The title of Vivek Couto‘s opening address at APOS 2026 uses the word “reset.” He has a more precise term in mind.
“It’s not actually being reset,” says Couto, CEO and executive director at Media Partners Asia, which produces the annual summit running June 16–18 in Bali. “It’s actually being redefined. The whole industry is being redefined in terms of the possibilities, in terms of new revenue streams, and frankly, in terms of the cost structures that one has to adopt.”
That distinction – incremental disruption versus structural transformation – is the animating tension of the APOS agenda. The conference, now in its second decade as Asia-Pacific media’s premier gathering, has assembled executives from JioStar, Warner Bros. Discovery, Crunchyroll, iQIYI, Viu, TVING, Prime Video, Netflix, Disney and YouTube to interrogate what the business is becoming: something that can no longer be described in the vocabulary of the industry that built it.
The forces driving that transformation, in Couto’s telling, are several and simultaneous. AI has moved from conference panel discussion to operational reality. Streaming has ceased being a land grab and started producing real profits. Sport has grown into a pillar of the entertainment economy. And microdramas – short-form, vertical video built on gamified entertainment principles – have crossed from novelty into genuine consumption category.
“Microdramas are no longer a curiosity,” Couto says. “It’s a real category of consumption, and there’s data to prove it.”
According to Couto, DramaBox and ReelShort, the two profitable peers in the microdrama space, are generating combined annualized revenue of close to $1.5 billion, with most of their users based in the U.S. ReelShort CEO Joey Jia, speaking on day one in a session titled “Micro Dramas, Mega Economics,” has expanded aggressively into Thailand through a partnership with AIS and is now eyeing Japan and Korea. India has emerged as a new frontier: Couto says microdrama platforms have unlocked roughly $300 million in transactions in the country over the past six months, with an annualized run rate projected at $800 million to $900 million.
Whether that trajectory holds is another question. “The jury’s in on subscription,” Couto says. “But how do you make it sustainable? What’s the lifetime value of these users?” On advertising monetization, he is more cautious: “The jury is out, to be honest.”
The monetization uncertainty hasn’t dampened investor appetite. As the top Chinese microdrama players and their Indian counterparts seek fresh capital, Couto sees the category becoming a new magnet for investment – though one shadowed by the looming ambitions of TikTok and Meta, both of which he identifies as moving into the format with “intent and velocity.” A dedicated day-two panel, “Inside the Micro-Drama Pipeline,” will hear from Cassandra Yang of RJ RisingJoy and Dabin Chung of Bamboo Network on what the production stack looks like from the inside.
The microdrama surge sits within a broader vertical video shift that has pulled in publishers from the New York Times and CNN to Disney and Netflix. But Couto is careful to separate the format’s mass-consumption appeal from premium storytelling. Platforms in Asia, he notes, appear to be licensing content from the American operations of Chinese microdrama companies rather than their Chinese-origin catalogues – a signal, he suggests, of a quality differential that matters to regional audiences.
On sports, APOS 2026 features ICC CEO Sanjog Gupta, La Liga president Javier Tebas, and JioStar sports and live experiences chief Ishan Chatterjee, whose session is titled “Sport as Platform: Fandom, AI and the Commerce Layer.” Couto points to a data point from the most recent ICC cricket cycle that illustrates how the sports geography is shifting: for the first time, meaningful demand emerged well outside India. Japan ranked as a top-three market. Indonesia came in at number four. Thailand at number five.
“How do you monetize that?” Couto asks. “How do you tap the fandom? And how do you develop new revenue streams around merchandising, ticketing, working with brands and advertisers – rather than just being dependent on these rights cycles and streaming platforms?”
The question reflects a wider pressure on rights holders to reduce their reliance on broadcast and streaming platforms as sole revenue conduits, and to build the kind of diversified fandom economics that Formula 1 has pioneered. A session with Copa90’s Tom Thirlwall examines what that model looks like in practice. Simon Robinson, president of global experiences and worldwide studio operations at Warner Bros. Discovery, brings the experiential economy into the conversation with a fireside titled “Beyond the Screen: The Business of Living the Story.”
