BHD co-founder Bich Hanh Ngo’s birthday present this year is a shiny new streaming platform and a string of cineplexes.

DANET and BHD Star Cineplexes are the culmination of all that she’s done since setting up the production/distribution company in 1996, and her bet on a future in a country of digital natives and an entertainment industry that’s gone from zero to boom across two decades of political progress.

“Normally we don’t have time to celebrate,” she said shortly after this year’s Hanoi International Film Festival (Haniff) in November. “We always focus on what’s coming next.”

But the 20-year milestone for the entertainment company, BHD Vietnam, and the chance to mark a move into digital as well as to fast-track her theatre plans was too good an opportunity to miss.

“It’s time,” she says. “Young people now want to watch anytime anywhere. It’s the right time to mark out 20 years and to be expanding into new areas”. On all levels, she says, “there’s a need to deliver the product directly to the end consumer”.

DANET adds three revenue streams – transactional video on demand (TVOD), subscription video on demand (SVOD) and advertising-supported video on demand (AVOD) – to BHD’s business. Distribution partnerships have already been sealed with Viettel, VTVCab, MyTV, FPT, FPT Play, Next TV, MobiFone and Vinaphone.

The platform will offer about 2,000 movie hours in year one, ramping up to 5,000 in year two, all 100% legal. Hollywood movie output deals for TVOD have been signed with Disney, Warner Bros, NBCUniversal, 20thCentury Fox and Paramount Pictures, and include hundreds of library titles such as Transformers, Jurassic World and Avatar. A diverse slate of movies has been acquired fromKorea, India, Thailand and Europe, including ACompany Man and A Hard Day. Vietnamese titles will stream on DANETthree months after theatrical release.

TVOD movies cost between VND12,000/US$0.53 and VND25,000/ US$1.10 each. SVOD costs VND50,000/US$2.20 a month flat fee. The AVOD platform offers regional/international drama, reality, and DANET originals productions.

Bich Hanh feels “it is important for audiences to pay for what they want to watch” but realises it will take time. “They aren’t in the habit of paying because of piracy,” she says, and the effort to convert illegal to legal continues. “We hope that it will take a couple of years for the audience to realise that paying a little bit of money makes for a much better experience,” she says.

The simultaneous push into theatrical exhibition tracks a market growing at between 30% and 45% a year in Vietnam, serving one of Asia’s youngest populations. Box office has grown from US$3 million in 2008 to US$100 million in 2015. Bich Hanh expects this to continue for another couple of years at least, with more players and fiercer competition.

BHD currently operates seven cinema complexes and 52 screens, the latest of which opened in Hanoi in November 2016. At least two new complexes – in Hue and Hanoi – will open in 2017, adding 12 screens andalmost 2,000 seats. BHD Star Cineplexes will be in 25 locations across Vietnam before 2020 in strategic partnerships with property developers and corporations such as Vincom Group, Bitexco and Satra.

All this rides two decades of political change, and the emergence of privately owned media companies allowed, among other things, to distribute foreign channels and movies and to produce content for local broadcast.

BHD was out of the private-ownership gate early. The company’s involvement kicked off in 1996 with music show Nhung Bai Hat Con Xanh, which aired on state-backed free-TV broadcaster VTV three times a week. The show ran to 1998, returning in 2015 in a new format.

BHD was the first company to distribute Korean movies, and its production initiatives rolled out quietly in an environment still tightly controlled by the state. In about 2000, four years after BHD first opened its doors, the shackles were taken off private production houses, paving the way for today’s local content boom. “The government is now a lot more open,” Bich Hanh says.

Life at BHD has also tracked Vietnam’s advertising sales industry. “When we started, [Vietnam’s biggest channel] VTV had no advertising department. So if anyone wanted to buy advertising, they didn’t know where to go,” she says. Today, local versions of the world’s biggest entertainment formats are thriving in Vietnam, backed by major advertisers and brands. “That’s a big change,” Bich Hanh says.

Not every project has been about money, she says, talking about some of the bigger surprises over the past 20 years. Or, at least, not at first. Art house movie, Floating Lives, for instance, was about a family of farmersliving in a small boat in a far-flung village. The potential for commercial success was low to none. “If you want your film to make money in Vietnam, you need beautifulpeople and long legs,” she says. “We did it because we thought it was a nice touching story and we wanted to do something valuable,” she says. The film went into production with expectations that it would earn back only half of what was invested. It came home with a 25% net gain. “You just never know,” she says.

