The Asia-Pacific region will be home to 5.2 billion screens by 2031, Media Partners Asia’s Vivek Couto said in his opening address at APOS, and the key to effectively monetizing that base lies in “closing the transaction loop” as video, social, and commerce converge.
Couto delivered his signature opening deep dive at APOS this morning, highlighting the screen economy’s reset. This isn’t a story of decline or disruption, he stressed. “It is a story about reallocation. Demand for premium video in this region has never been higher. What is changing quickly, and unevenly, is where the value sits, who captures it, and what it now takes to turn an audience into a business and build on new revenue streams.”
Couto walked delegates through four forces at work in reshaping the business, but pointed out that these aren’t isolated shifts—”together they amount to a single reset.”
The region is the largest and youngest screen base in the world, and while subscriptions are still increasing, “the high growth is moving to retail media and commerce. Video, social, and commerce are no longer separate businesses; they are collapsing into the same platforms.” On top of that, “AI is resetting the cost of content, the speed at which it travels, and the languages it travels in.”
Couto laid out the numbers; the region’s screen economy has grown from $142 billion four years ago to $179 billion this year; it’s on track to hit $200 billion by 2031. “On the surface, that is a calm, healthy growth story. But the surface is misleading. Almost every dollar of that new revenue is digital—premium streaming, social and user-generated video, and microdrama, a format that did not exist commercially a few years ago. Online video overtook total television in 2025. And linear TV, the engine that built a lot of the entire industry, is shrinking by around $21 billion across the decade even as the total video pie keeps growing. So the pie is bigger, but it is a fundamentally different pie.”
This matters more in APAC than other regions, Couto said. “We have roughly 55 percent of the planet’s screens, but only about a quarter of its revenue. The average screen in the United States earns close to $900. The average screen in the Asia Pacific earns a small fraction of that. You can read it as a verdict that Asia under-monetizes, and always will. Or you can read it as a runway. That gap is the single largest pool of latent value anywhere in global media, and the whole question for the next five years is who is equipped to close it, because closing it is no longer about adding reach. It is about converting reach into revenue.”
Scale is concentrated in three markets—China, Japan, and India—contributing the most in terms of new dollars entering the screen economy over the next five years. the digital gains more than absorb television’s decline. The one takeaway is this: the growth is real, but it is selective—and online video is doing nearly all of the lifting.”
Connectivity is driving gains, he said, “In India and Southeast Asia, the mobile network is still the primary way people reach video—and, increasingly, the bridge onto the big screen. CTV homes outside of China will more than triple over the decade, rising from 80 million to 250 million. “This matters for two reasons. It improves the product because big-screen viewership is more engaged, more premium, and more valuable. And it improves the advertising, because a connected television is more measurable.”
The challenge is the fact that dollars have not moved to CTV at the same rate. “The audience has moved; the advertising has not. And the reason is not appetite; it is measurement. The connected-TV ecosystem is still fragmented across streaming platforms, device-makers, and ad-supported channels. The appetite is plainly there: the great majority of media planners tell us they would shift linear budgets onto connected TV tomorrow if they simply had show-level targeting and reporting. So the prize is large, but the measurement is critical.”
Pay TV, while still viable in many AsiaPac markets, is shrinking, having been overtaken by SVOD in 2022. “By 2031, [SVOD] subscribers pay TV by more than five to one. “Pay-TV is not collapsing; it is in a managed decline—concentrated, sticky, and increasingly held together by sport.”
The nature of streaming growth has also morphed, moving away from “global libraries and aggressive pricing” to “product quality, local relevance, and live sport. The platforms winning today are the ones pairing strong local programming with international content and premium rights, and then using personalization and discovery to keep people there.”
Couto described the consumer wallet as being “robust—but it has been repriced. This is displacement, not destruction. The money has not left the category. It has changed hands, from a high-margin television dollar to a lower-ARPU digital one. And that single substitution is the quiet force compressing industry growth, because the replacement dollar demands more scale, more tech investments, better data, and tighter cost discipline to earn the same margin the old market did.”
