“There is the world as we know it... And then there’s the other one – for want of a better term – the scary world.”

Rohana Rozhan, Chief Executive Officer, Astro Malaysia, talking about some of the issues involved in growing Astro to 85% penetration over the next three to five years with between 50% and 55% pay. Astro currently has 65% household penetration.

“Content has been liberated and we should treat each piece with respect. Not standardise it.”

Henry Tan, Chief Operating Officer, Astro Malaysia, who said the platform’s bet on vernacular content had paid off handsomely. Astro has trebled the number of shows that have more than a million viewers. Tan said the next challenge was moving beyond Malaysia and beyond TV. “What we would like to do is leverage content into ‘franchisable IP’,” he said.

“We want to build communities around the IP, to build up the whole ecosystem and reinforce the value.”

Henry Tan, Chief Operating Officer,Astro Malaysia

“We are excited by return path data. For the longest time we were quite tired of data that we didn’t think was reflecting what was happening and a sample base not representative of our customer base. Less than 40 homes in the sample were HD homes. The truth is that more Astro subs are watching in HD. We thought it was time we took control of the measurement and we want a robust accurate system that captures not just TV viewing.”

Henry Tan, Chief Operating Officer, Astro Malaysia, on the return path data results Astro plans to make available in the second half of this year.

"Free-to-air is still a very strong business in some parts of Southeast Asia, particularly in Indonesia, Philippines and Thailand.”

Vivek Couto, Executive Director, Media Partners Asia (MPA), talking about the state of the video market in Asia. Couto said the video ecosystem grew 7% in 2014. MPA forecasts 5% growth between 2014 and 2023. Pay-TV share is steady, online share will grow to 11% and free to air comes down to 35% between now and 2023. Of the 11%, only 2% is driven by subscription OTT offerings. The rest is all ad-supported OTT, mostly big mass offerings. Couto said pay TV remained “exceptionally strong” in markets such as India and also in places like Korea. He added that an area of concern was in the slowdown in some low-penetration markets in Asia “and it’s not because of OTT”. Reasons included deep structural issues and a lack of alignment between stakeholders, as well as piracy. Couto called pay-TV growth in Indonesia “disappointing”, and said 10% penetration growing to 14% “doesn’t seem right”.

"Vernacular programming to us is the new premium.”

“The reality for broadcasters like us is that because we are used to pushing signals out, and live in a linear world, we are probably not ready to provide a completely engaging and immersive experience... but it’s definitely a world that we are moving into in earnest, with targets and milestones.”

“In order for us to do this really well, what we have to do is take ourselves on... we have to organise the organisation to be the aggressor to take on the ‘old world’. That’s where we are at at the moment.”

Rohana Rozhan, Chief Executive Officer,Astro Malaysia

“Taiwan’s ageing population is used to a big bundle. This is a factor that needs to be considered. There is a regulatory aspect too. For the more tech-savvy generation, they need not be served so much. They help themselves.”

Thomas Ee, Executive Vice Chairman, Taiwan Broadband Communications

“Content costs are increasing faster than revenues.”

“Sports is a fairly big chunk of the annual content spend (obviously India sways it a bit), but it’s still a third of revenues. Spend on international content is in slight decline. Asian content spend has gone up from about 7%-8% a few years ago to 12% and local content is still a strong engine.”

“The great thing about the industry is that everyone is investing in great stories and great content, some more than most, but everyone is making these bets. Operating margins for the last year continue to remain under pressure across the board... It has come down from 22.4% in 2013 to 21% last year. The pan-regional business has gone down from 30% to 28%. Taiwan is making money, but they always make money.”

Vivek Couto, Executive Director, MPA

"Whether it’s bundling or unbundling, it’s about building convenience.”

“Data limits and battery life are factors in mobile entertainment access.”

Thomas Ee, Executive Vice Chairman,Taiwan Broadband Communications

"Indonesia’s DTH growth has slowed since last year. Total subs in Indonesia are slightly above four million, so the potential is still very big. Why has growth slowed? The first reason is piracy. The second and third reasons are related to the content and the channels. Unhealthy free offering for new subs creates a ‘rotational churn’ – the same subscriber moves from operator to operator taking the free offering. Some platforms don’t shut off the non-paying subs. This is something that dampens growth.”

