Singtel is building out a mobile streaming platform under the Cast banner with a mix of in-house/ packaged channels and third-party services such as FOX+, Viu, tonton and Tribe, channel brands such as WB TV, SonyONE, Oh!K, Nickelodeon, CNN and others, and genre packs created for an-demand universe. Anurag Dahiya talks about curating and aggregating this streaming experience for a hyperserved community.

“[The biggest learning in rolling out Cast is that] It is not TV.”

What are the questions you are asked most often?

"Why do you have HOOQ and Cast? When you launch HOOQ will Cast go away? No is the answer because they are two totally different things. HOOQ is one of the content providers on the platform. The platform will be available, is available, and will continue to be available to as many different thirdparty partners as we can bring in.”

“If we were starting in the TV business today, we like to say this loud and clear, if we were doing it today we wouldn’t do it as an IPTV service, we would do it as an OTT service. But that doesn’t necessarily mean we won’t have linear in it. It’s just that the technology platform will evolve, and some of the features will evolve.”

Will Netflix be on Cast?

"We’re like Changi [airport] – open sky. We are an open platform. For all partners who are willing to come in and inte- grate with Cast we welcome them with open arms. We work with Netflix, in fact our partner- ship with Netflix predates Cast. There is already a billing-on-behalf relationship there and could it transition to Cast? Possibly yes.”

Do you differentiate between the content and branded spaces you aggregate/curate yourselves and third-party platforms on Cast?

“We don't consciously do that. For the sim- ple reason that consumers don’t care. They just want to find the content that they like. So one of the things we're working on with all our partners is to have a unified search within Cast.”

Will Cast replace Singtel TV?

"Singtel TV still has future. We have a great loyal consumer base that loves the product, but we equally see a segment of the market saying very loudly to us that they do not want a TV sub- scription, at least not in the way we are used to selling it. We see Cast coming in and fulfilling that need. Does it replace it eventually? Hard for me to say yet. Will Singtel TV evolve? For sure it will.”

"The challenge for us is to keep adding consumer-friendly features, which keep the value proposition right up there. In the foreseeable future we will see both products [Cast and Singtel TV].”

Would you consider replacing your existing box with something like the Roku box?

“We are in the midst of evaluating our next generation platform. There will be space for an OTT box and devices in that platform for sure.”

What else have your learned rolling out Cast?

“We went into Cast thinking that there were learnings from pay TV that we could apply in this space... about providing con- sumers easy choice, not overwhelming choice, in the form of easily digestible packages. Giving them one stop for all their needs when it comes to streaming video. Giving them a phone number to call if things don’t work and so on. And those things have in- deed worked.”

"A lot of the learnings, the assumptions we made as a pay-TV operator certainly don’t work here. There is typically no concept of a free trial in pay TV. Those are the kind of things we’ve been learning as we go. What we have become acutely aware of is that it is a constant sales job. It’s not a one-time sales or a two-year contract.”

Published on ContentAsia's Issue Seven, 27 November 2017