Laureen Ong

In the midst of these new challenges, STAR last year lured U.S. cable veteran Laureen Ong from National Geographic Channel in Washington, D.C., to Hong Kong to take up the post of COO. Ong had under her belt seven years of experience building NGC in the U.S. After its launch in 2001, the channel quickly became one of the fasting-growing brands in American cable-TV history. Previously, Ong headed up the local station WTTG-TV in Washington, D.C., and helped launch SportsVision in Chicago, one of the first regional sports networks in the country. Announcing her appointment last year, STAR’s CEO, Paul Aiello, cited Ong’s “forward-thinking business judgment,” which would be put to good use as the company “aggressively expands its portfolio of content properties across all platforms in its key markets in Asia.”

Ong has set about doing just that, keeping front and center one key tenet: “At the heart of STAR, we’re first and foremost a content company,” she says.

Firmly focused on attracting and retaining viewers, STAR is a prolific buyer of international fare for its portfolio of brands, most notably for its pan-regional English-language service STAR World, home to key imports like Heroes and 90210. As Ong explains, however, the key to any growth strategy in Asia is localization. With original productions in India, Taiwan and China, STAR has amassed a library of more than 20,000 hours of content, and more local fare is in the works. And it’s not just in the TV landscape; in September, STAR aligned with its sister News Corporation company Twentieth Century Fox to launch Fox STAR Studios. The venture will produce local-language feature films in Asia, beginning in India, before expanding to other markets in Greater China and Southeast Asia.

“Local” has also been the key word for STAR’s channel-expansion strategy, with the launch of the Indian regional services Pravah (in Marathi) and Jalsha (in Bengali) in the last few months, joining Vijay (in Tamil) in this lucrative market.

Ong is eyeing growth in several other Asian territories, notably the Philippines and Indonesia, and has set her sights further afield, with plans to expand STAR’s presence in the U.K. and in North America. She is also eyeing new-media opportunities, carefully negotiating the wildly different technological maturity levels across the region. In this interview with World Screen, Ong discusses STAR’s next stage of growth. “They always say it’s much easier to be number two than it is to be number one,” she says. “Being number one is hard. You have to constantly figure out how to stay there.”

ONG: We have 66 channels in 10 languages across 55 countries. When you have that kind of offering, content has to be front and center. It’s not enough to say, Wow, you’ve got all those channels and you’re in all the countries. What does it really mean? How relevant is the content? I would contend that we had taken our eye off the ball a little on some of our channels, which is why we needed to go through this next phase of reinvention. Every business needs to reinvent itself continually, just as executives need to reinvent themselves. So last year was a huge cleanup year for us.

WS: You’ve made a number of new appointments since you joined STAR. What kind of talent and expertise are you bringing to the company?

ONG:Since we are content focused, you’ve probably noticed a lot of our appointments are content related, starting with Todd Lituchy, who is our president of entertainment. Good programmers get programming no matter what language it’s in, no matter what territory or region you’re in, because ultimately it’s understanding consumers, what keeps them engaged, why they love coming back to your channels over and over again. Todd, with a research background and [his experience] at Disney and UPN and Viasat, has the perfect strategic background, as well as being a programming junkie—someone that just loves television. Plus, he’s got the relationships with all the suppliers.

ONG:STAR Plus has been the big behemoth for a very long time—number one 400 weeks and running. How do you stay number one in a market that is so competitive? We really put ourselves on the map with one big megashow, KBC [Kaun Banega Crorepati, the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?], and every network that has ever had a big megahit goes through that whole process of withdrawal. First, you get the big high from the huge ratings and then you keep milking it because you never want the ride to end, but sooner or later you have to be smart and understand that it is going to end. The audience, believe it or not, sooner or later gets fatigued and you’d better have something to follow it. We were also overreliant on one producer for our content, and that is a danger, too. We have been very insightful and [analytical] in looking at what do we need to do better, and we have diversified our program suppliers now. We have a lot more things we have put into development, we have a lot more experimentation. With everybody trying to nip at our heels and topple us from our position, we have to be aggressive and keep pushing the envelope.

