Singapore is one of the APAC’s leading hubs of connectivity. Source: Shutterstock

Will Asia Pacific lead the way to hyper-connectivity?

COMMUNICATIONS is at an all-time high in the Asia Pacific (APAC) region, and with all the infrastructure and solutions providers in place, it’s only going to get better.

According to experts, the APAC is poised to lead the era of hyper-connectivity. There’s a fair bit of excitement in the marketplace and a lot of investments to make sure companies can make the most of what’s ahead of them.

Adrian Pennington, in a recent report published in connection with the upcoming CommunicAsia summit in Singapore, said:

The sheer diversity and dynamism of markets in the Asia Pacific region make any snapshot of trends unavoidably simplistic requiring the filter of country-by-country analysis.

Nonetheless, it’s clear that Asian communications is being galvanized by unprecedented rises in broadband connectivity as enterprises look to capture share in a fast-growing and increasingly crowded market.

Some of the themes, which will be discussed in more detail at the summit, include:

Pay-TV continues to grow:

The total market for pay-TV is predicted to rise to 666 million by 2022, up 90 million in 2016, according to Digital TV Research’s Asia-Pacific PayTV Operator Forecast.

Given the rise of internet access in India and China in the recent years, it’s logical for them to be pegged as the biggest markets for pay-tv in the coming years.

Experts suggest that 80 percent of the region’s pay-TV subscribers will come from India and China by 2022, with China adding 40 million subscribers and India 30 million.

To support this growth, the number of Asian operators with more than 10 million subscribers will rise from seven in 2015 to around 12 in 2022.

The prominence of SVoD:

SVOD, or Subscription Video on Demand, such as Now TV, Neflix, Amazon Video, Hulu Plus, iFlix, and the myriad others are becoming more and more important everyday.

The rising purchasing power in Asia means that customers are increasingly demanding for more and better SVoD services.

In China, the online video market is dominated by Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent — which together account for nearly 70 percent of online video watch time.

In fact, Baidu’s iQiyi commands 35% of the monthly time spent watching online video in China, compared to Alibaba’s Youku-Tudou at 22% and Tencent Video at 13%, according to iResearch data.

While data about India is hard to acquire, the market is warming up to international SVoD providers like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video.

So much so that both these companies are not only stocking up on regional and local content but also investing in producing better regional and local video for exclusive consumption in the country.

The rise and rise of SVoD:

SVoD revenues will rocket from US$11.13 billion in 2015 to USUS$25.71 billion in 2021 by which time SVoD will contribute 40 percent of total OTT revenues.

From the 220 million global SVoD additions between 2015 and 2021, 107 million will be generated in APAC.

Pure play SVoD services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime currently dominate in APAC (at US$6.29 billion of the total predicted US$10 billion SVOD market in 2021)

In fact, the region had nearly 42 million SVoD subs in 2015, but could have up to 158 million by 2021.