Home-grown Singapore streaming platform, Toggle, is looking at 30+ originals next year, trebling the 11 titles it commissioned last year, and upping the count significantly from this year’s 22. “It’s a big focus area for us,” says Anil Nihalani, who leads the four-year-old Toggle as head of connected media for the country’s free-to-air broadcast behemoth, Mediacorp.

Toggle’s latest incarnation is looking more and more like third time luckier. The platform debuted a little over four years ago as a subscription service, with a bouquet of in-house and acquired channels, a sprinkling of other content, tech that wasn’t quite there yet, and a pricing structure Nihalani describes as “fairly complex”. It was, he says, “pay TV over OTT and it didn’t work”.

The pivot out of that was also pay, focusing more on Mediacorp video. At the time, news and other content streamed on online platform XinMSN, a joint venture with Microsoft that launched in 2010. The next step up the learning curve, taken in early 2015, came with the end of the Microsoft JV and the decision to consolidate all content under one roof.

Ultimately, Nihalani says, the platform’s view was that consumers didn’t want to hunt around among different platforms for entertainment. The decision was made to pool Mediacorp’s content, including celebrity news, catch-up and originals, and to focus very clearly on local content targeting younger audiences.

“Just consolidating that entire experience in a single place across a number of different platforms and devices made all the difference,” he adds.

Sports, too, had a significant impact on Toggle’s fortunes, not least because it was the only platform where Singapore could watch swimmer Joseph Schooling win the country’s first Olympics gold last year. The crowd, predictably, went wild. Toggle ran four linear channels live for the entire duration of the Olympics.

“In those two weeks alone we had more traffic than we typically get in a month,” Nihalani says.

This year’s Southeast Asia (SEA) Games were also delivered live and free on Toggle, as were Singapore’s general elections in 2015, where Toggle at one point was streaming live from 14 locations on 14 separate channels. “Live works. Catch-up by itself is only going to take us so far,” he adds.

The decision to go live and linear on sports was part of a broad philosophy that looks at audiences rather than distribution platforms/screen sizes. “It’s a case of video delivered across any number of devices that users want to consume on,” Nihalani says. Including, obviously, linear. But he’s not getting drawn into a linear vs on-demand/which-is-better conversation.

“The most important consideration here is that it’s not about linear or VOD. It’s really around video and curating the right collection of content for every audience type. And that lends itself to a lot of different formats. In the case of sports, it has to be linear. We’ve had a lot of experience with the SEA games and the Olympics and it works very well. So we will continue to do more of that.”

The push into Toggle Originals across genres and languages, which kicked off in a big way last year, has a clear focus on younger audiences, a demographic that free-to-air broadcasters are struggling to hang onto. “This was a way for us to fill the gap and reach that audience,” he says.

The Toggle Originals initiative involves both in-house production resources and third-party commissions, such as LifeSpam from Disney’s Singapore-based production unit. The origin, though, is way less important than the impact. “It goes back to reaching audiences with content that they like and relate to,” Nihalani says.

Toggle Originals so far include dramedy The Breakup List (Luke and Joe learn how to survive singlehood after being dumped) and horror drama Silo (four siblings raised in a safe hideout are forced to navigate a world of monsters after their mother is critically injured), along with one of Toggle’s early efforts, 2014’s 13-episode comedy What Do Men Want? (two young men attempt to clean up their lives, beginning with cleaning house and ditching their girlfriends).

Short-form content is high on Toggle’s priority list. “People have different attention spans at different times of the day and we want to be available for them at every one of those consumption stages in the course of the 24-hour cycle. We will continue to do a little bit of everything with specific audiences in mind,” Nihalani says.

Toggle’s current three subscription tiers for entertainment and sports are simple. S$9.90/US$7.30 a month (no contract) each for entertainment, MUTV and Chelsea TV.

The entertainment tier, Toggle Prime, covers Toggle-It-First, which gives subscribers access to programmes a week before they air on Mediacorp channels. Nihalani says viewers, once they’re hooked on a show, don’t want to wait for the weekly or daily release. “They would much rather watch in advance”.

Toggle Prime also includes Celestial Tiger Entertainment’s Miao Mi live channel and on-demand content and some crime documentaries from A&E Networks. Other third-party acquisitions are a work in progress. Multi-year licensing deals with Lionsgate and Disney for ABC Studios on Demand were allowed to lapse earlier this year. Toggle’s acquisitions team is now in negotiation with distributors to build out a premium entertainment tier with more traction.

Whether something goes behind Toggle’s paywall is a function of the nature of the content, how much it costs, and how it fits with Mediacorp’s structure, which is oriented around audiences rather than platforms.

A large slice of Mediacorp’s revenue overall is advertising based. “Clients very clearly are not looking at buying media on platforms. They want to buy audiences. The entire focus is on how to make ourselves relevant in that space,” Nihalani says, adding that Toggle brings younger audiences into that mix. “That’s the key driver and what drives the largest focus of the business.”

What does – or doesn’t – go behind the paywall is driven by “what makes the most sense both from a consumer looking in as well as how we can make that package available for clients,” Nihalani says. “We have two customers. The audience as well as our brands and we need to get the right mix for both of them”.

Mediacorp may, eventually, follow regional neighbours such as Media Prima’s tonton in moving outside of its home base. Nihalani says Toggle may look further than Singapore, eventually. But there’s a more important task for now. “A lot of the focus today is very local. We need to get it right. And to make sure we have the right engagement in that space”.

Published on30 November 2017