The battle for ad dollars is fierce and uncertain, he said, intensified by the ongoing Gulf crisis; “2026 is the slowest year for APAC advertising since the pandemic, growing just over 5 percent. But the headline rate is not the story. The story is the mix. Television advertising will fall again, its eighth consecutive annual decline. Digital will grow and now takes three-quarters of every ad dollar in the region.”
APAC digital advertising nearly doubles across the decade, with power concentrated among a small group of players with heft in retail media—”advertising attached directly to a purchase. The logic is simple: a platform that can connect attention to a transaction captures the budget, and a platform that can only deliver attention ends up renting its reach to the one that can. Reach is necessary. It is no longer sufficient.”
Retail media gains are not just being driven by China—it’s region-wide, encompassing key markets like Japan, India, Southeast Asia, Australia and Korea. “The centre of gravity in advertising is moving from the impression to the transaction—and the screen businesses that thrive will be the ones that sit closest to the point of purchase.”
Couto also weighed in on the microdrama trends that have reshaped the region’s ecosystem, led by China. :The economics are very attractive in one way, but they’re also hard. Micro-drama is hits-driven, and its dominant cost is not production. It is marketing. Paid user acquisition can consume the majority of revenue. These businesses live or die inside very short ROI windows, of 48 to 72 hours. That is real, persistent margin pressure, and it is the defining challenge of the format.”
There are companies that have made this model work at scale, he said, referencing ReelShort and DramaBox, which account for almost half of all the microdrama revenues outside of China. AI is transforming the sector’s financial viability. “In China, close to 40% 50% of the top 100 microdramas are already AI-generated; Douyin saw tens of thousands of AI- titles in a single month, produced at a fraction of live-action cost.” Alongside the AI shift is a genre one, as the business expands beyond traditional tropes into thriller, horror, fantasy, and local-language storytelling. “Broadening the audience is a very durable way to bring those acquisition costs down. So, the winners in microdrama will not be the heaviest spenders. They will be the operators who use AI to make more bets and new genres to make those bets land with a more effective ROI.”
China has set itself up as the model, with Couto calling it “the most converged video market” in the world. “The platforms that began in short video and social now earn more from video than the dedicated streamers do. Every major player runs a hybrid stack: social feeds, short clips, microdramas, and full-length premium series under one unified user account and recommendation engine.”
Meanwhile, the “creator economy has now drawn level with premium streaming for attention. Creator and social video take the larger share, and in Indonesia, it is more than 90% of streaming time. On revenue, premium streaming still holds its ground. So creators have already won the attention. The dispute is the money and the economics. China is the benchmark, and on a scale of its own, at roughly $20 billion of creator and influencer ad spend, sitting on top of close to $500 billion of creator-driven commerce, with a hundred million creators on a single platform.”
The influencer ad pie sits at about $2 billion in Southeast Asia, while creator-driven commerce is at $50 billion. “The money is not in the ad beside the content. It is in the transaction inside it.” It’s the opposite in India, which he described as a situation of “audience without revenue. Reach is not revenue until you build the rails to the transaction.”
Couto also highlighted the rising power of local players, among them JioStar in India, U-Next and TVer in Japan, TVING and Wavve in Korea, Vidio in Indonesia, and Viu across Southeast Asia. “In every major market, the strongest local platform is gaining share against global scale by pairing local content and sport with smart bundling. The lesson is that a local champion can now reach regional-scale economics, particularly in big markets. JioHotstar surpassed $1 billion in revenue last year and is on track to surpass YouTube in total revenue by the end of this year in that market. In advertising, it is precisely these scaled local players that have been able to withstand the pressure that is eroding other players.”
A fascinating nugget shared by Couto: “of the ten most valuable retail and e-commerce companies in the world, nine are Asian. The screen economy and the retail economy are merging into a single economy with attention and transaction inside one loop and that combined economy is being built, first and at the greatest scale, here in this region.”
AI is a key part of the APOS agenda this year, and it’s not just about delivering more cost-effective dubbing and lower production costs as the technology shapes storytelling, drives viewing with better recommendation algorithms. “AI is becoming embedded in the operating fabric of this industry.”
