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After nearly a four year break, kpop super group BTS is back.
Everyone here and everyone watching on Netflix around the world, thank you for joining us tonight.
More than one hundred thousand fans watched their comeback concert promoting a new album this past weekend in Soul, and millions more watched live on Netflix. It's the first time the group's seven members have shared the stage since twenty twenty two, when they took a break to complete their mandatory military service. In k pop, tastes change fast and groups come and go quickly, but BTS has proven they've got staying power. Tickets for the band's upcoming world tour,
all eighty two shows sold out almost instantly. Bloomberg's Asia Entertainment correspondence So He Kim was at the Netflix show in Seoul.
They have this army as a fan base who's willing to buy the hundred copies of the albums, streaming endlessly their music, and attending concerts a couple of times.
The performance was also a significant milestone for Netflix. It's the platform's first live streamed concert from Asia and only its third live event in the region.
Netflix's deal with BTS speaks to the growing importance of Asia as a region for the world's largest streaming service. It's been the fastest growing region in the world for them the last few years.
Lucas Shaw is the managing editor for Media and Entertainment at Bloomberg and writes its screen Time newsletter. He says BTS is big comeback has given Netflix a golden opportunity to build an audience with fans who aren't Netflix customers yet.
The return of BTS is one of the if not the biggest cultural moment of the year in the region. They're the most popular boy band in the world. They're the most popular pop back Korea has ever produced, and so this is an opportunity to try to draw in a lot of fans from across the region who haven't tried Netflix is even though there you know, Netflix has tens of millions of customers in Asia, there are billions of people and probably hundreds of millions of BTS fans.
This is the big Take Asia from Bloomberg News. I'm Wanha. Every week we take you inside some of the world's biggest and most powerful economies and the markets, tyccoons and businesses that drive this ever shifting region. Today, on the show, BTS is Back and Netflix is using the boy band's popularity to boost its dominance in Asia, we look at how Netflix and its competitors are chasing growth in the region and what strategies they're using to grab market share.
Bloomberg Showhee Kim has been covering K pop for a decade, long enough to watch BTS's explosive rise in real time. She remembers the first BTS press conference she attended. It was early in their careers, after they became the first K pop group to win at the Billboard Music Awards in twenty seventeen. That year, they beat out the likes of Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande for the Top Social
Artist category. And we still cannot believe that we're standing here on this stage at the Billboar Musical Wars.
Oh my gosh, they were young.
I was young, and they looked like a very big pop star already, but I could sense that they were still boys.
Now, almost a decade later, Sooey says, the band has clearly grown up.
Ten years after the big stardom and the military service, and now they are in the thirties and I'm now in thirties. The answers and the vibe that they've been giving me during the interview was very mature and thoughtful.
K Pop as a genre has matured too. In twenty seventeen, when Sooey first met BTS, kpop was relatively new to global audiences, big in parts of Asia, but far from the nine billion dollar business it is today.
K Pop started as the Korean language pop, but if you listen to the music, it's not just Korean language where Korean sound, it's more of a mix of a lot of pop genres, and now K pop bands are singing a lot in English, so I will say it's more of like borderless genre right now.
K pop's borderless appeal is one reason tens of thousands of fans from all over the world gathered in Soul for the comeback. Bloomberg's Lucas Shaw says Netflix hopees moments like this can act as a powerful on ramp, giving BTS's massive, highly engaged fan base a reason to sign up, sample the platform, and ideally stick around as long term subscribers.
Well.
The main way for Netflix to make money off this is to get people to sign up to pay for Netflix, right, they're not selling it as an add on. You know, they're not a lot of acts where I think they'd want to do live concerts like this, just because there's only a handful of acts at the scale of a BTS. And I imagine they would want this to be part
of an ongoing relationship with the band. They'd love to have there be somewhat regular documentaries or touch points, just because BTS has stretched a strong and passionate fan base.
Netflix hasn't disclosed how much it costs them to stream BTS's opening show, but the BTS Live comeback gave the platform a rare chance to make a big splash in Asia, and it worked. The live stream drew more than eighteen million views and it was the most watched show on Netflix for the week. That's exactly the kind of global attention Netflix is betting on.
