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TV shows and streaming video
This Week in AsiaEconomics

Can Raya and the Last Dragon help Disney capture Southeast Asian streaming prize?

  • With a potential market of 650 million viewers, Southeast Asia is a key battleground for platforms from China, the West and the region itself
  • Will Disney’s first Southeast Asian princess give it an edge over Netflix, WeTV and iQIYI?

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Raya and the Last Dragon is based on Southeast Asian characters and culture. Image: Disney
Resty Woro Yuniar

As an ever greater number of Southeast Asians become transfixed by video streaming services, the region of 650 million people has become a battleground between home-grown platforms and competitors from the West and China.

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In the past year, China’s streaming behemoths, Tencent’s WeTV and Baidu-backed iQIYI, have ramped up efforts to expand in Southeast Asia, following in the footsteps of their Western counterparts Netflix, Walt Disney, and WarnerMedia’s HBO. Tencent, for example, acquired regional streaming platform iflix in June as a way to expand its own WeTV service in the region.
“After acquiring iflix, Tencent’s WeTV is now present in 13 countries in the area. Meanwhile, Baidu’s iQiyi has been opening local offices in Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Indonesia and has invested in local content, a major driver of viewership in this area,” said Ophélie Boucaud, research analyst at digital industries research firm Dataxis.

“The potential of this area is of strategic importance for these players as we have observed a global slowdown in growth of paying services’ subscriptions in the past few years.”

A joint report by Google, Singapore’s Temasek, and Bain & Co. estimated the region’s online media consumption, which includes advertising, gaming, video and music on-demand, would grow to US$35 billion by 2025, up from US$17 billion last year, partly due to a 38 per cent surge in subscriptions video-on-demand (SVOD) platforms during lockdown.

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The Media Partners Asia consultancy (MPA) estimated that 6.5 per cent of households in Southeast Asia would have subscribed to video streaming services by the end of this year. MPA also estimated that Southeast Asia had contributed 10 per cent of the US$6.8 billion revenue in the SVOD sector in Asia Pacific, excluding China, last year. That leaves plenty of room for growth for streaming players in the next few years.

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