PREMIUM: HOOQ CEO Peter Bithos shares with TV AsiaPac his ambitions for the new platform, formed as a joint venture between Singtel, Warner Bros. and Sony Pictures Television.<\/p>\n
TV ASIAPAC: <\/strong>How did the joint venture for HOOQ come together? TV ASIAPAC: <\/strong>Is most of your content coming from your parent companies or are you also looking to outside suppliers? TV ASIAPAC:<\/strong> Tell me about the opportunities, and obstacles, in some of your target markets. India is critical for us. It\u2019s unbelievable how fast that market is evolving. We believe our mix of local and Hollywood content is truly differentiated. We think we have a fantastic opportunity to get into the Indian market quickly with a value proposition that appeals to people who love movies and quality stories. We\u2019re not going to be the mass-market premium model with a cricket offering. But with 1.1 billion people, there are a lot of movie lovers out there!<\/p>\n The biggest challenge in Indonesia is the network readiness. The desire from the customer is definitely there, but there is a lot of 2G [in the mobile] network, particularly in the provinces outside of Jakarta, and fixed-line broadband is not as prevalent. We will get to Indonesia, but it won\u2019t be till later this year.<\/p>\n TV ASIAPAC: <\/strong>Are you going to be purely an SVOD play or will you be looking at other revenue models? TV ASIAPAC: <\/strong>How do you adjust for the varying broadband speeds across the region? TV ASIAPAC: <\/strong>Do you expect mobile devices to be the primary screen for your users? TV ASIAPAC: <\/strong>How do you need to adjust your strategy to cater to mobile viewers as compared with those watching on PCs or smart TV sets? HOOQ CEO Peter Bithos shares with TV AsiaPac his ambitions for the new platform, formed as a joint venture between Singtel, Warner Bros. and Sony Pictures Television.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":290,"featured_media":3726,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[67,69],"tags":[91,92],"class_list":["post-3380","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","","category-interviews","category-top-stories","tag-hooq","tag-peter-bithos"],"yoast_head":"\n
\nBITHOS: <\/strong>It starts with a fundamental customer need across emerging markets. There\u2019s an emerging middle class of 1 to 2 billion people across Southeast Asia and South Asia, depending on which countries you count in. Those individuals are finally getting to the point economically where they have some disposable income to spend on things like digital entertainment. The average age in Asia is about 26 or 27. The youth across Asia are digitally savvy and they have a bit of affordability, but no one is providing a convenient, legal and affordable way for them to get the content they want, how they want, when they want. From that, we found in Warner Bros., Sony and Singtel three partners that said, we can fill that need.<\/p>\n
\nBITHOS:<\/strong> It is not an exclusive play with Warner Bros. and Sony. We have Hollywood content from other studios as well and we complement that with a very deep content catalogue from any local market we go into. We just announced our launch in the Philippines. We\u2019ve been publicly saying that the Singtel Asia footprint is where we\u2019ll start and that includes India, Thailand and Indonesia. We have a very conscious strategy to complement Hollywood content with quality local content.<\/p>\n
\nBITHOS: <\/strong>We started with the Philippines for a couple of really great reasons. It\u2019s a population of 100 million people. It\u2019s the youngest country in Asia. It\u2019s also, depending on the quarter, the fastest-growing economy. It\u2019s English speaking and has an affinity for Hollywood content. It has the best wireless infrastructure of any of the emerging markets in Asia. It was the only market where the entire ecosystem has rolled out LTE and the 3G network is everywhere. And we found a great distribution partner, the local telco Globe Telecom.<\/p>\n
\nBITHOS: <\/strong>We launched with a subscription model at an emerging-market price point. That was one of the core features for our start-up. Our first announced price point was Ps199, which is around US$4 a month. But in Asia you have to have more pricing innovation. Sachet pricing is very prevalent in just about every industry; the ability to get a bite-sized component of something bigger. One of the pricing innovations we’ll be working very hard at is a way for people to access content in more manageable value chunks\u2014be it 50 cents or $1.<\/p>\n
\nBITHOS: <\/strong>We\u2019ve put a lot of effort into adaptive bit-rate streaming. We also have the ability to set, by country, different speeds for different [levels of] quality and different access platforms. What we can deliver in the Thailand mobile market can be set differently to the quality or the bit rate we deliver in the Indonesian fixed-line market. We\u2019ve built that into the platform, knowing that we\u2019re going to go into a diverse set of environments across Asia.<\/p>\n
\nBITHOS: <\/strong>We will be available on all platforms\u2014from PCs to smart TVs to android set-top boxes\u2014but I expect most of the traffic will come through mobile and tablets.<\/p>\n
\nBITHOS: <\/strong>A user may not have access to the mobile network or Internet connection at the time they want to see content. They might be in rural areas, they might be commuting, their data balance might be zero. In the Philippines, the typical mobile data customer will only access the Internet on the mobile network five to seven times a month. Because of that, we have a feature where you can download five different movies in an offline mode and you can watch them when you want, where you want, and it\u2019s encrypted on your device. We know that the network quality and the connection are hit or miss. So that\u2019s an example of a feature innovation that was built for Asia.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"