IP, sports and AI define Asia’s new content era

The Asian entertainment industry is entering a new phase of maturity. Growth remains important, but executives at this week’s APOS conference in Bali were focused on building sustainable ecosystems, scalable IP and deeper audience engagement. Here are eight themes that defined the conversation.

IP has become the new currency

Whether it was Netflix signaling a dormant fandom awakening around Japanese live-action and Chinese-language content, or MD Entertainment pursuing global co-productions, one theme emerged repeatedly: owning IP is more important than ever. The focus has shifted to creating franchises that can travel across platforms, markets and formats. “I always think of myself and my team as portfolio managers,” says Minyoung Kim, Netflix VP of content for APAC (ex-India), pointing to successful investments in Korea, Japan and India. Speaking at the ‘Indonesia At Scale’ session, MD Entertainment founder and CEO Manoj Punjabi said global streaming services have become important gateways for Indonesian stories to reach international audiences, while future growth will increasingly depend on cross-border IP development.

AI shifts from experiment to infrastructure

Vivek Couto, CEO of Media Partners Asia, which produces the conference, set the tone in his opening remarks, stating that AI has moved from the conference talking point to operational reality. JioHotstar illustrated this point concretely: Chief Architect Vijay Seshadri said the platform has implemented a voice discovery feature built with OpenAI, with more than 60% of users now choosing voice-over-text for content discovery. ReelShort described AI as a future production workflow that functions alongside traditional live-action. A special panel on day two on GenAI across the content pipeline, featuring JioStar’s Stephan Bugaj and FBRC.ai’s Todd Terrazas, was followed by sessions on AI-native filmmaking, AI-powered localization and AI video generation – an agenda that would have been unthinkable at any previous edition of the summit.

Fandom is now a business strategy – and sports is the clearest proof of that

Crunchyroll’s expansion into Taiwan and South Korea underscored how anime fandom is increasingly seen as an economic driver rather than a marketing outcome. Sport emerged at APOS as the category in which this logic is most visibly expressed. JioStar Sports CEO Ishan Chatterjee said the platform now regularly delivers more than 1 billion viewers per IPL cricket tournament season – 1.2 billion by 2026 – and set a global digital concurrency record of 72.5 million during the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup Cricket 2026 Final. Chatterjee described live sports as one of the few formats still capable of reaching an audience on that scale, and pointed to JioStar’s decade-long investment in kabaddi – which now attracts more than 300 million viewers per season – as evidence that cricket’s top audience can be diverted to build fandom in other sports from scratch. On the commerce front, he cited JioStar’s integration with food delivery platform Swiggy as part of a broader effort to combine content consumption with transactional experiences. Couto, in conversation with Variety Ahead of the summit, cricket’s changing geography was pointed to as further evidence of the sport’s growing reach, with the most recent ICC cycle seeing meaningful demand emerge from Japan, Indonesia and Thailand for the first time. “How do you make money with that?” Couto said. “How do you leverage the fandom? And how do you develop new revenue streams around merchandising, ticketing, working with brands and advertisers – rather than just depending on these rights cycles.”

Vertical entertainment is going mainstream – and the numbers back it up

From ReelShort’s expansion in Southeast Asia to FlareFlow’s efforts to build vertical reality franchises, industry leaders increasingly described vertical storytelling as a long-term content category rather than a temporary trend. The category now has a financial weight that reflects this belief: Media Partners Asia estimates that DramaBox and ReelShort, the two profitable leaders in microdrama, generate combined annualized revenues of nearly $1.5 billion, with most users based in the US. ReelShort announced at the summit a new partnership with Philippine telecommunications company Globe, following a deal with Thailand’s AIS two months earlier. During the “Building the Vertical Stack in Asia” session, Timothy Oh, managing director and chief marketing officer of COL Group International, said: “Today we are already seeing the development of vertical documentaries, vertical IPs and vertical franchises.” RisingJoy CEO and co-founder Cassandra Yang separately announced the launch of RJOY, a direct-to-consumer microdrama streaming service launching via TikTok Minis in the US and Japan, with twenty originals slated for the second half of 2026.

Connected TV is changing the home screen across Asia

A theme that was discussed during several sessions was the increasingly rapid shift from digital viewing to television. Gunjan Soni, director of YouTube India, told APOS that the platform now has the widest reach among media properties on connected TV screens in India, according to Comscore data, describing YouTube as “India’s prime-time screen.” Creator-driven cricket content alone generated 190 billion views on the platform by 2025, with 66% of that consumption time spent on non-live content such as behind-the-scenes analysis and programming. JioHotstar’s Bharath Ram cited nearly 100 million connected TVs in India as context for the platform’s increasing CTV push, while Soni said YouTube now reaches more than 75 million Indian adults aged 18 and older on connected TV screens. Collectively, the data pointed to a market where mobile-first assumptions are rapidly being revised.

Governments show up for court streamers

At this year’s summit, a newer dynamic became visible: government officials are actively competing for manufacturing investments. Jakarta Vice Governor Rano Karno appeared at APOS to announce a six-point initiative that positions the Indonesian capital as a major production hub, anchored by a tax credit program under which eligible national film productions can receive up to 50% tax rebates on costs incurred in the city, which will formally launch on June 26. He held separate talks with senior Netflix executives about expanding the streamer’s production in Jakarta. The moment was notable for what it signaled: that governments across the region are increasingly seeing content production infrastructure as an economic development priority worth appearing at a media summit to pitch.

The Creator Economy has become a macroeconomic force

Soni has viewed the Indian maker ecosystem not as a marketing channel, but as a structural economic contributor. “India represents the blueprint for how a digital creative economy reaches institutional scale,” she said. YouTube reported that by 2025, 200 million logged-in users searched for shopping-related content on YouTube India, driving a 250% year-over-year increase in shopping watch time. The content-to-commerce pipeline – creators who directly drive purchasing behavior – emerged during several sessions as one of the most commercially concrete developments in Asia’s digital economy.

Asia is no longer just a market; it will become the growth engine of the sector

Netflix, marking the 10th anniversary of its Asia Pacific operations, has released figures to coincide with APOS showing that APAC content now accounts for more than half of all titles appearing in the global non-English Top 10 rankings each week, up from around 30% in 2021, with viewing hours of APAC content on the platform quadrupling since 2019. Prime Video, Disney and regional players all highlighted the growing international appeal of Asian stories. Couto returned to the language of disruption or reset in his opening statement, preferring a more precise term for what APOS captured. “It doesn’t actually reset,” he said. “It’s actually being redefined. The entire industry is being redefined in terms of the opportunities, in terms of new revenue streams, and frankly, in terms of the cost structures that one has to adopt.”