PeopleTV has arrived in Asia as part of Monty Ghai’s new bouquet of brands ready and willing to fill gaps in audience demand and platform line ups.

U.S.-based PeopleTV rolled out in Asia Pacific for the first time earlier this month, adding Hollywood celebrity to a linear lifestyle/entertainment space populated by E!, Lifetime, Discovery’s TLC and BBC Lifestyle.

The channel, part of a region-wide bouquet distributed by Singapore-based brandwith, debuted on StarHub in Singapore on 5 October with a six-hour block looped around the clock and a regional road map starting at South and Southeast Asia and then moving across to North Asia, and Australia/New Zealand. The linear channel runs alongside on-demand access and a plan to roll out a direct-to-consumer platforms with operator billing.

brandwith founder/CEO, Monty Ghai, who in past lives worked for BBC, Viacom and CNBC in Asia, says his 18-month-old company is curating international programming for Asia-based audiences – particularly younger audiences.

PeopleTV in Asia focuses on celebrity and food. Original production may follow. But Ghai is not rushing to add local celebs to Hollywood fare. “There is a demand in Asia for Hollywood-related information,” he says.

PeopleTV’s Asia schedule has been cherry-picked from the two-year-old U.S. service’s playlist. Content includes half-hour prime-time entertainment news magazine, Chatter, which promises trending moments in celebrity and entertainment news; Lola Ogunnaike’s Couch Surfing, which follows stars back through the big, small and embarrassing moments of their careers; and The Jess Cagle Interview, in-depth interviews with Hollywood A-listers hosted by People and Entertainment Weekly editorial director Jess Cagle.

PeopleTV is part of brandwith’s plan to build a video service bundle focused on news/business news, factual, lifestyle and kids, curated for Asian audiences. In other words, Ghai says, everything outside of the high-stakes movies, drama, sports spaces.

“Viewers will find big sporting events, big movies, regardless of the network they’re on,” Ghai says. Other genres? Not so much. “In terms of other genres, such as factual and lifestyle, especially in the on-demand universe, it becomes harder to find programmes to watch among the 20,000 thumbnails out there,” he says. “In the on-demand space, brands matter”.

So far, brandwith’s slate includes CuriosityStream (factual), PeopleTV (lifestyle), Reuters TV (news) and Cheddar (tech/business news). Ghai says other channels are in the pipeline.

None of brandwith’s channels have had feet on the ground in Asia in the past, although the U.S. services are widely available online, on YouTube and via direct subscriptions to U.S. platforms.

PeopleTV’s roll out comes a little over a month since Ghai launched CuriosityStream, also on StarHub, filling a factual gap that opened up with Discovery/Scripps two-phase exit from the platform in June and August.

Ghai believes 30% of viewers in Asia, like elsewhere in the world, are hard-core factual fans, and that a gap opened up a long time before Discovery and StarHub failed to agree on renewal rates. Factual, he says, headed into the reality/entertainment space years ago, largely abandoning a base who didn’t want to go there with them.

“What happened to those factual subs who wanted and were paying for a factual tier and weren’t getting what they wanted?” That’s the gap. And that’s where he’s headed.

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