Singtel’s app platform for Singapore, Cast, is a growing force of linear streaming, subscription bundles, catch up, in-house packs, third-party apps, sports services... The telco’s head of content and ad sales, Anurag Dahiya, talks about life at the forefront of creating a super-aggregator.

Singapore telco Singtel has, in the past year or so, bulked up and got skinny, tackled a future in OTT without losing learnings from its pay-TV past, flowed with the stream and swum against the tide, waged war against friction and worshipped at the altar of simplicity, and wrestled with ARPU erosion and low pricing that is the hallmark of app-based services – all under the banner of uber-aggregator app Cast.

The ultimate goal is a foothold in OTT, says Anurag Dahiya, Singtel’s head of content and advertising sales. “The whole objective with Cast is to have a presence in the OTT space, which is clearly where consumers are moving,” he says. There’s an important ‘but’ to that quest. “In doing that, we didn’t want to lose all the lessons that we’ve gathered over the last 10 or 11 years of being a pay-TV provider in Singapore,” Dahiya says.

Those learnings include an appetite for content on-demand running alongside linear as either a lean-back experience or as a background to household life. “There’s something in us which wants to go and switch on a TV as we enter our apartments and leave it on as we do other things,” he adds. Cast’s skinny bundles are “our effort to go in and address that need at the same time as acquiring more on-demand content”. One of the skinny bundles, Variety Plus, for instance, offers 26 linear entertainment channels and catch-up for S$14.90/US$11 a month with no contract.

“We don’t want to neglect linear,” Dahiya says. “Our view is that linear is not dead or in any danger of dying any time soon. But a lot of value has to be added to the experience. Whether it is in terms of the amount of catch-up or in terms of discovering content within linear,” he says. The aim is “neat packages that appeal to our consumers that they’re willing to pay a decent ARPU for. That’s really what we’ve been trying to do.” Is it working? “A lot of our hypotheses have been validated in what we’ve seen so far. You will see more and more of those skinny models and a lot of linear content coming through,” Dahiya says.

How much will people pay? That’s a tough one. Consumers are stacking one or two apps, replacing a S$40/US$29 or S$50/US$36 ARPU with 10% or 20% of that. “There’s a huge ARPU erosion and that’s one area where we need to start thinking about redeploying some of our learnings from pay television,” he says. “On the one hand we are teaching consumers that they can cut their bill very significantly by being on just one or two apps. But the reality is that we’ve got used to a certain ARPU level and that feeds the whole content ecosystem.”

Buffets instead of a la carte, could be the answer, with simple pricing/packaging and seamless integration. Technically, that’s a whole lot easier said than done. For one, most apps are designed for B2C, which makes them less-than-ideal contributors to an integrated buffet environment.

That struggle takes place against an impossible-to-beat benchmark set by piracy. “However low the subscription fees, we’re never going to be zero, which is what piracy is” he says, having long let go of expecting miracles. “I don’t think piracy can be eliminated entirely. But we can bring it down to manageable levels where it’s not upending the whole system.”

Meanwhile, Cast as an uber-app remains a work in progress, including tech solutions such as using 4G to authenticate users and ditching the username/password requirement. “The journey is not by any means finished, Dahiya says, adding: “I’d say it’s just getting started.”

Published on ContentAsia's Issue Six 2018, 29 October 2018