BHD’s movie budgets are anywhere between US$300,000 to above US$1 million. TV budgets are lower, a situation Bich Hanh says caps global distribution op- portunities. “If drama series had a better production budget, we would have a good chance of introducing those outside the country,” she says.

Film titles are successfully distributed around the world, including Once Upon a Time in Vietnam by Lionsgate in the U.S. as well as channels in Europe. BHD’s most successful film this year was Tam Cám: Chuyen Chua Ke (Tam Cám: The Untold Story), a local Cinderella fairytale told from the prince’s point of view. Tam Cam topped this year’s box office in Vietnam, and the male lead, boy band singer Issac, won the Rising Star award at the Busan International Film Festival. The film has so far sold to about 10 territories, including

Korea, Japan and Taiwan. BHD also led the Hanoi International Film Festival (Haniff) Project Market in November this year in cooperation with the government-backed Cinema Department of Vietnam. The Project Market’s aim is to match producers, directors and scriptwriters with investors, funding bodies such as the World Cinema Fund, and film festival organisers.

This year’s festival comes 15 years after BDH ventured into movie production for the first time with feature film Song of the Stork. The film went on to win the best feature at the Milano Film Festival 2002.

“Song of the Stork proved that if handled in a proper way, Vietnamese movies can score well in different markets worldwide,” Bich Hanh says. BHD has subsequently produced a slate of theatrical titles, including The White Silk Dress (2006) with a budget of US$2 million. The award-winning film remains one of the most costly titles ever made in Vietnam.

The company was the first to acquire Korean drama rights for Vietnam, kicking off the strategy in early 1997 with KBS’ Yumi, My Love, which went on to air on VTV1.

In 2000, BHD produced its first game show format – A Century of Song – followed in 2004 by FremantleMedia format, The Price is Right (Hay Chon Gia Dung). The show premiered on VTV3 in 2004 and ran to 2016.

Another signature FremantleMedia format, Vietnam Idol, premiered a part of BHD’s stable in 2010. Five seasons of the singing competition format have been produced so far. Vietnam’s Got Talent was added in 2011; so far four seasons of the talent show have been produced.

Big-budget formats have since become a staple, with five seasons of The Amazing Race Vietnam and three seasons of MasterChef Vietnam since 2012, along with Big Brother, a kids version of Vietnam Idol (2016) and Junior MasterChef (2016).

In 2005, BHD produced its first TV drama series, 39 Degrees of Love. The 16-episode drama aired on HTV7, and was followed by a local version of Ugly Betty (Co Gai Xau Xi, 2008) and Suddenly I Wanna Cry (2009).

Today, the company produces between 100 and 300 hours of drama series a year, in addition to all the game show, reality and other shows.

Bich Hanh is proud of the company’s local content achievements, saying it led the trend that made Vietnamese drama more popular in Vietnam than drama from South Korea and China, and put game shows and reality on the domestic viewing agenda.

“Before local drama, you would only see Taiwan, China and Korean drama,” she says. “We are proud of creating something new,” she says. “But there’s always more to do. Now we see that drama is going down a bit, so what’s the next new thing that we need to think about? We don’t have an answer yet”.

BHD’s TV content distribution is primed for growth. “TV content is more challenging. You need popular stars and extraordinary content, and there’s still a long way to go for us.”

The rise of digital platforms isn’t making much difference yet; “prices for digital is still low,” she says.

Piracy in Vietnam is significant too, a scourge Bich Hanh says she will continue to fight. “One of our challenges is that pirate content is still so easy to access. We are competing with illegal platforms,” she adds. Her best weapon is to convince audiences of the risks, such as malware and spyware, and to persuade them to support the local creative industry.

Another major challenge today is that production costs are rising but revenue is flat or down. “It’s challenging. We need extra revenue from the sale of content not only from television but from other platforms,” she says.

Looking back, Bich Hanh wouldn’t do much different. “We did a lot of silly things. We didn’t know so we dared to do. You make mistakes and you learn from them,” she says, adding: “If you didn’t make the mistake, you wouldn’t be able to do what you do today. One thing leads to another, so I probably wouldn’t change anything”.

Published on ContentAsia's Issue Six 2016