The Asia-Pacific streaming market is evolving rapidly. With SVOD and mobile services providing significant growth potential, companies are looking to enhance their offerings to meet diverse consumer needs across the region.
Summary
- The APAC streaming market holds significant growth potential, with forecasts indicating a CAGR of 22.6% from 2025 to 2030, potentially reaching revenues of $113 billion, primarily driven by SVOD services and mobile-first solutions.
- There is a notable trend among telcos to enhance existing services rather than introduce new ones, focusing on technologies like advanced recommendation systems and localized content to optimize user experience in the face of declining ARPU.
- Cross-platform innovations, such as Multi-X solutions, are gaining traction, allowing video service providers to streamline operations and offer tailored TV experiences while reducing total costs.
- Targeted TV advertising and bundling strategies are becoming increasingly important for monetization, as telcos introduce ad-supported services and offer aggregated packages that include both global and local streaming options to minimize consumer churn.
Potential for growth
Of all the global streaming markets, it is undoubtedly APAC that contains the most potential room for growth. Deployment of streaming services is still lagging behind the mature North American and European markets, delayed by a combination of COVID-19 disruption, the need for investment in localization to achieve true success, and a patchy broadband rollout across such a large and diverse area. But that just means there is stored-up potential there ready to be tapped.
While 2025 has started slowly, largely due to uncertainties in the wider macroeconomic picture, the forecasts for the market are promising. Overall, the Asia Pacific video streaming market size is anticipated to grow at a CAGR of 22.6% from 2025 to 2030, to achieve total overall revenues of $113 billion. This is driven in the main by SVOD services and a new wave of mobile-first services based on cloud infrastructures. Overall, it is estimated there will be 309 million subscribers across the region in 2029, with a further 378 million in China alone.
Key APAC trends
It is, of course, a very large region with a lot of differences between the individual markets at a country level. These are driven by a complex network of interlocking factors including consumer sentiment, economic performance, government regulation, and a whole lot more. That said, there are some trends we can pick out from the overall market that hold true across even APAC’s immense geography.
As already mentioned, activity across the region in 2025 has been so far rather slow, though we expect this will start to pick up as the year continues, providing the ongoing trade wars don’t escalate any further. In the main, telcos have been cautious with their investments and are looking at enhancing their existing services rather than introducing new ones.
Inevitably, in some cases this will lead to employing new technology. The first generation of streaming devices are getting progressively older in the market and some are definitely due a replacement as their support for some of the newer in-demand services is incomplete to say the least.
Tier One companies are probably the most dynamic, and willing to spend at least a portion of their CAPEX each quarter. Below them, Tiers Two and Three currently look to be in survival mode. These are challenging times for the smaller players but, being optimistic about the situation, those that make it through this period will be stronger for it.
What are the services telcos are looking to enhance their offerings with? Advanced recommendation systems are at the top of the list, and it is in this context we are probably having the most conversations with customers regarding AI, though its role in localizing content is also attracting interest. Analyzing the data here also opens the door to the much-requested feature of increased analytics, both analyzing content libraries and user behavior when it comes to interacting with that content. In an era of declining ARPU, which is what we currently have in many areas of APAC, making sure that content is as optimized to the end user as possible is an important consideration.
Cross-platform innovations such as our Multi-X solution are also increasingly turning up as requests on RFPs. These streamline operations for video service providers by consolidating diverse operational groups into a single, unified offering. They allow seamless support of content across a variety of business needs, spanning multi-regions, multi-brands, and multi-enterprises. The ultimate goal is a tailored TV experience for each group's distinct user preferences, coupled with a lower TCO for the company deploying the solution. This very much feeds into the whole trend of enhancing current services and allowing companies to expand into new markets in an organic, cost-effective way.
Targeted TV Advertising is an increasingly important part of monetization strategies. Tier One telcos in particular have been introducing ad-supported services, and these continue to grow. Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia, and Indonesia have been particularly active in this area.
Bundling is also an area seeing great interest. It is an effective way of minimizing consumer churn as the aggregated services that the consumer is offered as a result can lead to definite savings. These are proving popular in the cost-competitive market. Even established brands will now seek to offer both the large global streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, alongside some of the key local players with everything bundled up under their own brand’s umbrella.
In conclusion
The critical question for the market is, as always, what does the consumer want? In the main it boils down to wanting the right content at the right price. But alongside that, they are increasingly expecting to see other features such as increased personalization. Price rises from the streaming giants have become a fact of life that consumers grudgingly bear, but all other price increases are unpopular and can lead to dramatic churn. This means that telcos and broadcasters throughout the region have to effectively do more with less; offer the consumers the steadily increasing Quality of Experience and the quality of content that they expect, but do so as cost-effectively as possible.
