated to subtitling and localizing in Indian languages, like Hindi, and other international languages. While the third vertical follows is our newly launched OTT platform VROTT, whose catalog is made up of global content subtitled and dubbed for the Indian market.’