Rudy Tanoesoedibjo, President and Director, MNC Sky Vision

“We have to make sure we are providing our subscribers with all their on-demand as well as linear needs.”

“Netflix will absolutely grow the overall market in Australia. They will be a good thing in the medium term as people start to experience paying for television and start to compare the products.”

“We do more original first run programmes in a week than Netflix does in a year. People will start to understand why one product is worth $10 and one is worth a lot more.”

“Subscribers who have spun-down are starting to spin back up.”

Richard Freudenstein, Chief Executive Officer, Foxtel Australia

"Bundling is still the right model. We are going beyond bundling channels to bundling with broadband and mobile. We don’t see pay-TV as a standalone.”

Tan Tong Hai, Chief Executive Officer, StarHub Singapore

“We have too many channels... it used to be very convenient to watch TV. The new world – as Rohana said, the ‘scary world’ – is also a very inconvenient world. How do we bring back convenience for customers? How do we harmonise? There is too much OTT content. It’s more scary but it couldn’t be more inconvenient for customers, with all the gadgets and passwords.”

Tan Tong Hai, Chief Executive Officer,StarHub Singapore

“There’s a danger when factual gets into the realm of general entertainment, into reality. We have some concerns about that. A lot of Asians want to hear stories about themselves. There is a greater interest in where they come from. We see a gap there and we see an opportunity.”

Henry Tan, Astro Malaysia, on one of the reasons behind Astro’s involvement in new regional factual channel, Spark Asia

"The best people to address the new world are probably people like us. The new world is about the science, art and creativity and being able to blend it in a way that makes sense... Also, in the new world, physical, live engagement with content and talent gives you an edge. We are doing a lot more events, live engagement, even merchandising and ticketing... our reality shows have big turnouts by people who pay to attend. If we can add, layer, those different parts of the business, we stand the best chance of making the transition.”

Rohana Rozhan, Chief Executive Officer, Astro Malaysia

"Our vision is to democratise content. We don’t think about pay-TV audiences, we think about everyone else.”

Mark Britt, Chief Executive Officer, iflix

“We have gone into Japanese content, into Asian documentaries… these are niches that no one else is satisfying.”

Henry Tan, Chief Operating Officer, Astro

“Korea is a market on steroids.”

Vivek Couto, Executive Director, Media Partners Asia (MPA), adding that some pay-TV platforms in Korea have penetration rates of 140%.

“If you can provide a better product than piracy, people will pay. They are already paying for pirated content... Netflix has proved that easy, simple, ‘press play and access to whatever I want when I want it’ works.”

“85% of Netflix subs have pay-TV. Right now these are complementary services. For a top-tier customer, if we can do a good job people will get both us and Hooq.”

Mark Britt, iflix

“We love the India business. It has now evolved enormously from Hindi entertainment to regional-language broadcasting and now we are a national platform. The sports business for us is a new pillar and we are looking at the business in a long term time frame. And if we keep innovating and investing in putting more creative and innovative content on screen, Star India will become a billion dollar EBITDA business by the turn of the decade.”

James Murdoch, Co-Chief Operating Officer, 21st Century Fox

"We hope, after 18 years, we have strong enough relationships with our content partners to move towards real collaboration... That’s the great challenge. If we can’t do that, we will have to create our own IP, whether it’s by ourselves or in collaboration with friendly, like-minded people.”

“It would be derelict of us if we stopped looking at this [regional OTT/SVOD platform] space... but it’s extremely crowded and we’re not good at being a me-too.”

Rohana Rozhan, Astro Malaysia

“We would like to see our consumers – as individuals or households – have access to content across the board. More and more things have to be day and date, bundled or un-bundled, across multiple screens.”

Rohana Rozhan, Astro Malaysia

“The pace of mobile broadband growth is massive... By 2023, wireless broadband will be used by three billion people, compared to 445 million fixed broadband households, which will have an effect on how online video is consumed and charged for, and how advertisers engage with it.”

“Clearly China and Japan dominate the OTT market currently. They contribute more than 50% of subscribers and revenues respectively. The sector remains fairly sub-scale in Southeast Asia, parts of North Asia and even India, though the past 12-24 months has seen multiple new platforms launch in many markets. China is very much an AVOD model, while in Japan... average ARPU is about US$6 a month versus US$50 on pay television.”

