Online, all-screens, high-speed fibre connectivity and other wonders of the deep-digital age may, on the whole, be patchy across Asia and behind some other parts of the world. But the shift is happening and few doubt that, later if not sooner, Korea-style services and connectivity and Japanese-type definition will be ubiquitous. Plus we will have full iTunes services rather than the limited music/movies packages that rolled out in 12 Asian markets this year; \\'player\\' services a la BBC iPlayer and Fox Movies Play will, actually, play on all devices; and we will, hopefully, have legal access to HBO Go.Progress is being made. New services rolled out in the region this year include the Astro On-The-Go platform, which allows subscribers in Malaysia to take live and other content on the road with them.The powerful Malaysian platform, which has more than three million regular pay-TV subscribers, kicked off the initiative in June 2012 with on-the-go access to the UEFA Euro 2012 matches for PCs and iPads along with a bundle of linear channels, catch-up and video on demand.Top tier Astro subscribers were able to access all 31 live matches on the go as well as exclusive catch-up videos, and UEFA video- on-demand titles. 3G-connected iPhones along with Android-based devices were added shortly after the launch of phase one. By the end of this year, Astro is planning to offer its on-the-go services to everyone - including people who don\\'t subscribe to its other packages - on all devices across all technologies and platforms.In neighbouring Singapore, dominant player StarHub is also pushing into the go-every-where space.In mid-September, three months after it rolled out the TV Anywhere service, StarHub upped the \\"anywhere\\" channel count to 23 (of 180+ channels on its traditional cable platform) with seven new services available on PC/Mac and mobile devices (iOS/iPhone/ Android).New channels included StarHub\\'s in-house Racquet Channel and Football Channel, along with Discovery\\'s flagship Discovery Channel, Animal Planet and TLC. Newbie \\'anywhere\\' channels joined existing services such as National Geographic, Discovery Kids, Setanta Sports, Nick Jr, MTV Southeast Asia and Fox Movies Play.Also in Singapore (although there are no details yet) monopoly broadcaster MediaCorp is preparing to launch Toggle, an over- the-top platform designed to keep the public broadcaster in line with the times and, hopefully, to keep viewers linked with, if not completely in, the MediaCorp fold.Announcing Toggle last year, MediaCorp said the new \\"revolutionary interactive\\" service would deliver content to all devices \\"enabling the subscriber to stay connected anytime, anywhere with any internet access\\".This migration to an on-the-go world is a lot clearer now than the revenue path. At the most recent ContentAsia Summit in Singapore, speakers and delegates talked about bundling TV sales with online offerings, offering advertisers \\"one price and two screens\\", and the challenges of persuading anyone - subscribers and advertisers - to pay more for the added value.Moses Lye, MediaCorp Singapore\\'s vice president, xinmsn, interactive media, said MediaCorp was adept at bundling and packaging services for advertisers. He also said that the paradigm had been shifting in that content was now being produced specifically for multi-screens.Malaysia\\'s Tonton, the online platform operated by dominant free-TV player Media Prima, has a similar model to Singapore\\'s xinmsn in that TV networks and online/digital were bundled. Lam Swee Kim, Media Prima\\'s group general manager for new media and group general manager for integrated marketing, said the company also tapped online consumer/subscriber revenue as well as online B2B licensing revenue.\\"There are a lot of revenues streams for the business, and it keeps changing, it keeps being different every other month. So we get revenue from everywhere,\\" Lam said.Andrew Hoppe, Microsoft Japan\\'s MSN general manager, said some of the same trends were emerging in different markets.\\"Time and again, we see the same trends in different markets, such as short-form to long-form video consumption, and the other big trend... huge demand from advertisers for video online, and we\\'re seeing it in large markets such as Australia, and also in emerging markets like Southeast Asia, China and India,\\" Hoppe said, adding that advertisers followed viewers and \\"want to be in that environment\\".The \\"do people prefer long-form or short- form online\\" debate is still playing out... and perhaps always will. \\"For us it\\'s a mix of the two,\\" Hoppe said, adding that consumption depended on location and environment. \\"Commuting, it\\'s all short-form snacking, viral videos, entertainment and infotainment... and for the weekend and evening viewing it\\'s more on the long-form content\\".The same principle applies to other forms of viewing and platforms, none of which seem to be mutually exclusive. \\"If you\\'re eating Japanese sushi you can go \\'omakaseh\\' [I\\'ll leave it to you] and let the chef decide... that\\'s programming linear television. Or you can go to a sushi train and pick your own individual pieces. People want to do both. Sometimes they just want to be lazy and just trust a good broadcasting brand that is going to serve great content and at times they like to look for something specific to watch at a particular point in time. I don\\'t think they are mutually exclusive, I think they co-exist together,\\" Hoppe said.MediaCorp\\'s Lye said Singapore was a bit different in that online catch up was popular, and that was all long-form and, today at least, PC-based. \\"But we are seeing the trend moving towards tablets, to on-the-go,\\" he said.Fox International Channels\\' senior vice president and head of new media for Asia, Steven Hickson, said the new Fox-branded premium player was a value-add extension to the linear channel and was being used as part of Fox\\'s premium drive. Hickson said the player - offered at no additional charge to subscribers - was all about making the premium package more robust, covering different genres, more content, and the non-linear option.\\"We know that people are consuming content in different ways, and on devices... this enhances the values of the package,\\" Hickson said, stressing that the \\'play\\' offer was a partnership with affiliates and not a standalone service. The decision to make the player part of the premium package was all about driving average revenue per user (ARPU) and subscriptions.Jason Brenek, The Walt Disney Studios\\' senior vice president, international in-home sales, said the big challenge in the digital space was to \\"find out what opportunities exist for us to increase the utility for our consumers and the brand extensions that we already nurture for our company, and also to find rev- enue models to grow our pie for our partners and for Disney as well\\".