March was a significant month for Brightcove in Asia-Pacific. Our customer PrimeTime Entertainment went live with their OTT streaming service on 1st March 2015, which is powered by Brightcove Zencoder. Brightcove's SVP of Media, Anil Jain also took centre stage with PrimeTime's CEO, Kasidit Kolasastraseni, at the CASBAA OTT Summit 2015 in Singapore, to chat about the emergence of OTT in the Thai market and to give the audience the backstory on its newly launched service.
The emergence of OTT technology in the region played a major role in shaping PrimeTime's business strategies. As with any market, the Thai market comes with its own unique indicators that deserve close attention, such as the market having a higher mobile penetration rate than TVs per household. Piracy of entertainment content in Thailand is also pervasive, signalling a strong appetite of content. Together, these factors were the biggest indicators of the market's readiness for an OTT streaming service. With strong support from Cable Thai Holdings, Thailand's leading internet service provider and DNA 2002 Plc, a leading DVD retailer, such viable market and business conditions enabled PrimeTime to launch an OTT streaming service to serve a market of over 60 million people.
As part of its strategy to quickly go to market with a wide array of western content for the Thai market, PrimeTime pursued direct content licensing agreements with US content owners. PrimeTime plans to eventually build a broad content offering (variety, sports, local dramas, local shows, etc) that appeals to the mass market.
Lastly, PrimeTime opted to adopt a blended monetisation strategy instead of a one-time flat monthly fee pricing option. This gives its viewers the option to flexibly sign up for a combination of SVOD and TVOD models, enabling them with the freedom to select the package that best fits them. Kasidit lauded Brightcove Zencoder's capability to provide a granular level of operational control, while ensuring the technology is future proof, easily scalable in its implementation and seamlessly encodes and streams content to various devices.
We are certainly very excited to support PrimeTime's endeavour to revolutionise the way Thai audiences consume their video content on demand, regardless of device.