Asia’s entertainment industry is entering a new stage of maturity. Growth remains important, but executives at this week’s APOS conference in Bali were focused on building sustainable ecosystems, scalable IP and deeper audience engagement. Here are eight themes that defined the conversation.

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, while future growth will increasingly depend on cross-border IP development.

AI Is Shifting From Experimentation to Infrastructure

Vivek Couto, CEO of Media Partners Asia, which produces the conference, set the tone in his opening address, framing AI as having moved from conference talking point to operational reality. JioHotstar illustrated the point concretely: chief architect Vijay Seshadri said 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. ReelShort described AI as a future production workflow operating alongside traditional live-action. A dedicated day-two panel on GenAI across the content pipeline, featuring JioStar’s Stephan Bugaj and FBRC.ai’s Todd Terrazas, was followed by sessions on AI-native filmmaking, AI-powered localization and AI video generation — an agenda depth that would have been unthinkable at a previous edition of the summit.

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. Ishan Chatterjee, CEO of JioStar Sports, 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. Chatterjee described live sport as one of the few formats still capable of aggregating audiences at that scale, and pointed to JioStar’s decade-long investment in kabaddi – now drawing over 300 million viewers a season – as evidence that cricket’s top-of-funnel audience can be redirected to build fandom in other sports from scratch. On commerce, he cited JioStar’s integration with food delivery platform Swiggy as part of a broader push to combine content consumption with transactional experiences. Couto, speaking to Variety ahead of the summit, pointed to cricket’s shifting geography as further evidence of sport’s expanding reach: in the most recent ICC cycle, meaningful demand emerged for the first time from Japan, Indonesia and Thailand. “How do you monetize that?” Couto said. “How do you tap the fandom? And how do you develop new revenue streams around merchandising, ticketing, working with brands and advertisers — rather than just being dependent on these rights cycles.”

Vertical Entertainment Is Moving Into the Mainstream – and the Numbers Back It Up

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, the two profitable leaders in the microdrama space, are generating combined annualized revenue of close to $1.5 billion, with most users based in the U.S. ReelShort announced a new partnership with Philippine telecommunications company Globe at the summit, following a deal with Thailand’s AIS two months prior. At the “Building the Vertical Stack in Asia” session, COL Group International general manager and chief marketing officer Timothy Oh said: “Today we’re already seeing the development of vertical documentaries, vertical IPs and vertical franchises.” RisingJoy CEO and co-founder Cassandra Yang separately announced the launch of RJOY, a direct-to-consumer microdrama streaming service launching via TikTok Minis in the U.S. and Japan with 20 originals planned for the second half of 2026.

Connected TV Is Reshaping the Home Screen Across Asia

A theme that cut across multiple sessions was the accelerating shift of digital viewing to the television set. YouTube India country managing director Gunjan Soni told APOS that the platform now holds the highest reach among media properties on connected TV screens in India, per Comscore data, and described YouTube as “India’s prime-time screen.” Creator-led cricket content alone generated 190 billion views on the platform in 2025, with 66% of that consumption time spent on non-live content such as analysis and behind-the-scenes programming. JioHotstar’s Bharath Ram cited nearly 100 million connected televisions in India as context for the platform’s accelerating CTV push, while Soni said YouTube now reaches more than 75 million Indian adults aged 18 and above on connected TV screens. The data collectively pointed toward a market where mobile-first assumptions are being revised at speed.

Governments Are Showing Up to Court Streamers

A newer dynamic emerged visibly at this year’s summit: public officials are actively competing for production investment. 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 under which qualifying national film productions can receive up to a 50% tax refund on costs incurred in the city, set to formally launch June 26. He separately held discussions with senior Netflix executives on expanding the streamer’s output in Jakarta. The moment was notable for what it signaled: that governments across the region increasingly see content production infrastructure as an economic development priority worth showing up to a media summit to pitch.

The Creator Economy Has Become a Macroeconomic Force

Soni framed India’s creator ecosystem not as a marketing channel but as a structural economic contributor. “India represents the blueprint for how a digital creator economy achieves institutional scale,” she said. YouTube reported that 200 million logged-in users searched for shopping-related content on YouTube India in 2025, driving a 250% year-on-year increase in shopping watch time. The content-to-commerce pipeline — creators driving direct purchasing behavior — emerged across multiple sessions as one of the most commercially concrete developments in Asia’s digital economy.

Asia Is No Longer Just a Market – It’s Becoming the Industry’s Growth Engine

Netflix, marking its 10th anniversary of operating in Asia Pacific, released figures to coincide with APOS showing APAC content now accounts for more than half of all titles appearing in its global non-English Top 10 rankings each week, up from around 30% in 2021, with viewing hours of APAC content on the platform having quadrupled since 2019. Prime Video, Disney and regional players all emphasized the increasing international appeal of Asian stories. Couto, in his opening address, pushed back on the language of disruption or reset, preferring a more precise term for what APOS captured. “It’s not actually being reset,” he said. “It’s actually being redefined. The whole industry is being redefined in terms of the possibilities, in terms of new revenue streams, and frankly, in terms of the cost structures that one has to adopt.”