Three years ago, Taiwanese multimedia company CatchPlay, which started out as a distributor for European and American movies, launched Taiwan’s first over the top (OTT) platform with an eye to going global.

Meanwhile, CatchPlay has become the largest pay OTT in Indonesia, with more than half of its offerings being original content.

In Taiwan, CatchPlay has begun to invest in TV dramas, teaming up with HBO Asia to gain the license for the original Taiwanese TV drama The World Between Us. Promoting the ten-part series like a box office hit, the Public Television Service (PTS) production achieved blockbuster fame, setting the stage for the worldwide export of locally produced content.

Are movie platforms now following in the tracks of the New Southbound Policy? Over the past three years, digital content from Taiwan has quietly made it onto the home screens of 2.6 million Indonesian households.

When Indonesians return home after an exhausting day of work, they very likely switch on their TVs and tune into CatchPlay On Demand, an OTT service platform from Taiwan, to chill while watching Marvel Cinematic Universe films, indie romance movies or home-grown Indonesian productions.

The tiny streaming app underpins the Taiwanese company’s resolve to go global.

“Taiwan’s Chunghwa Telecom has MOD (multimedia on demand); Telkom Indonesia basically has us,” remarks Daphne Yang, executive director and Group CEO of [Cayman Islands-registered] CatchPlay Inc., in a display of strong confidence.

Precise Strategy Makes CatchPlay Indonesia’s Largest Pay OTT-Platform

The global OTT market grew rapidly in 2016, as Netflix and iQiYi entered the Taiwanese entertainment sector. Catchplay, which was founded by Timothy Chen, a nephew of primary shareholder Cher Wang, the co-founder and chairperson of HTC, distributes 25 to 30 feature films from Europe and the United States per year in Taiwan. Jumping on the bandwagon, the media company released Catchplay on Demand and expanded into Southeast Asia.

At the time, Indonesia’s traditional telecommunications companies and pay TV operators were facing pressure to transform their businesses. Aiming to sell digital content and expand their sources of revenue, they approached OTT platform providers.

CatchPlay seized the opportunity, entering into a long-term partnership with broadband operator Telkom Indonesia and pay TV provider IndiHome.

Having the CatchPlay app preinstalled in their set-top boxes became a selling point targeting the country’s high-end, white-collar market. Telkom Indonesia’s new lineup of medium- and high-priced broadband packages launched this March all come bundled with CatchPlay video on demand services.

Crucial for gaining the Indonesian partners’ trust were comprehensive content offerings.

Striking fast with resolve and precision, CatchPlay clinched exclusive licensing deals with Indonesia’s three major independent film producers, thus boosting exclusive content above the 50 percent mark. Thanks to its collaboration with the eight major U.S. film studios, CatchPlay is able to bring a mix of Hollywood productions to its platform based on local box office results.

In Taiwan, for instance, local films are not very popular, mostly accounting for less than 10 percent of box office receipts. Indonesians, however, love home-grown movies, which generate around one fourth of annual ticket sales. Consequently, CatchPlay sees to it that around 25 percent of its Indonesian OTT platform content consists of local productions.

“Our content strategy for every market involves a special trip [to the market in question] to check out their movie theater box office. With CatchPlay you can watch blockbuster movies like Avengers and A Star is Born within three months [after their movie theater opening]. No one else in Indonesia has accomplished this,” notes Yang.

Tailored to the Indonesian Market, CatchPlay Becomes Largest Pay OTT Platform

While most transnational OTT video on demand providers use online payments, CatchPlay had to come up with an alternative approach, since credit card penetration is extremely low in Indonesia. Subscribers now conveniently pay for the video on demand services together with their telephone bills.

Thanks to these localization strategies, CatchPlay has already grown into Indonesia’s largest pay OTT platform, outstripping U.S. rival Netflix, becoming the only transnational streaming OTT service from Taiwan.

Back in Taiwan, however, CatchPlay’s rich movie content has become somewhat of a disadvantage.

Compared to TV drama episodes, a feature film lasts at least 90 to 120 minutes, requiring undivided attention. Watching a full-length film during a commute or other shorter time slots does not make for a pleasant viewer experience. Therefore, peak ratings in Taiwan are usually reached during the weekend, but in the long run, this affects stickiness and time spent watching.

Deciding to focus on content to improve the user experience in Taiwan, CatchPlay began to invest in home-grown original drama series.

Clinching Licensing Deal for The World Between Us

By mere coincidence, Yang one day watched a 13-minute-long trailer for The World Between Us 我們與惡的距離 on the mobile phone of Lin Yu-ling, one of the series’ producers. Yang was so thrilled that she abruptly jumped up from her seat when the segment ended, almost tipping over the table. “I frantically asked Yu-ling how I could get my hands on this TV drama. How can I let CatchPlay get a full license?” recalls Yang.

A few months later, CatchPlay On Demand became the first transnational OTT platform to exclusively stream The World Between Us. It also marked the company’s first shot at exporting a Taiwanese TV drama series.