I would view it as a continuation of a strategy where they do a small number of major live events and they want each one of them to feel special and loud. But it's in keeping with you know, they had the World Baseball Classic in Japan. You know, they don't have a full season of football. They do Christmas Day football. They don't have a full season of baseball.
They're doing Opening Day and the home Run Derby, and so you know, what better way to have their first concert than a live show with one of the biggest acts in the world.
Lucas says BTS is just one part of a bigger push. Netflix has been investing heavily in CAREA and in Korean content because the returns have been impossible to ignore. Squid Game, the gory dystopian Korean thriller, remains Netflix's most watched title
of all time. Its first season generated and estimated nine hundred million dollars in value and spawned multiple seasons, and now Netflix is planning a k pop Demon Hunter's World tour, building on the runaway success of its most popular movie ever.
The customer base in Korea first streaming is not a top five market, but as a producer of film, television and some of these music properties, it's punched away above its weight.
Right.
It's been the most important in Asia by far, because Korean film and television is popular not just at home, but in Japan and tauth East Asia and increasingly elsewhere. I'd say it's one of the three or four most important markets outside of the US.
In Korea definitely holds the crown for content right now. Asia is huge, though, so when Netflix looks at the rest of Asia, where do they see the biggest growth opportunities.
Japan remains a very high value metro market with very strong will needs to pay. So they've been working on a lot of jills in Japan and they spend a lot of money on WBC live streaming scale wise, India and Southeast Asia over the long run could give them some massive skill but for now it's a lower revenue per user. So I think the opportunities like lies in tailoring price and content that they are going to have in each market.
And of course there's China right huge market, but totally inaccessible. They've tried. Any Western company, or really any foreign company needs to have a license or really have a local partner that controls the business. It would be sort of
a you know, a separate venture. Netflix had tried for a few years, but it probably wasn't going to happen, And I think they also made a decision looking at how much money would be required to invest in China to make it work, you know, billions of dollars that that was money better spent on places like India and Japan that were equally large.
Global streamers like Netflix, Disney Plus, and Amazon Prime all see Asia as a driver of growth, but it's also a notoriously difficult market for American companies to crack. After the break, we look at the strategies streaming platforms are adopting as a battle for dominance in the region. Asia offers enormous growth potential for global streamers, but it's a complex region to scale. There's differences in length, UIG and income,
and diverse local taste and infrastructure. Bloomberg's Lucas Shaw says the challenges vary widely from country to country.
The continent is home to more than half the people in the world right, so it's by nature going to be more diverse than like in Latin America, though it's tricky. They all speak the same language, and so that's a lot easier than like India alone has dozens of different languages. If you're talking about places in Southeast Asia, for example, generally poorer, so they don't have the disposable income to
spend on Netflix subscriptions. A lot of them don't have credit cards, and there's also not the same local infrastructure to produce local content, which tends to be very popular and key. So it just it requires a much longer term investment, right like Netflix could slip a switch in Canada or Australia and it immediately worked. It could slip a switch in the UK and it pretty much immediately worked. Latin America. Let's say it took them three to five
years to figure out India. They're ten years in and I still don't think they'd say they've cracked it.
All of the big American content companies looking at Asia have similar stories to tell. Take Disney. For years it tried to set up in India on its own, but without success. Eventually it merged its India business with a company backed by Reliance Industries, the conglomerate owned by Mukesham Bani,
Asia's richest man in India. Competition from local providers is fierce, so he pointed to India's Geostar, which owns the country's largest collection of TV networks and its most popular paid streaming.
Service, Geostar.
They are disrupting the markets with this like a free, ad supported platform and the live streaming for sports and other regions like Southeast Asia, for example, videos there, view is there, and Korea. Tving is now expanding their territories with multiple deals with the international players. They are going
into Japan and as well. The local players also have their own, like a strategy to scale their business in this market and eventually they want to like have more of international viewers from the USS wall.
