IP Has Become the New Currency Whether it was Netflix flagging a dormant fandom waking up around Japanese live-action and Chinese-language content, or MD Entertainment pursuing global co-productions, one theme appeared repeatedly: owning IP matters more than ever . The focus has shifted toward creating franchises capable of traveling across platforms, markets, and formats.
“I always consider myself and my team as portfolio managers,” said Minyoung Kim, Netflix VP of content for APAC (ex-India), pointing to successful investments in Korea, Japan, and India . During 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 .
AI Is Shifting from Experimentation to Infrastructure Vivek Couto, CEO of Media Partners Asia, set the tone in his opening address, framing AI as having moved from conference talking point to operational reality . JioHotstar illustrated the point concretely: the platform has deployed a conversational voice discovery feature built with OpenAI, with more than 60% of users now choosing voice over text for content discovery .
Fandom Is Now a Business Strategy – and Sport Is Its Clearest Proof Crunchyroll’s expansion into Taiwan and South Korea underscored how anime fandom is increasingly viewed as an economic engine rather than a marketing outcome . Sport emerged at APOS as the category where that logic is playing out most visibly. JioStar Sports CEO Ishan Chatterjee said the platform is now regularly delivering over 1 billion viewers per IPL cricket tournament season – 1.2 billion in 2026 – and set a global digital concurrency record of 72.5 million during the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup Cricket 2026 Final .
Vertical Entertainment Is Moving into the Mainstream From ReelShort’s Southeast Asia expansion 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 financial weight to match the conviction: Media Partners Asia estimates that DramaBox and ReelShort are generating combined annualized revenue of close to $1.5 billion, with most users based in the U.S. .
Governments Are Showing Up to Court Streamers Jakarta Vice Governor Rano Karno appeared at APOS to announce a six-point initiative positioning Indonesia’s capital as a major production hub, anchored by a tax rebate program . The moment signaled that governments across the region increasingly see content production infrastructure as an economic development priority.