CatchPlay promoted the TV series The World Between Us like a blockbuster movie. (Photo source: PTS)

CatchPlay and HBO Asia jointly hold the overseas license for The World Between Us. Yu Pei-hua, director of PTS’s programming department, reveals that PTS has negotiated with international OTT platforms many times. Key for CatchPlay prevailing was that it not only offered a price but also submitted a rounded overseas marketing plan.

“Originally we had a NT$3 million advertisement budget for this series. Since CatchPlay has been collaborating with HBO for a long time, they directly brought in HBO’s funding, which allowed us to push the drama to this level with a concerted effort,” notes Yu.

Spending some NT$10 million on an advertisement campaign, CatchPlay held an international news conference at a five-star hotel, leased advertisement boards at the entrance of the Vieshow Cinemas in Taipei’s Xinyi District, hosted Vieshow premieres, and plastered elevators in business towers with promotional posters, promoting the TV series like a Hollywood movie with much fanfare both online and offline.

“International platforms are highly responsive to the market, including movie-watching habits, themes, narratives and so on. When Taiwanese TV series are included in an OTT, an international platform, their market can be expanded further,” says Liu Yu-Shiuan, producer of the Taiwanese TV miniseries The Teenage Psychic, HBO Asia’s first Chinese-language original series.

“Since recouping the investment is highly likely, production faces fewer constraints.”

After The World Between Us aired, time spent watching the channel and the ratio of paid content increased both for new subscribers and existing ones, so that the annual targets were reached within just two months.

Given the rising market potential of Taiwanese productions, CatchPlay is currently reviewing several promising projects, planning to invest already in the pre-production stage. As Yang explains, the vast majority of CatchPlay’s audience grew up watching movies and American TV shows. Their taste and interests differ widely from Taiwan’s typical prime time viewers, i.e. older women and fans of drama series from China and South Korea.

“In the future, we want to look for dramas movie audiences would be willing to spend their time viewing as well. To achieve that, we will have to raise the artistic quality of the productions, and make them more issue-driven,” says Yang.

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It Takes More than Good Content to Run an OTT Platform

Presently, CatchPlay On Demand has 3.5 million registered users, including 2.6 million in Indonesia, 800,000 in Taiwan and 100,000 in Singapore. Subscribed users account for around 10 percent of the respective market [registered users get to watch a curated selection of movies for free].

CatchPlay’s key slogan, also printed on their bright orange name cards, reads: FOR MOVIE LOVERS, BY MOVIE LOVERS.

But in the three years since the OTT services went online, the company has undergone a drastic transformation that Yang describes as follows:

“This company has already changed from a pure content provider into a technology company.”

Having served as vice president of marketing at Taiwan Mobile for almost eight years, Yang joined CatchPlay in 2012. CatchPlay Chairman and former Taiwan Mobile CEO Harvey Chang, who now doubles as chairman of Taiwanese commercial TV broadcaster TVBS, had asked her to help with the company’s transition into the digital age.

At the time, 90 percent of CatchPlay’s revenue came from traditional movie distribution and just 10 percent from digital business. Now, seven years later, the traditional to digital business ratio stands at 4:6, meaning that digital revenue exceeds movie distribution revenue.

During the same period, staff numbers have risen from 30 employees to 130 employees in Taiwan and more than 10 in Indonesia. Reflecting the shift to digital content, most of the additional hiring took place in software engineering and digital product planning.

“In the past, the entire staff were female; even the guys were feminine. We were very much like the typical content or marketing company, but now the company has many guys; we are a tech firm,” remarks Charline Han, senior manager public relations and editing.

What were the greatest lessons learned during the three-year transformation?

“I noticed that everyone likes to say that ‘content is king’, which is not wrong, but if you don’t pair it with a good user experience, you are just like a king who has been locked up in his castle, unable to get out,” says Yang.

In the past, CatchPlay only needed to put together a good selection of movies and market them well to be commercially successful. But after becoming a streaming platform, a more refined approach is required. “You will ask yourself why, out of 100 users coming in, only 15 percent end up registering successfully? During which action in the process do we lose the most people? You will get these answers only through learning by doing,” says Yang.

Using good content to lure customers in one thing, but CatchPlay now faces the pressing challenge of making the user experience so pleasant that they stay on the platform, a task that pertains to its intuitiveness, smoothness of network streaming and ease of switching carriers.

From Importing Foreign Content to Exporting Taiwanese Creations

However, Yang has even higher ambitions. In the past, CatchPlay invested in domestic movies such as Paradise in Service or Hollywood productions such as The Revenant starring Leonardo DiCaprio or Martin Scorsese’s period drama Silence, which was shot in Taiwan. In most cases, the company co-financed the projects and handled advertising and distribution of the finished movies.

“Now we have begun to create our own IP (intellectual property),” notes Yang.

CatchPlay will give it a try, already becoming involved in the pre-production stage for TV dramas and feature films, and acting effectively as a co-producer. The aim is to export Taiwanese IP by collaborating, for instance, with Indonesian producers or directors to shoot stories set in the Southeast Asian country.

Only time will tell whether CatchPlay will be able to take Taiwan’s film and television soft power to a wider audience and gain a strong foothold abroad as it continues to venture further into content creation.

Translated by Susanne Ganz

Edited by Sharon Tseng