APOS, the marquee annual gathering of the Asia-Pacific media and entertainment business, gets underway this week in Bali, Indonesia, and its organizers have given the 2026 edition a pointed framing: a reset. Run by research and advisory firm Media Partners Asia, the summit convenes the region’s most powerful players — global streamers, Indian conglomerates, Chinese tech platforms and a wave of AI and microdrama upstarts — around a single premise: that television, theatrical, streaming and social video are collapsing into one market and that nearly every conventional rule about how it makes money is being rewritten.
MPA values Asia’s screen entertainment economy at roughly $180 billion today and sees it on course to top $200 billion by 2031, with online video having already overtaken linear television across the region and almost all future growth coming from digital.
More and more of it accrues to platforms built for attention rather than prestige: by MPA’s reckoning, the world’s most valuable entertainment companies are now ByteDance and YouTube, each carrying a valuation north of $500 billion — roughly double that of a traditional Hollywood major. “Money is following consumer money,” as MPA chief executive Vivek Couto puts it, “and advertiser money is following attention.”
