Are China’s streaming companies becoming Southeast Asia's newfound "Netflix"? Or will they even overcome Netflix themselves?

Image from MUVI

Everybody’s favorite streaming platform is Netflix. Quite literally, everybody’s. Where do you go to watch a new popular movie or TV show? Definitely Netflix. At times, people even go to the lengths of activating their VPN when certain content isn’t available in their country — all this extra convenience just for the sake of streaming on Netflix. I mean, Netflix is known for its easy-to-navigate software, ad-free streaming, etc. It has always been the best streaming platform, dominating the market throughout the 20th century. However, until recently, people have been complaining about how most of their popular old shows and movies have been taken out, and that they need to get better. There have always been complaints, but people never imagined another streaming platform could be like Netflix. Right? I mean, we would expect another streaming platform like Amazon or Disney+ to take over, but have you ever thought a streaming platform from China would take over?

Well, in the Southeast Asia streaming market, it seems like Tencent and iQiyi are climbing up the ranks despite being each other’s top rivals. U.S. Netflix and other U.S. streaming platforms like Amazon Prime all entered the Southeast Asia market in 2016. Throughout the market, they continued to expand globally, including taking a 60% share of Singapore’s market (French research company, Dataxis). But Chinese companies like Tencent and iQiyi are rapidly catching up to these U.S. streaming companies. In Thailand, they hold about 40% of the market, while U.S. companies only have 30%. Their key strategy is to promote their ad-supported free viewing of premium content, similar to what Netflix provides, but without being annoying like an “illegal website.”

These Chinese streaming platform companies aim to further dominate the Southeast Asia market, a region they are already rapidly overtaking. In addition to their ad-supported free viewing content, they also have low monthly subscription fees equivalent to only a few dollars. Their platforms, on average, have around 36 million monthly subscribers within the Southeast Asia market. To achieve their goals of expanding and dominating even further, they plan to create more original content within Asia, including Thailand, Indonesia, and other countries. In Thailand, iQiyi is already pushing 9,000 titles, with over 60% of them being Chinese productions. Moreover, Yang Xiaowei, iQiyi’s co-managing director of iQiyi's Thailand subsidiary, mentions that they’re planning to focus more on popular genres, such as boy-love and girl-love drama shows. They also plan to “invest up to 50 million baht ($1.54 million) per production, and release four to six titles per year," said Yang (Nikkei Asia). Additionally, they plan to expand their content in Indonesia. In June of this year, they partnered with Indonesia’s largest mobile carrier, Telkomsel, to jointly produce these six titles they’re planning to release. They’re working with local studios and plan to heavily promote their new content to Telkomsel’s roughly 170 million subscribers.

Along with Tencent’s growth in many other segments, like music, it seems the popularity of Chinese goods and services — from household appliances to AI-driven electric cars, and even their renowned character Labubu — is growing throughout Southeast Asia. If Chinese streaming services continue to expand, as seen with Tencent's rise to become the new Spotify with even better numbers, Chinese brands could gain even greater sway in the region than we thought.