Asia Content Spend Hits $15.1B on Streaming, Local Film — SkimNews
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- Media Partners Asia (MPA) reports content investment across seven major Asian markets will rise from $14.8B in 2025 to $15.1B this year, reaching $15.4B by 2031, with growth concentrated in streaming and film
- Korea accounts for $6.9B of the 2025 spend, the largest share among the seven markets analyzed, with Netflix leading streaming and TVING growing subscribers through baseball rights
- India ranks second with $5B in content spend, where online video now leads investment at 46% compared to 42% for television, driven by JioHotstar’s dominance and IPL cricket demand
- Indonesia’s Vidio has been profitable since Q4 of last year and leads its market with six million paying subscribers, signaling regional potential for monetized streaming platforms
- Local film is identified by MPA as the region’s clearest growth opportunity, with Vietnamese box office up 20% to $213M in 2025 and local titles capturing 69%, mirrored by strong domestic performance in Indonesia and India’s $1.41B box office
- Stephen Laslocky, Vice President at MPA, states that while Asian video industries have large audiences and creative capability, they lack structures to generate sustainable returns, making management quality decisive
- Myat Pan Phyu (May), another MPA analyst, emphasizes that viewer demand remains strong and capital is reallocating toward streaming and local film where both engagement and returns are growing
Why it matters: Established media companies in Asia face widening valuation gaps as streaming and local film draw investment away from legacy TV, which struggles with oversupply and weak ad returns; those that cut costs, adopt AI, and protect key content advantages will outperform peers still reliant on outdated models.
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