Weekend Listen: BTS Leads Netflix’s Push for Growth in Asia

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2:23After nearly a four-year break, K-pop supergroup BTS is back. To everyone here and everyone watching on Netflix around the world, thank you for joining us tonight. More than 100 ,000 fans watched their comeback concert promoting a new album this past weekend in Seoul. And millions more watched live on Netflix.

2:50It's the first time the group's seven members have shared the stage since 2022, 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 82 shows, sold out almost instantly. Bloomberg's Asia entertainment correspondent Sohee Kim was at the Netflix show in Seoul. They have this army as a fan base who's willing to buy like 100 copies of the albums, streaming endlessly their music and attending concerts a couple of times. The performance was also a significant milestone for Netflix.

3:39It'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' 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.

4:25They're the most popular boy band in the world. They're the most popular pop-back Korea's 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. Because even though Netflix has tens of millions of customers in Asia, there are billions of people and probably hundreds of millions of BTS fans.

4:55This is The Big Tick Asia from Bloomberg News. I'm Wan Ha. Every week, we take you inside some of the world's biggest and most powerful economies and the markets, tycoons, 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.

5:29Bloomberg's Sohee 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 2017. That year, they beat out the likes of Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande for the top social artist category. You know, we still cannot believe that we're standing here on this stage at the Billboard Music Awards. 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.

6:13Now, almost a decade later, Zoe says the band has clearly grown up. 10 years after the big stardom and the military service, and now they are in 30s and I'm now in 30s. 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 2017, when Sohee first met BTS, K-pop was relatively new to global audiences. Big in parts of Asia, but far from the$9 billion business it is today. K-pop started as a Korean language pop. But if you listen to the music, it's not just Korean language or Korean sound. It's more of a mix of a lot of pop genres.

7:05And now K-pop bands are singing a lot in English. So I would say it's more of like a borderless genre right now. K-pop's borderless appeal is one reason tens of thousands of fans from all over the world gathered in Seoul for the comeback. Bloomberg's Lucas Shaw says Netflix hopes 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.

7:47You know, there are 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 touchpoints, 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 18 million views, and it was the most watched show on Netflix for the week.

8:27That'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?

9:00Lucas says BTS is just one part of a bigger push. Netflix has been investing heavily in Korea 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 an estimated$900 million in value and spawned multiple seasons. And now Netflix is planning a K-pop Demon Hunters world tour, building on the runaway success of its most popular movie ever. The customer base in Korea for streaming is not a top five market. But as a producer of film, television and some of these music properties, it's punched way above its weight, right?

9:52It's been the most important in Asia by far because Korean film and television is popular not just at home, but in Japan and Southeast Asia and increasingly elsewhere. I'd say it's one of the three or four most important markets outside of the U.S. Great. So 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 willingness to pay. So they've been working on a lot of shows in Japan and they spent a lot of money on WBC live streaming.

10:30Scale wise, India and Southeast Asia over the long run could give them some massive scale. But for now, it's a lower revenue per user. So I think the opportunities 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. So it would be sort of 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.

11:25Global 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.

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14:03Asia offers enormous growth potential for global streamers, but it's a complex region to scale. There's differences in languages and income, and diverse local tastes 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.

14:45A 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 flip a switch in Canada or Australia and it immediately worked. It could flip 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 10 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.

15:19Take 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 Mukesh Ambani, 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 free ad-supported platform and the live streaming for sports. And other regions like Southeast Asia, for example, video is there, Viu is there.

16:03And Korea, TV is now expanding their territories with multiple deals with international players. They are going into Japan and other markets as well. The local players also have their own strategy to scale their business in this market. And eventually they want to have more international viewers from the U.S. as well. 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 80 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.

16:49They just rolled it out with the same price everywhere and wanted to see how it worked 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 a spreadsheet. They soon realized there are 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 experimenting with. I think it is unlikely that you will see a 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 limiting factor for their growth in some of these more populous but poorer markets.

17:31Part 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 has just not really picked up in the U.S.

18:08And 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 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.

18:52The 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 hub used to be Mumbai. But now they are expanding in South India, Tamil, and Telugu for their next big growth driver. 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.

19:39Disney has historically believed that it is producing programming in the U.S. 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 2030.

20:18What 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. but the local platforms will continue to hold ground in key markets like India, Japan, Korea. They're also trying to spend more money on live streaming deals like in sports. And there will be special events like Netflix and Disney Plus will have in this market to generate the buzz around those events and use it as a growth momentum. them. 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.

21:03You'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 TF1 and Netflix in France. TF1 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.

21:44Let'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. 2030 is not actually that far away.

22:03This is The Big Take Asia from Bloomberg News. I'm Wan Ha. To get more from The Big Take and unlimited access to all of Bloomberg.com, subscribe today at Bloomberg.com slash podcast offer. If you like the episode, make sure to subscribe and review The Big Tick Asia wherever you listen to podcasts. It really helps people find the show. Thanks for listening. See you next time.

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