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.
