Warner Bros. Discovery now the largest broadcaster in Asia-Pacific with 35 channels

The new entity born from the merger between Warner Bros. and Discovery Networks last year became de facto the largest broadcaster in Asia-Pacific, with 35 channels, overcoming its three main competitors: Disney, True Corp, and VTV Group. With an acceleration of the mergers and acquisitions, and the growing momentum of OTT, the competition for TV dominance in Asia-Pacific among international broadcasters is now at its peak. A Pay TV area mainly, with local disparities While being a relatively mature TV market, with TV penetration among households higher than 90% within the countries covered, TV distribution in Asia-Pacific also mainly relies on Pay TV channels. Among the more than 1,200 TV channels available in the region, less than 15% are free-to-air, with some markets being exclusively Pay TV, such as Maldives or Mongolia, while New Zealand and Sri Lanka, on the other hand, have the highest availability rate of free TV, with 25% of channels. A strong dominance of US media giants among the regional distribution Highly diversified, with more than 550 groups operating TV channels, the area remains very competitive, as the top 15 groups gather less than a quarter of the TV channels available in the region. But the highest number of channels available does not necessarily translate into the widest regional availability, as some of these groups heavily focus on their domestic market. True Corp for instance operates more than 30 TV channels in Thailand, hence accounting for more than 20% of the TV offer in the country, but provides very little coverage abroad, besides Cambodia. While regional players such as CCTV, NHK, Zee Entertainment, or Rewind Network rank high in regional distribution, most of the top players are US-based. If regional broadcasters are widely available as they provide the generic entertainment and news content to their diasporas within Asia-Pacific, these US-based groups, such as Warner Bros.-Discovery, Paramount, NBC Universal or Walt Disney Company, have managed to expand their reach among TV packages, both by acquiring local or regional broadcasters (such as Star in India for Disney or Mediaworks in New Zealand for Discovery), and by providing a significant share of the premium entertainment content available within Pay TV bouquets, and aggregating a growing number of sports rights. Hence, within the 10 groups most distributed in the region in 2022, both in terms of channels available and countries covered, 6 were US-based. Two main profiles of content offers in Asia-Pacific region Going deeper into the content offers provided in the region, two main country profiles emerge. Overall, customers in Asia-Pacific are given a lot of room when it comes to building their content mix, both in terms of generic packages and in terms of add-ons available. Due to...