“The online video revenue pie will be close to US$18 billion by 2023. China and Japan will definitely play a big part.Platforms in India and Australia will also be key contributors to this growth story.”

Vivek Couto, Executive Director, MPA

“Consumers have zero tolerance for mediocreexperiences.”

"The one thing that we all need to come to grips with is: None of us is in charge. The consumer is in charge. And that hasn’t always been the case... that’s not necessarily a bad thing for business, for programmers and distributors. It could actually be a fantastic thing for business. But it will require each of us to play our part, and require us to up our game in terms of meeting consumer expectations.”

John Martin, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Turner Broadcasting System

"Ad-funded online video models remain dominant... There were 500 million active online video users at the end of 2014, of which 75 million were paying for some form of content... That will grow substantially to 1.5 billion by 2023 and the SVOD base will come up to 24% of that. But the ad-funded model will be pervasive in places like India and China and also parts ofSoutheast Asia.”

Vivek Couto, Executive Director, MPA

"It’s very important going forward to have all the rights we need.”

Richard Freudenstein, Foxtel

"The term a la carte has been used for years and years, and the idea of allowing consumers to select individually the channels that they want to pay for... what we are seeing now is an elegant evolution of the bundle that is happening in an orderly fashion and will continue. But it’s not necessarily moving directly to a la carte. Having smaller bundles of more important packages will better serve consumer needs and demands.”

John Martin, Turner Broadcasting System, talking about breaking the pay-TV channel bundle

“We are in the early days of what is going to be a lot of experimentation among programmers to ensure that we can get our branded environments out to as many consumers in as many packages as possible... it’s important to note that our commitment is first and foremost to work collaboratively with existing platform partners... to try to make the overall television service better for consumers. That’s our first, second and third priority.”

“We are in the process of reimagining what TV even is.”

John Martin, Turner Broadcasting System, on existing in a B2C environment without multi-platform video distributors (MPVDs)

"Better engagement in sports will drive greater consumption. People don’t look happy when they win a sports bid. Practices in the sports business have become quite toxic. Instead of a content creation business this has been run as a rent-a-cab business.”

“People are queuing up to buy an EPL, a La Liga or a Bundesliga, but the question here is how much engagement do these games actually offer as compared to relevant local content. We tried this with ISL and Kabaddi and the initial response has been very encouraging.”

“English movies and drama consumption is barely 2% of all content consumption in India. Sports needs to find a much more local strategy to make it relevant and to grow it.”

“We need to have a long term commitment to build a sport, a 10- to 20-year approach to build it [from the] ground up. Take the example of EPL, which has been around for decades and has built an extremely strong consumer franchise that advertisers are eager to associate with… The three-year view of buying sporting rights has to change. This current regime disallows most of the partners to make money and disincentivises anyone trying to build a sport.”

Sanjay Gupta, Star India

“I am prejudiced towards aspirational content.. This is something we have always kept in mind while creating all of our content and is the same philosophy that we are bringing to sports as well. Sports has a huge role to play in empowerment, especially in a country like India, where we need to make the society believe that even an uneducated person can aspire to something greater if he is talented in a sport. This is what has worked with Kabaddi in a big way.”

“The reason I’m excited about the OTT space is because it allows for democratisation of creativity. However this is not the same as saying that anyone can create content.”

Uday Shankar, Star India

"We haveapplied the same philosophy that we had in our entertainment business to sports – creating content with deep localaffinity using the audience aggregation power of cricket.

“Sports broadcasting has been plagued by laziness and lack of innovation, treated merely as a distribution agent of acquired rights, which is what we have tried to change with multiple local leagues. If it’s your team that’s playing, even if it is not the best team, you will be deeply passionate about it. Creating a hierarchy of leagues across the country can be a huge
empowering phenomenon.”

Uday Shankar, Chief Executive Officer, Star India

“One of the challenges that we are seeing is that almost all of the investment in sports is going into rights cost. We are trying to change that by investing in basic sports infrastructure apart from rights, whether it is grooming the players for an on-screen experience in Kabaddi or partnering to get the stadiums ready for ISL.”

Sanjay Gupta, Star India

"When there’s a big sporting event, people congregate to watch in huge numbers. The only question is: are there enough of these happening and how much innovation has there been?”

Sanjay Gupta, Chief Operating Officer, Star India, on the lack of innovation he says is stifling sports economics