If sports represents the engagement opportunity, AI represents the efficiency and reinvention play. Couto frames the central AI question not as tool adoption – “everyone’s doing that,” he says – but as embedded intelligence: the difference between attaching AI to legacy systems and building organizations whose decisions, data and teams are structured around it. That thesis shapes the “Intelligent Enterprise” keynote from Thomas Tull of TWG Global, and informs sessions featuring Google’s Jon Zepp alongside Andy Serkis and Kling AI’s Melody Hou, as well as a dedicated panel on GenAI across the content pipeline with JioStar’s Stephan Bugaj and FBRC.ai’s Todd Terrazas.
Localization is one area where the impact is already measurable. When Netflix first expanded globally, localization across dozens of languages was a significant cost burden. That cost has come down substantially, and microdrama platforms have been the fastest adopters of AI-driven localization at scale. Streaming companies and broadcasters are now following.
The longer-term AI thesis, Couto argues, is about freeing capital for content. He cites the example of ABS-CBN International, which has used AI not as a creative tool but as a technology and infrastructure lever – cutting operational costs by 50 to 60 percent and redirecting the savings into content investment. He points similarly to Foxtel in Australia, which merged its engineering stack with DAZN following that company’s acquisition of the broadcaster, and now focuses spending almost entirely on content.
“Netflix, in some ways, is so successful because there’s the freedom to invest and spend on content,” Couto says. “That’s what everyone should be doing.”
For global investors trying to read Asia, Couto identifies two persistent misconceptions that are slowly correcting. The first is the underestimation of local content – not just as an engagement driver, but as a transaction engine. Korean content’s expansion has been well documented; Chinese content’s reach across the region has grown dramatically in the past two years, which is why iQIYI and WeTV are at APOS focusing not just on their streaming platforms but on their studio and content-licensing capabilities.
The second misconception is the pace of change. Couto points to Stage, the Indian dialect-focused streaming platform backed by Blume Ventures, which has grown to three million direct subscribers paying for vernacular and niche content. That growth has attracted attention from India’s top-tier streamers. “You can’t dabble in Asia,” he says. “Dabbling in Asia was something you could do in the 90s and 2000s. Now it’s very different.”
Thai content gets its own dedicated panel at APOS this year, with director Banjong Pisanthanakun and TrueVisions NOW’s Deedee Pholthaweechai among those examining why Thai stories are traveling. The Philippines and Indonesia each have featured sessions as well, with Vidio – now profitable and, in Couto’s assessment, the leading local streaming platform in Indonesia by revenues – serving as a case study in how local content can drive subscription share in a competitive market.
The Korean content wave continues to reshape the region’s streaming map. Couto describes the impact of Korean content on Max’s growth across Southeast Asia and Taiwan as transformative, saying it is driving both viewership and subscriptions in those markets. WBD APAC president James Gibbons will address the conference in the day-one panel “Asia’s Streaming Advantage: Growth, Profitability and What’s Next,” alongside Netflix’s Minyoung Kim, Prime Video’s Gaurav Gandhi and Disney’s Tony Zameczkowski.
The investor lens gets its own dedicated space on day one in a panel titled “Capital in the Age of AI: Where Investors Are Betting Across Sports, Streaming and Stories,” featuring Blume Ventures, Elysian Park Ventures, Asia Partners and VI Group.
Ask Couto which of the trends reshaping Asia’s media landscape will matter most in five years, and the answer is unambiguous. “It’s going to be AI, for sure,” he says. “It’s just the beginning.” But he is precise about what that means. AI will not displace storytelling or IP, but it will determine which companies have the structural freedom to compete for both. The companies that figure out how to embed intelligence into their operations, cut the legacy cost base and redirect resources toward creative investment are the ones, in his view, that will still be standing when Asia’s media redefinition reaches its next phase.
APOS 2026 runs June 16–18 at The Mulia, Nusa Dua, Bali. Pre-conference activity on June 16 includes an AVIA Policy Roundtable, an AVIA State of Piracy Roundtable and an invitation-only CEO Forum, with the main conference program beginning June 17.
