Mark Francis, a veteran TV and streaming government in Asia, has joined Indonesia’s Vidio streaming platform as its chief content material officer and technique officer. The appointment comes because the platform repasses 4 million subscribers and reclaims a lead within the Indonesian streaming market.
Based mostly in Jakarta and reporting on to CEO Sutanto Harton, Francis is anticipated to supervise the freemium streamer’s content material technique and programming. This consists of the premium stay sports activities tentpoles’ the Premier League, BRI Liga 1 and plenty of extra worldwide and native sports activities, plus an increasing portfolio of scripted authentic sequence.
Francis has twenty years of expertise as a senior content material government and government producer for the likes of Discovery, Fox Worldwide Channels, Nationwide Geographic Channels, now defunct Asian streamer iflix and Astro Malaysia’s streamer sooka, which he helped launch in 2021.
Most just lately Francis served as group lead of authentic productions at Warner Bros. Discovery overseeing HBO Go’s premium scripted and non-scripted originals from markets together with Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, and Taiwan.
Whereas at iflix, at a time when OTT was nonetheless in its relative infancy in Asia, Francis was concerned in launching hyper-local drama sequence, together with the Indonesian hit romance “Magic Hour: The Sequence” (Screenplay Movies) and a first-of-its-kind horror sequence “Kisah Tanah Jawa: Merapi” (Rapi Movies).
Early in 2024, Vidio is anticipated to announce an expanded slate of originals. It’s rising its output of action-thrillers corresponding to “Pertaruhan The Sequence” season 2, and a number of returning seasons of Vidio’s hottest younger grownup franchises and broad attraction comedy sequence.
“After weakening in Q2 2023, the Indonesian SVOD market has recovered with extra sustainable demand because of sports activities, native and Korean content material. Sports activities and native content material stays the principle engine for Vidio which has led class progress in This autumn 2023 and is anticipated to develop quickly in 2024 with the general class anticipated so as to add 1.3 – 1.4 million new subscribers in 2024.” mentioned Vivek Couto, CEO of consultancy agency Media Companions Asia.
Media Companions Asia’s Asia Pacific Video & Broadband Trade 2024 report ranked Vidio because the OTT platform with essentially the most subscribers in Indonesia, surpass world and regional OTT platforms together with Netflix, Viu and Disney+ Hotstar. It’s the just one with paying subscribers in extra of 4 million.
“Vidio is dedicated to maintain allocating the biggest funding in growing native content material because the spine of Vidio’s future progress, and this native content material turns into the rationale for patrons to proceed coming again visiting Vidio platform. We hope this dedication will help assist the expansion of the Indonesian content material trade, in order that sooner or later we are able to penetrate the worldwide market,” mentioned Hartono.
Indonesia has lengthy been a market with big potential. Based on Media Companions Asia, complete paying streaming subscribers on the finish of the third quarter was in Indonesia was 21 million – lower than 10% of the 270 million inhabitants.