ONG: We’ve had two discrete businesses, one in Taiwan and one in China. As we looked at the broader picture—and the timing was very good for us, with Taiwan’s new political environment [showing] much more openness to China—[we realized] we can look at [those two markets] as Greater China. Some of the content we are able to produce for Taiwan will play well in China. (It doesn’t necessarily work the other way around.) We have looked at what we can do to raise the quality of our content that can run on both of those channels and sell across the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia. So when we talk about Greater China, we’re talking about Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan and China.

ONG:We produce about 10,000 hours of programming every year, in India, Taiwan and China. We don’t necessarily produce it ourselves. We have a lot of third-party productions. But we will start to produce more and more in-house. We used to have production in Kuala Lumpur for Channel [V] International; we have since moved that to Hong Kong.

We are looking at increasing local production, particularly of our Chinese-language content. We get requests all the time for localizing content, so where it makes sense we will entertain going into markets and creating localized channels. That’s really been the strength of STAR.

I find it amusing how many new pan-regional channels are popping up here in Asia. It’s a tough market to play in, because there’s not a lot of money to go around to support the channels. There are more and more players, so it’ll be interesting to see how that shakes out in the future. When I got here I killed a couple of channels that [STAR was] thinking about doing that were going to be pan-regional in nature, in the English language. When you actually looked hard at the P&L [profit and loss statements] of these channels, they were never going to make money. At the end of the day, you have to remind people, we are a business!

ONG: In India, as you know, every day there’s another channel. It would be like putting our heads in the sand [if we didn’t launch additional channels]. If the market is going to get fractured, then we should be part and parcel of that. This year we are launching four regional channels; the local-language marketplace is very important in India. As for the rest of the marketplace, we are launching two HD channels this year: STAR HD is launching off the back of our Chinese-language movie library and our Chinese content. STAR Movies HD will be an HD version of our Hollywood blockbusters channel.

ONG: We have a brand-new team on the revenue side of our business, whether it’s distribution or advertising sales. That’s very exciting for us in helping us refocus our business. Being much more consumer-focused has been part of what we’re trying to do here. On the ad-sales front, we have found that just like in North America, it’s not sufficient anymore for people just to buy time on your channels. We are very heavily involved in looking at ad-funded content where we are partners with a lot of advertisers and they support some of the content we are producing. Obviously, everyone wants product placement. But more and more advertisers are becoming much more involved on the content side of the business. We are looking at interesting ideas that make sense. We’re not in the business of having advertisers dictate the content. Having come from a bit of a news background, I know that’s just a very bad place to go. However, advertisers are looking for environments in which they can either exclusively own a show or they’re in a family-friendly environment or they’re in an environment that makes their client look good or whatever it happens to be. Those are opportunities we’re very open to and having discussions on.

ONG:We have high hopes for Indonesia. We’re in a joint venture there in a terrestrial channel, ANTV. Indonesia is an interesting market because the pay-television side still has very low penetration. Terrestrial is very important. We continue to look at opportunities in that market and see where it can grow. If you look at the statistics, Jakarta is [one of the] largest cities in the world and growing very quickly in population—it’s pretty hard to ignore a market with that kind of critical mass.

ONG: Those markets are very important for us; they have demonstrated a fondness for our content, particularly our English-language content. STAR World has a separate beam that goes only into the Philippines, and we’ll look down the road to program that almost as a local channel. How do we stay competitive? With either first-window exclusive content or [through time-shifted scheduling against] the terrestrials.We’re taking the Philippines as a priority market and a high-opportunity market.

ONG:Last year was our cleanup year. We have a lot of people in place, a lot of ideas, a lot of deals that have been enacted that will come to bear this year, so now it’s all about execution. We need to execute strongly on our strategy and raise our game. We look at every single channel very closely and how we can raise the quality of the content we have. As we’re doing that, how do we raise the perfor­mance from the revenue side of our business? If we’re going to go through all this trouble to raise quality, then we’d better be able to monetize it as well.

WS:Having come from the more mature U.S. pay-TV market, what’s your sense of the challenges ahead for Asia’s cable and satellite industry?

ONG: I can look at my calendar and I know what my schedule is tomorrow, but I can guarantee you every single day I come to work, something or some things happen during the day that are so unpredictable! When you’re the leader in the marketplace as we are, we get a lot of interesting phone calls for opportunities in various marketplaces. One day it’s somebody coming in from Japan or Korea, another day it’s somebody with an offering in Vietnam. Being able to multitask, particularly in the diverse region we serve, is essential.