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Southeast Asia SVOD war will be won with telco deals says Hooq founder as brand nears Singapore launch

Hooq logo 'coming soon'Streaming video on-demand brand Hooq is to soft launch in Singapore this month with a full launch slated for January.

The company is to go to market with a content-led campaign through owner Singtel, and is looking to work with other telcos such as StarHub and M1 to gain traction in a competitive market with high levels of piracy.

Singapore is the first high-income market Hooq has entered, and the brand will be targeting a broad spectrum of Singapore consumers with a mixture of Hollywood, Thai, Filipino, Bollywood and Indonesian shows, with different packages aimed at pre- and post-paid Singtel customers.

A country head has been hired, so too have senior marketing stuff, with an announcement imminent from the company that, as Mumbrella reported last week, has had a bumpy ride on the personnel front since launching less than two years ago.

Hooq enters a market in which none of the OTT brands are dominant, according to a recent survey by Media Partners Asia.

Netflix – which has met with criticism for its limited content offering in Singapore – is the top performer for customer satisfaction. StarHub’s Go service has the highest conversation rate of trials into users (72%), Singtel’s Cast has among the lowest (48%).

Co-founder Krishan Rajagopalan told Mumbrella that Hooq, which was the first to offer “sachets” for lower income users, is going for the middle market, and does not see Netflix as a competitor because its library of Hollywood content “only appeals to only 5% of the market.”

Viu, the PCCW-owned service that launched in Singapore in July, Rajagopalan said was a “niche” player because of its heavy focus on Korean content, which he described as a “fad”.

Other services he suggested were only interested in getting acquired and not innovating in the OTT space. “They all about flipping,” he said.

Krishnan Rajagopalan:

Krishnan Rajagopalan: “We’ve been careful about replacing the CXO suite. This time we want to make sure have the right people in place.”

Next year will be a “make or break” year for over-the-top content services in Southeast Asia, Rajagopalan said, and the critical success factor would be the players that can work best with telcos.

Hooq, a partnership between Singtel, Sony Pictures and Warner Bros, was the first homegrown OTT brand to launch in Asia when it entered the Philippines through a deal with Globe in February 2015, nearly a year before Netflix entered the region.

Hooq has since ventured into three other markets through deals with telcos that Singtel part owns; AIS in Thailand, Airtel in India, and Telkomsel in Indonesia.

Rajagopalan, who would not reveal subscriber growth figures, admitted that a mistake in the first year was to limit the service to a sub-set of its telco partners’ addressable customer base.

The next phase will be to “go in wide” and make the service available to all of the telcos’ customers, he said.

“The most successful OTT brands – Hooq included – rely on deals with telcos,” he said, referring to the trend of subscriber growth driven by telcos offering their customers bundled deals that include an OTT subscription.

“Getting consumers to convert from trialling to paid subscribers is proving to be very difficult. Which explains why some of the global players are really struggling in Asia. They haven’t been able to get traction.”

“Because we have the strongest [telco] players in each market exclusive to us – at least with respect to the regional competition – we have a really good chance of owning the market this year,” said Rajagopalan, who is the company’s chief content and distribution officer.

Hooq will be advertising through Singtel in key media such as print, television and outdoor, with on-ground activation in Singtel stores a key part of the plan, as it has been in other markets.

One learning from marketing activation in the Philippines and Thailand has been to deploy Hooq staff in Hooq branded uniforms, and not count on telco staff to sell the product, Rajagopalan noted.

Hooq has experience high senior staff churn during its short existence. News of the chief strategy officer leaving emerged last week. Hooq has also had to replace CTO and CFO, with rumours of the CMO moving on too.

Rajagopalan conceded: “We’ve had our share of churn.”

“It’s been combination of what’s natural for a startup, and the unique context of Hooq as a brand. It’s a startup that has deep-pocketed investors who have certain expectations. That has contributed to churn in certain ways, as has different personalities who have joined us.”

High churn has meant that Hooq has taken longer than previously to bring in new people.

“We’ve been careful about replacing the CXO suite. This time we want to make sure have the right people in place,” said Rajagopalan, who said that Hooq staff needed to be comfortable in both a startup and corporate environment.

He pointed to Singtel’s acquisition of marketing business Amobee, which the telco acquired in 2012, as an example of another company that took a while to settle in to corporate life with the telco giant.

“There was a period of time when everyone had to learn to get along. Now it’s one of the best performing businesses in Singtel,” said Rajagopalan, who worked for Singtel for three and a half year as head of technology and regional TV before taking on the Hooq job in January 2015.

On when he expects Hooq to start making money, Rajagopalan said it was “early days” for every player in the market, but he expected the business to break even in three years, and be profitable in three to five years.

Rajagopalan will be speaking at the Asia TV Forum & Market, which is to take place from 6 to 9 December.

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