Top Online Video Streaming Apps in Asia: Netflix and Youtube's Absolute Dominance

Seeing Netflix's stock price increase by over 10x since 2012, many entrepreneurs in Asia have been launching their own video streaming platforms to recreate Netflix's success. For example, India has been one of the most hotly contested markets for online video streaming services, with more than a dozen services competing for consumer's attention. But which video streaming company is having the most success in Asia? Is there a product that consumers have generally liked the most? Our team at ValueChampion took a look at the data to arrive at an answer.

While data on total viewership is very limited, we were able to measure success of the top streaming services in each country by looking at their mobile app's rankings on the Apple App Store. As it turns out, Netflix and Youtube are winning in almost every country in Asia.

Top Streaming Apps by Revenue: Netflix

Out of the 13 geographic regions we studied, Netflix was the highest grossing streaming app in 8 regions, including India, Indonesia and Australia, some of the biggest economies in the world. Despite the fact that it costs at least $8 per month, a considerable amount for these emerging market countries, Netflix is still garnering a lot of dollars from consumers' wallets.

Even where Netflix was not the top revenue generating app, it still ranked as at least top 4 streaming service (except China where Netflix's partner iQiyi is the number one).

Revenue Rankings of Top Video Streaming Apps by Country

There were some notable local streaming services that closely competed with Netflix. For example, Hotstar TV in India was closely behind Netflix in terms of revenue ranking: as the 2nd most popular streaming app, it had an overall revenue ranking of 4.25 behind Netflix's 1.08.

Also notable is the popularity of "live streaming" apps like V Live, Kitty Live and Showroom. Although they are free to use, these apps allow online celebrities to host their own shows live, where viewers can make "donations" to these stars in form of digital gifts. V Live, a product from Korea's internet giant Naver, was particularly successful in Asia by leveraging its access to popular Korean celebrities.

Top Streaming Apps by Download: Youtube

Out of the 13 geographic regions we studied, Youtube was the most downloaded video streaming app in 11 countries. However, what's notable is that Youtube didn't even rank for most countries in terms of revenue. This suggests that Youtube's subscription product Youtube Red is not getting much success anywhere in Asia.

Download Rankings of Top Video Streaming Apps by Country

While Netflix dominated the online video streaming landscape in most Asian countries, it did not do as well in terms of downloads. For instance, it was #2 after Youtube in only 3 of the countries (Singapore, Philippine and Australia), and made top 5 in only 5 of the 13 countries.

In particular, it's worth pointing out that Amazon Prime Video outranked Netflix in terms of download in India. Given that Amazon Prime Video is included within the Amazon Prime package, Amazon Prime Video doesn't show up in the revenue ranking. Also, a local competitor that costs $3 per month (199 Rs) Hot Star TV has outranked both Amazon Prime Video and Netflix in India. In comparison, Amazon Prime costs costs 999 Rs (499 Rs for the 1st year) per year, while Netflix costs 500 Rs per month.

High Quality, Local Content and Low Price

What this tells us is that, to win in the online video streaming market, a service needs to first have content that is crucial to the local population (i.e. live cricket) and be price competitive. While Youtube is the most downloaded video app, nobody is willing to pay for its subscription service as its content is not deemed sufficiently "high quality." Both Hot Star and Amazon Prime are ahead of Netflix in terms of downloads because they are the cheaper service. Among the two leaders, however, it seems that Hot Star is winning due to its special set of content (i.e. cricket) although it is more expensive than Amazon's service. Given this, buying the broadcast rights for cricket for the next 5 years will be a crucial strategic move for all of these players, as we have written before here.

We saw a similar trend in markets like Japan, China and Korea, where foreign services have not garnered popularity. For example, pooq in Korea can cost less than $4 per month, provides access to a plethora of Korean shows. Similarly in China and Taiwan, Netflix's partner iQiyi only charges about $2 per month and provides both local and foreign contents.

Methodology

We collected the Apple App Store's download and revenue rankings of the most popular streaming apps in 13 Asian regions from April 23rd to May 4th to get the latest trends. We first compiled a list of the most popular video streaming apps by country by looking at the App Store's top chart for the "Entertainment" app category. Then, by comparing the average rankings of these apps during the aforementioned period, we were able to determine which apps are currently most popular in terms of downloads and revenue generated in each of the 13 Asian countries we examined.