APOS 2026: 5 Key Questions as Asia’s Top Media Summit Gets Underway

APOS

APOS, the marquee annual gathering of the Asia-Pacific media and entertainment business, gets underway this week in Bali, Indonesia, and its organizers have given the 2026 edition a pointed framing: a reset. Run by research and advisory firm Media Partners Asia, the summit convenes the region’s most powerful players — global streamers, Indian conglomerates, Chinese tech platforms and a wave of AI and microdrama upstarts — around a single premise: that television, theatrical, streaming and social video are collapsing into one market and that nearly every conventional rule about how it makes money is being rewritten.

MPA values Asia’s screen entertainment economy at roughly $180 billion today and sees it on course to top $200 billion by 2031, with online video having already overtaken linear television across the region and almost all future growth coming from digital.

More and more of it accrues to platforms built for attention rather than prestige: by MPA’s reckoning, the world’s most valuable entertainment companies are now ByteDance and YouTube, each carrying a valuation north of $500 billion — roughly double that of a traditional Hollywood major. “Money is following consumer money,” as MPA chief executive Vivek Couto puts it, “and advertiser money is following attention.”

Couto, who opens the three-day program with a keynote and leads many of its sessions himself, has organized the agenda around the forces driving that shift — scale, monetization and, above all, AI.

A decade ago, Reed Hastings took the APOS stage to introduce Netflix’s vision to the region. Today, premium streaming is a mature pillar of the industry rather than an upstart, and the company’s execs will join a speaker lineup comprised of surprisingly formidable homegrown giants and AI-native services promising a complete revolution for content costs and production timelines.

Here are five questions hanging over APOS in 2026 — and the next phase of Asia’s entertainment business.

What’s Next for Premium Streaming in Asia?

The premium streaming market for Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+ and HBO Max is forecast to be worth $10 billion annually in the Asia-Pacific region alone by the end of 2026, according to Media Partners Asia. In a peace summit-like moment for what was once referred to as “the streaming wars,” the top regional executives of the rival platforms will appear at APOS side by side — Netflix’s Minyoung Kim, Prime’s Gaurav Gandhi, Disney’s Tony Zameczkowski and Warners’ James Gibbons — to discuss what comes next for the maturing sector.

“These platforms have had a good couple of years in Asia, but the issue is, while they’ve grown perhaps two times in size, YouTube and TikTok have grown four times,” says Couto. “Given everything that’s going on with the war for attention, and the huge growth of vertical video and microdramas in particular, what does premium streaming do to unlock the next phase of growth?”

The panel is expected to explore various strategies: the growing investments in live events and sports, the continued launch of ad-supported tiers across new markets, increased production of cost-effective unscripted formats, experiments with premium short-form content, sharper personalization on the product side and a fresh wave of bundling and partnerships throughout the region.

“And hopefully a few fresh ideas that will surprise us,” Couto adds.

Can India’s JioStar Truly Go Head-to-Head with YouTube?

Among the regional champions APOS regularly spotlights, none draws more consistent attention than JioStar, the Reliance-controlled Indian streaming and television giant in which Disney holds a 37 percent stake. What sets JioStar apart, in APOS’ framing, is that it’s not chasing Netflix or Prime Video so much as YouTube, competing directly for advertising dollars at enormous scale — “the only player outside of China that really does that,” as Couto puts it. Among the fastest-growing streaming businesses anywhere, now repositioning itself as an AI-native premium service with increasingly competitive economics, JioStar could be “proof that a local champion, once consolidated, can achieve global economics without even leaving home.”

In a pair of talks, JioStar’s entertainment CEO Kevin Vaz will lay out how the company intends to redefine scale in its home market, while Ishan Chatterjee, who runs sports and live experiences, will take up fandom, AI integration and the commerce layer JioStar is building around live events (such as IPL cricket). The open question is whether a YouTube-style ad engine and a premium subscription business can run side by side in one app — and whether India’s scale advantage and unfettered embrace of AI can translate into the kind of margins that have eluded other regional players as they’ve sought to compete with the dominant global platforms.

How Will Microdrama Platforms Transform Their Explosive Growth into Profitability?

Vertical microdrama — swipeable, cliffhanger-driven serial shorts shot for phone consumption — has become “the fastest creation of a format we’ve ever tracked,” Couto says, adding that it’s “a multi-billion-dollar industry built in about four years.” MPA puts the microdrama business outside China at about $3.5 billion this year, with Crazy Maple Studio’s ReelShort and rival DramaBox together holding 50-55 percent of the market. ReelShort founder and CEO Joey Jia, who built the app from a Silicon Valley experiment into a growing U.S. consumption habit, will take part in an APOS fireside on the economics behind the boom. With many platforms widely reported to be burning cash in pursuit of mind-share, the next hard question for the nascent industry is profitability — and whether these startups can convert reach into greater revenue, whether through paid subscriptions, telco deals or licensing.

Can Anime and K-Content — Once Niche, Now Global — Continue to Grow?

For a long while, many trade observers wondered whether any specialty streamer could survive without mass scale. Anime streamer Crunchyroll, a regular bright spot in Sony Group’s recent earnings calls, has proven it can be done. In an early fireside chat, Crunchyroll president Rahul Purini will discuss building a 360-degree fandom business — with streaming at the core, and merchandise, live events, music and theatrical experiences spinning around it. On Wednesday morning, the company is anticipated to reveal at APOS that it is adding to its global reach by launching in some new markets that are major consumers of anime. In a later session, DIVE Studios co-founder Brian Nam will make the case for K-pop as another fandom engine uniquely built for global consumption. Both companies serve as a reminder that focus, not breadth, can be both a moat and a competitive advantage against aggregators — provided the fandom runs deep enough to monetize across formats and global markets.

Will AI Collapse Costs Without Cutting Out Humans?

The embrace of AI across Asia, particularly in the heavyweight markets of China and India, is happening “at an unprecedented scale relative to the rest of the world,” Couto notes. Unsurprisingly, then, AI is the theme running throughout the APOS program in 2026. For the investor class, the question is to what extent “AI triggers a total repricing of the entertainment P&L, as marketing and localization costs collapse, and production cycles tighten — but content quality nonetheless holds, or even improves,” according to Couto. China’s AI-video leaders such as Kuaishou’s Kling and ByteDance’s Seedance feature prominently in Bali this year, as do AI-native production startups like Utopai Studios. The marquee AI conversation pairs director and acclaimed motion-capture actor Andy Serkis (Lord of the Rings, Planet of the Apes) with Google’s Jon Zepp to discuss AI, intellectual property and human craft — and how to “put humans at the center of AI-powered production to really reimagine what storytelling can be.”