Bridging THE GAPS in Asia's video landscape

A decade after the first video was uploaded to YouTube, the video landscape looks very different, and so does the Internet. This contrast is no clearer than in Asia, where trends create opportunities that don’t exist in the West, but also challenges that are larger. Quite simply, people in Asia watch videos in a fundamentally different way from people in other regions. The world of mainly one screen in one room (the living room) – the TV – has been replaced from a world of many screens, some of which we carry around with us all day long – smartphones. We’ve gone from fixed schedules to content on demand. We’ve gone from a one-way broadcast system to dialogue, from analogue to digital. Asia gives the clearest picture of where the world’s going next, but also the big obstacles that we need to overcome that get there.

 

 

Opportunity 1: Connectivity

Some people in Asia are connected and some aren’t. This doesn’t just mean having a smartphone, but getting data on those phones – which can be more expensive in emerging markets. Today, half of YouTube views worldwide are on a mobile device. In Asia, we find in many countries where data plans may be less affordable, and streaming a YouTube video might cost as much as buying a DVD, mobile watch time still exceeds desktop watch time. If we change the framework from price to value, we get a clearer picture of what’s happening. People put a high value on the range of content online, the convenience of watching it wherever they are and are willing to make it happen. In many emerging markets, people will go to Internet cafes simply to download content over Wi-Fi that they’ll watch later, to save on data costs.
 

If we’re to live up to the value that people in Asia place on mobile video, we have to make it work for them on any device, on any network. The demand is certainly there. We have been working hard to create new ways of using our products that make a smaller burden on data and speed. On Monday in Thailand we launched YouTube offline which gives you a way to save videos to watch later during short periods of low or no Internet connectivity. We don’t see mobile video as a luxury experience online. We see it as a core experience of the Internet, whether you’re in Bangkok, Berlin or Boston. Foreigners who Thai businesses could only have reached by posters or billboards on the streets can now be reached for less money anywhere there’s an internet connection, just as Thais can now watch lectures from American university professors simply by turning on Wi-Fi in a cafe.
 

By reducing the data burden of video we help make Asia’s connections as good a tool for creating, viewing videos as you can find elsewhere.
 

Gap 2: Programming for all the time, anywhere

Across most of Asia, online video is mobile video. The majority of time spent on YouTube is spent on mobile devices in both emerging markets like Thailand and fully connected markets like Thailand. People are breaking free of TV schedules and the content owners that embrace that shift find that not only is their content viewed more, it drives a closer relationship with the audience. Partners in Thailand are already leveraging YouTube to make their content available anytime, anywhere. For example, The Voice Thailand, one of the most popular singing competitions in Thailand, upload their content onto YouTube almost instantly after each “on air” episode, letting fans watch their favourite moments again and again and share it with their friends. By making their content available online, they grew their online and offline community of fans and now have over 1.4 million subscribers.
 

Gap 3: The mass market for content doesn’t serve the masses

The explosion of ways to watch videos is changing the benchmark for what counts as successful content. This brings us to the next gap: There is a gap between content that people can watch and content that people love to watch. The mass media no longer set the tastes of the audience. The audience – the fans – set their own taste. A great example of this is Uncle P, a Thai gaming creator who built his channel to show young Thais that you can actually learn through video games, and that gaming is something to be proud of. There are now close to 600,000 fans that subscribe to his channel, and his videos have been viewed over 140 million times.

 

New talent, brands will bridge these gaps

I mentioned how we’re re-engineering YouTube to better live up to the heightened expectations that people have for mobile video, but who should re-engineer the content gap? We’re finding that this happens most productively when brands commit their resources to fresh talent for whom video has always been broadcast digitally. As TV continues to program for older audiences, a new programming gap has been created that the next generation of creators on YouTube is now filling by building and share content for communities.
 

As John Green said in his speech at Brandcast in the US a few weeks ago, these online creators aren’t in the distraction business – where the currency is eyeballs and views – they’re in the community business. For these creators engagement is what counts, so they build content that people really love. And their fans reward them for it. A famous Variety survey showed that many YouTube stars are more well known among teens than Hollywood celebrities. Ryan Higa was number five, beating Jennifer Lawrence, Katy Perry, Seth Rogen. Who were the top four? All YouTube stars.
 

Brands that want to be relevant to the next generation are also building fan communities on YouTube. These brands have made ads on YouTube move from something viewers fast forward to something people choose to watch. This is a new trend. For the first time, four companies made it into the top 10 trending videos of the year in 2014: Nike, Wren, Budweiser, and the viral campaign for 20th Century Fox’s film “Devil’s Due.’
 

The exciting thing is that across Asia, it’s no exaggeration to say that marketers and creators have the opportunity to shape their country’s culture. In many emerging Asian markets, the adoption of smartphones today is far faster than the adoption of PCs in the US in the 1990s. That gives people less time to digitise their countries, their cultures. Quite often, they arrive online to find very little in their own language, about their culture, that fits their needs. That means brands have the opportunity to fund content or to offer it themselves.

We’ve come a long way in 10 years, but the job is far from over. I’m an optimist – the next 10 years will be exciting and rewarding as long as we stay focussed on bridging the online video gaps.