Indonesian streamer Vision+ will eventually merge with the country’s free-to-air channel RCTI, creating a new all-consuming platform for local audiences, a Vision+ executive confirmed this afternoon at Filmart in Hong Kong.
Omar Giri Calliappan, COO of the OTT division at Indonesia’s Vision+, told an audience this morning at Filmart that a merger between the two entities, both of which are owned by the overarching conglomerate MNC, was inevitable.
“After just 32 days in the job, this is the first thing that crossed my mind,” Calliappan said when asked about bringing the two brands under one roof.
The exec said audiences in Indonesia are currently underserved by MNC’s current structure, which keeps Vision+ and RCTI separate.
“If you download our free-to-air app, but you want to watch anything on the subscription side, you actually have to click and download the other app if you don’t have it,” Calliappan said.
“It’s not the best usage. We’re taking the user through multi-app journeys, even though we’re all one business. So I do want to fix that.”
Calliappan continued to describe the current structure as “fragmented” and said that an eventual merger of the two brands will provide “much more optimization.”
“There’s a consolidation there in terms of just the brand, in terms of the experience, and how we actually communicate what we have with the audience,” Calliappan said. “Moving those eyeballs, keeping those eyeballs, and testing different models.”
Elsewhere, Calliappan spoke at length about what he described as the company’s struggles with understanding the viewership patterns of its desired audience.
“We have 300,000 hours of content, which I wouldn’t say is completely optimized or unlocked,” he said. “Getting that content in front of the right audience is still something that we’re working on and perfecting.”
Calliappan said Vision+ has “250 million eyeballs” across its social media portfolio, which it aims to convert into dedicated subscribers to its own platforms.
“What we’ve been doing is giving them snippets to bring them back to our own platform. It’s worked in some ways, but now even that dynamic has changed,” he said. “That’s the challenge. How do we bring them back to our platforms again, and how do we ensure they’re consuming our content correctly, whether it’s short form, long form, or mid-form?”
Calliappan said that his long-term goal at Vision+ is to reach out further and attract global audiences with ties to Indonesian culture.
“The next part is testing an audience like the Indonesian diaspora that’s outside the country,” he said. “We’ve not really touched on that in any depth or at any length.”
Filmart ends tomorrow.