\\"The one thing we know about digital space is that consumers want to get access to our content more in more different ways, on the go, and more screens than they ever have before,\\" he said.To accommodate the demands of the new environment and to be much more globally oriented, Disney has \\"broken down a lot of the walls that exist between our business, be it geographically based, or content-based, or brand-based and we started looking at the world in a much more holistic way,\\" Brenek said, adding that innovation from different places in the world was being integrated into Disney\\'s global learning.Pricing models are a work in progress, and there\\'s nothing dogmatic about them. \\"The trick is not only encouraging our new partners to innovate, and develop new services, and support them in those services, but also to encourage research and development as well as new platform experimentation,\\" he said.Revenue models cover the gambit. \\"We do everything from selling DVDs down to electronics ownership, to video-on-demand... we have even dipped our toe in ad-VOD,\\" Brenek added.Like most online platforms, the ad-support- ed xinmsn fights to balance advertising revenue with costs. The new over-the-top service, Toggle, will add a subscription revenue component, giving MediaCorp its first bite at Singapore\\'s subscription television pie.Media Prima\\'s Kim said the main challenge was \\"to get consumers to pay for content at all\\" in a thriving pirate DVD market. Advertisers also continued to see digital as a value-add to a broadcast TV buy, with little or no intrinsic value of its own, she said.MSN\\'s Hoppe said there was a value in creating a quality platform that advertisers wanted to be associated with.\\"If you look across the different categories such as news, viral, to entertainment-based content, through to longer forms, clients are getting sophisticated in where they want to be. And as audience-targeting gets more sophisticated and precise, you are creating pockets where you are meeting demands and pockets where you\\'re not,\\" Hoppe said.User data is among the biggest benefits of next-generation digital technologies. \\"By being able to capture the user data, such as what content they are watching, how they are watching, are they watching in one session or watching it over five sessions... those are the learning points that we have don\\'t have access to on the linear channels,\\" Hickson said.Pulled back into the linear channel environment, this info makes programmers better equipped to make acquisition decisions, commission original production, and schedule. \\"So it will give us an insight that we haven\\'t had in the past and we think that is going to be a very strategically important,\\" Hickson said.Fox\\'s early experience with the player in Latin America showed, for instance, that the average time per session on the player was about twice that of the linear channel. \\"So even though it is a small amount of the population watching the content on the player and using it, the viewers there are are finding it very sticky, they are staying and consuming a lot, and they are sampling, they are trying out content that they normally would not be interested in. They are discovering things, and that drives them to view more of that content on the linear package/channel, so there is a lot of things that we didn\\'t know but we know now, that can improve our overall package,\\" Hickson said.Building on interactivity is one of the learnings. \\"One of the things that we know about the consumers watching our movies is that they are interacting with the movies, watching while on tablets and PCs, and their mobile devices at the same time,\\" Brenek said, adding that this had led to the development of second-screen applications and \\"other type of products that help us create better engagement with our customers while they\\'re watching the movies\\".Brenek also said second-screen content developers were \\"getting very much further upstream into the creative development process, and we create bonus materials, behind the scenes, and all those type of things... plant those into the production schedules, so when the movie comes out, on whatever the platforms it is able to come out, we are able to create a much more robust, immersive 360 experience around the product for people who really want to go deep on that piece of content\\".Affiliate partners were benefiting. \\"One of the things we are trying to do is to make sure each of the partners that we provide the content to has some kind of value add,\\" Brenek said, stressing that every single channel through the entire lifecycle of the film is \\"extremely important to support the economics of movie making\\".\\"At the end of the day, it is not like one platform has to win at the expense of another one, but it\\'s really just trying to appeal to a different segment consumer base to make sure that the platform viewing experience is the best that it can be given the platform attributes,\\" he said.Managing costs in a low-to-no revenue environment was key, platforms said. And too much traffic can be a bad thing.\\"When a programme works too well, we actually hold on to our seats because bandwidth costs a lot,\\" Lam said. So, at the same time as investing in good content, \\"we are also very worried when it gets too good online because we\\'ll bust our bandwidth\\".So what does a platform do? \\"The entire office will stop everything they do, we divert traffic out... so we do not need to pay millions in bandwidth costs. So that\\'s the scary part for us, it is not about the fixed cost,\\" Lam said.Moving audiences around different platforms within the group is a developing art. Lam said it was an advantage to have TV stations within the group for cross-promotion purposes. We used to plead and beg, but now we hang out and ask if you can roll that commercial for me\\" she said.One of the biggest questions moving forward is the threat multi-screen technology may, if not handled properly, pose to existing operators and platforms.Brenek reckoned the absence of innovation was a much bigger threat than the multi-screen environment. He said platforms that innovated, that spent on expanding into the multi-screen environment, experienced lower churn, more engagement with the consumer, and had more data to adjust the platform to consumers\\' needs.\\"There\\'s no better way to drive consumers to the screen than high-quality professional grade content, great story telling, great characters,\\" he said, adding: \\"At the end of the day, platforms that innovate and who also have great content partnerships and partners who know how to support the efforts, will win\\".<i>ContentAsia</i> Issue Three 2012