Local platforms also battle it out on price. That makes it hard for premium service like Netflix to compete. In India, for example, a monthly subscription to Geostar streaming service costs around eighty cents. A Netflix subscription is almost double that. The same goes for a lot of the other local markets where Netflix expanded in the region.
They just rolled it out at the same price everywhere and wanted to see how it work. Because Netflix is a big fan of test and learn, rather fail in public and figure it out quickly than try to map out the perfect strategy on the spreadsheet. They soon realized their problems and rolled out lower cost plans in some of Southeast Asia and India. I think it's still a work in progress for them, still something that they're fermenting with.
I think it is unlikely that you will see company like Netflix offer their product for as little as Geostar does, you know, they're not going for the masses in quite the same way, but it's been a real, real limiting factor for their growth in some of these more populous but poorer markets. Part of what.
Makes Asia such a complicated target for global streaming companies is that audience habits in the region can look very different from the US and Europe, both in terms of what people consume and how they consume it, and it's something these companies still haven't fully figured out yet.
There are a bunch of media types that are very popular in Asia that people have tried to replicate in the US and the West with mixed success. This is less maybe less pertinent to film and TV, but I think matters with celebrity and talent, like live shopping is a huge thing in Asia that it has just not really picked up in the US. And I'd say in general, the fan economy in Asia is larger and a little
more developed. Americans spend a ton of money on concert tickets and on merchandise, but there's not as many online and kind of direct transactions and tipping and like live streams where you're paying for to be able to use emojis and certain things like that that I think are just bigger in this part of the world.
All of those differences are shaping how streaming evolves in the region and where it may end up next. One of the main ways global streaming platforms are trying to get an edge and more subscribers in Asia is by investing heavily in local language programming. The idea is simple, Shows made for local audiences are more likely to break through at home, and the biggest hits can travel far beyond the original markets, like what Squid Game in Korea did for Netflix.
Netflix strategy is local for local. For example, in India, India's content used to be in Mumbai, but now they are expanding in like a South India, Tamil and Teleku for their next big growth river.
Yeah.
Netflix has been the biggest investor in local programming in Asia and the world by leaps and bounds. Amazon has invested heavily in select markets where it has an existing business, oftentimes where there's overlap with their prime shipping service. Disney has historically believed that it is producing programming in the US that travels the world, and it does not need to invest as much in local markets because Marvel and
Pixar and Star Wars are universal. That has changed over the last few years as it has realized the importance of local programming.
It's a lot to think about for these streamers. Serious investment in local programming means developing multiple streams of content in diverse markets across the region. It's an expensive proposition with no guarantee of success. Let's pretend you're both looking into a crystal ball. It's twenty thirty. What does the Asian streaming market look like.
It's likely to be a hybrid like global players that will dominate in scale and premium content. The local platforms will continue to hold ground and team markets like India, Japan and Korea. They're also trying to spend more money on live streaming deals like in sports, and there will will be like a special event, so like Netflix and Disney Plus will have in this market to generate the buzz around those events and use it as a growth momentum.
Netflix will still be the most successful premium streaming video service. You know, we're going to set the YouTube TikTok Instagram aside for the moment you'll see a newly combined Paramount and Warner Brothers Discovery kind of push its product across a lot of Asia, but I think we'll still be a pretty small player and not have invested enough in
local programming because it's just too expensive. I wouldn't be surprised if you saw some local players do what we've already seen happen in certain markets, where they license their TV network or they do a deal with a Netflix or an Amazon where that becomes their streaming home for their TV network. Right there's a deal between TF one
in Netflix in France. PF one is one of the biggest media companies in the country, and they basically just said competing with Netflix online is not going to work for us. Let's just partner and benefit from the audience. And I think you could see some of that if some of the local streaming services don't work. But I don't know. Twenty thirty is not actually that far away.
This is the Big Take Asia from Bloomberg News. I'm wanha to get more from The Big Take and unlimited access to all of Bloomberg dot Com, subscribe today at Bloomberg dot com slash Podcast offer. If you liked the episode, make sure to subscribe, and review The Big Take Asia. Wherever you listen to podcasts, it really helps people find the show. Thanks for listening, See you next time.