Thailand’s True Corp is making a play for digital streaming audiences in Indonesia and the Philippines with a duo of AVOD platforms that offer everything from news and short-form content to recent/library Korean, Thai and other Asian premium drama series.

Thailand’s True Corp is making a play for Southeast Asia’s on-demand audiences, adding even more streaming activity to the regional frenzy and hanging another heavy load of hopes, dreams and ambition on, among others, Indonesia’s population of 274 million.

On 18 August 2020, less than three weeks before Disney+ Hotstar went live with its high-energy live-streamed Indonesia launch, True Digital quietly flipped the switch on TrueID-branded advertising-supported on-demand platforms in Indonesia and the Philippines, following about nine months of prep by teams on the ground in Jakarta and Manila. 

In both markets, the platform is being offered as a standalone advertising-supported direct-to-consumer service, with telco (or other) distribution partnerships still under discussion.     

Indonesia country  head, Armando Siahaan, says TrueID Indonesia’s competitive advantage is both its bottom-up approach in terms of content mix as well as services within the platform. 

“We have the ability to define our platform prioritising the specific characteristics of Indonesian audience,” he told ContentAsia.

“TrueID Indonesia offers long form content like movies and series from Indonesia and other Asian countries, which may be similar to the other OTT platforms. But we will also include classic local movie titles or reruns of favourite local TV shows, which may not be considered by the regional and global players,” he added.

Indonesian films on the platform include titles such as the comedy Cek Toko Sebelah (2016), romantic comedy Yowis Ben (2018); and Thai series Love You So (2019). Expansion includes lifestyle and anime, plus a wider geographic spread. Indonesian originals are also part of the plan. 

Local content creators and digital studios are being invited in to power a short-form layer along with live TV and articles – “two forms of content still vastly consumed by Indonesians,” Siahaan says – that other regional players don’t offer. 

In the Philippines, the platform’s drama slate includes Illustrado (2014) and Tadhana (2017), both from free-TV broadcaster GMA Network. The focus is on non-scripted snackable content as well as a curated list of articles, which, like Indonesia, other OTT players don’t offer, says Philippines’ country head, Dindo Marzan. 

Across both markets, TrueID is committed to AVOD, including native advertising/branded content. Any subscription tier (if there ever is one) will be layered on top of the free services, Marzan says. 

“A huge segment of Indonesian audience comes from a tradition of watching free-to-air TV, so they never had to pay for content and are used to the idea of watching ads. This segment is naturally shifting to digital. They will seek premium content on digital platforms, but with no willingness to pay,” Siahaan adds.

In addition, “with such a shift, digital advertising spend is also growing rapidly in this market. Brands will more and more look for premium inventory. That is where we come to try and connect those two needs”.

Siahaan says his biggest challenge is Indonesia’s diversity and, therefore, the content mix across the archipelago. “Finding the right content formula is key,” he says.  

“This is exactly why TrueID Indonesia does not want to restrict itself to limited content formats, genres and even services, and instead offers a breadth of content verticals that we believe will resonate with Indonesian audiences”. Siahaan describes TrueID Indonesia’s current slate – Asian content, with the focus on Indonesia, Korean and Thai drama/horror/comedy – as in its “early stage”.

In the Philippines, Marzan says his biggest challenge is “building a new brand in a country where True is not widely known and Facebook, YouTube, and Netflix are household names”.

True’s expansion rides an upward trend across Southeast Asia. 

Media Partners Asia (MPA) research notes that “online video consumption continued to soar through the pandemic in Southeast Asia during the first half of 2020,” and that “the growth of premium video services has been significant, with a greater scale of consumers paying for online video in large emerging such as Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand”. 

It’s still early days outside of Thailand for True Digital, which is a clear market leader at home. According to MPA’s AMPD research, TrueID leads Thailand’s telco OTT rankings; data published at end Sept showed TrueID Thailand at 1.5m paying/authenticated subs in Q2 2020. For Q2 2020, TrueID Thailand reported 61% Q-o-Q growth in TV box/OTT penetration to 1.4 million, making True the largest Android TV box operator in Thailand. Monthly video views were up 55% to 219 million.  

True’s plans in Indonesia kicked off in Dec 2019, when the Thai company set up a subsidiary in Jakarta with an investment of Rp24.99 billion/US$1.7 million. At the end of August this year, True also set up a wholly owned subsidiary in Vietnam, True Digital Vietnam Joint Stock Company, with paid-up capital of VND4.7 billion/US$200,650. The Vietnam venture’s business is listed as data analytics and digital solutions.

In trodding the regional video streaming path, TrueID enters a space still raw from the high-profile crashes of iflix (powered by smart-talking and breathtaking fund-raising strategies before assets were sold to Tencent/WeTV earlier this year) and Hooq (powered by Singtel, Sony Pictures Television and Warner Brothers), which entered voluntary liquidation in March. Opinions range all over the place on blame, the simplest of which is a difficult operating environment. That operating environment remains. What True for sure doesn’t have is the same approach to overblown announcements and overstated claims. And that may, in the end, be a good thing. 

Published in ContentAsia's Issue Three 2020, October 2020