Thanks to TikTok, streaming services are losing subscribers in Southeast Asia

In Southeast Asia, TikTok has become big enough to influence the subscription video on demand (SVOD) industry, even though it doesn’t offer a true SVOD service of its own. According to a report from Media Partners Asia (MPA), TikTok’s viewership share in Southeast Asia has jumped by 20% over the past two years. As the ByteDance-owned app soars, SVOD content providers are struggling to attract new subscribers in the heavily-populated region.

Between January and June of 2023, 42% of all streaming video watch time in Southeast Asia came on TikTok, per the MPA report. That’s good for a 20% increase over the past two years and a 7% year-over-year bump. That growth comes on top of numbers that were already massive. At VidCon Anaheim in 2022, TikTok Head of Creator Marketing Solutions Claire Sun announced that the video app had surpassed one trillion total views in Southeast Asia.

TikTok is “increasingly a major driver of viewership growth on mobile and web platforms, responsible for over 70% of growth in streaming minutes over the past two years,” reads the report. But there’s only so much watch time to go around, and TikTok’s gains have pushed other streaming platforms into difficult positions.

Across Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand, SVOD services only added a net gain of 7,000 subscribers between January and June of this year, according to the report. In Indonesia, total subscriptions fell by 1.2 million

The report makes clear that each measured country has its own SVOD ecosystem and its own subscriber trends. “The region’s leading premium VOD platforms are in the midst of a shift towards quality customer growth, retention, and monetization,” said MPA Executive Director Vivek Couto in a statement. “Netflix has reduced prices and introduced member sharing measures while Disney has raised prices in Indonesia and Thailand in an effort to build low-churn, high ARPU customer bases.”

The SVOD industry’s Southeast Asian slowdown is occurring despite major investments in the region from companies like Netflix and Amazon. The report claims that local content accounted for half of Southeast Asia’s watch time on premium SVOD platforms during the first six months of 2023.

TikTok has maintained its advantage over other platforms by betting big on Southeast Asian consumers. In June, at a forum in Jakarta, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew said that his company will invest “billions of dollars” in Indonesia and its surrounding countries “over the next few years.”