ATF 2014, going digital and beyond

According to the organizer, the Top 5 countries represented at ATF/ScreenSingapore (including buyers and sellers) were Singapore, Hong Kong SAR, Indonesia, China, South Korea & Thailand. Prensario noticed more buyers from Japan and less from India, for instance.

Apart from the main broadcasters and producers, gathered on the Japanese pavilion, the Screen Authority of Sapporo (SAS) has brought 19 regional broadcasters from Osaka, Okinawa and other regions of Japan, which are making more emphasis on the international market. ‘It is our second year here and now there are more companies. We are planning to attend the Hong Kong Film Festival, too. There is a lot of good content from these TV stations’, comments Yuki Otaka, from the international promotion department at SAS.

For the first time, the three main broadcasters of The Philippines attended ATF with a booth, selling and buying: ABS-CBN, GMA and TV5. They mainly buy scripted and big entertainment shows, while they sell their successful prime time drama series, concreting sales in Africa, Eastern Europe and gaining new markets in Asia during 2014.

There were more buyers from new territories, such us Nepal (Subisu Cablenet), Bangladesh (Independent TV), Sri Lanka (TV Derana), Thailand (Amarin TV), among others. As an example of expansion, Dreamworks Animation has confirmed the launch of a kids TV channel during the second half of 2015, which will cover 16 territories. Asian content business is growing and spreading in new markets.

Apart from the countries mentioned above, Prensario also met TV channels, both free and pay TV, from Kazakhstan and Russia, which were attending the ATF for the first time. ‘Here we have a second window apart from the main tradeshows, so for us it is important to participate, to see the product first’, a buyer added.

By markets, Singapore and Malaysia are showing their consolidation as (national and international) production hubs, while Japan continues to be recognized for its entertainment formats (very successful in the international market), China for its documentaries, and India for the animation. There is enough room to grow in Asia Pacific.

Yu Dong, founder and chairman of Bona Film Group (China), who launched a USD 100-million Media Found with Singapore during ATF, explains: ‘Singapore is the perfect place to launch this fund as it is not only a financial capital of the world, but also the place where East meets West. This fund will allow foreign investors to participate in the fastest growing media and entertainment market in the world’.

PwC's Global entertainment and media outlook 2014-2018 estimated that China’s media and entertainment industry is forecast to overtake Japan’s by 2018 to become the second largest one in the world, only behind the United States. It is already the second largest film market in the world, and China’s

TV industry is set to surpass the UK and Germany by 2016 to also become the second largest one behind the U.S. market.

2015 will be an important year for Singapore, as well. The country is celebrating its 50 Anniversary (after its independence of 1965), for which the government and different entities are working in a number of big events. Following its support to content industry, the Media Development Authority (MDA) will inaugurate Mediapolis in December 2015, where the public TV broadcaster MediaCorp will move its assets.

Digital took the scene… again
Vincent Martin, EVP, Dailymotion Asia-Pacific, explained during a panel about OTT: ‘People here are increasingly accessing entertainment content via mobile devices. 55% of network usage in the region is spent on YouTube videos, a figure projected to multiply tenfold by 2020. We encourage creators to launch their own video streaming platform. The challenge? Not to incurring high fixed costs’.

Twitter Australia’s head of TV partnerships Tony Broderick, held the TVxTwitter conference the last day of ATF, showing the strength of its social network in supporting TV channels programming strategies. ‘It is clear that social TV is not competing, but complementing. The challenge is to find new ways to make TV special again. We emphasize on shared experience: Twitter is live, public, conversational and need to be quickly distributed’, he remarked.

Twitter has 284 millions of monthly users, where 80% are mobile; over 500 tweets are sent every month. ‘70% of the TV related tweets are sent during the TV shows. Television prime time is Twitter prime time’, concluded Broderick, who also highlighted the partnerships with Nielsen (Australia) and Video Research (Japan) to launch Twitter rating measurement systems.

Fabricio Ferrara, from Singapore