KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia--(BUSINESS WIRE)--iflix, the world’s leading entertainment service for emerging markets is thrilled to announce it has crossed more than 15 million subscribers to its service, on the back of 250 per cent growth since January 2018.
The media industry globally is undergoing a transformational shift, as digital platforms continue to see seismic growth and mobile viewing breaks new records daily. Entertainment, particularly television, is becoming a less passive and more immersive experience, with user demands focused on locally, culturally and socially relevant content, accessibility and convenience.
The first half of 2018 has been a period of significant change for iflix as the service evolves away from the traditional Western SVOD model and introduces new unique culturally rich, engaging localized programming and features, targeting both mass market users and younger digital-savvy demographic groups. The result has been unprecedented growth in customer engagement, with content consumption doubling in the last 5 months for an overall 22.84 billion minutes (43,500 years) streamed since launch.
Local communities want extraordinary local stories.
User
data reveals that local audiences have a strong preference for local
content. To cater to this demand, iflix has significantly increased its
acquisition and commissioning of local content, with the aim of
quadrupling its commissioning slate by 2019 with 12 original television
series, 30 feature movies and 75 short form films.
This commitment is validated by the ongoing success of iflix Originals’ existing slate of hyper local original series and films, including the television series instalment of Indonesian box-office sensation Magic Hour. Magic Hour: The Series set new viewing records with a binge index that outperforms top international hits, such as The Flash and top Korean drama Goblin.
KL: Special Force, another iflix Original, made available exclusively on iflix following its post-cinematic release, gained 34 per cent share of total viewers, three times that of the next-best title.
iflix has further doubled its efforts and resources for translation and subtitling, to help make its extensive international content library more accessible to local audiences.
Access to live sport is a human right.
In January this year,
iflix announced its groundbreaking joint venture with Football Malaysia
LLP to democratize the game and bring football back to the Malaysian
people. iflix’s live football offering resulted in a record-breaking 80
per cent boost in activations on the back of the announcement with the
highest conversions to view thus far.
Since then, the company has additionally added Bangladesh cricket, Formula E, and most recently 2018 World Cup Russia action, as well as music events, including Korean-sensation BTS’ concert and Myanmar leading pop star, Sai Sai’s Annual Birthday performance to its live sports and events offerings.
The Company has further built an all new live hub with world class live streaming infrastructure and capabilities, enabling the seamless, high-quality stream of every World Cup match on its Kwesé-iflix service across Africa. The investment highlights the Company’s focus on consumer innovation and its obsessive dedication to delivering exceptional customer experiences.
iflix 3.0
With relentless focus on consumer innovation and
engagement, the Company this week launched iflix 3.0, leveraging off
extensive market learnings and data, with four newly defined content
pillars, including FREE, Kids, News and Originals, along with
significantly upgraded personalized functionality, including feed and
daily collections to make iflix the ubiquitous entertainment service in
emerging markets.
iflix 3.0 offers customers more than 40,000 hours of cinematic quality, culturally rich, engaging and relevant content from 600 studios and content creators over a broad range of genres, as well as 40 Free-to-Air (FTA) channels. The company is on track to reach 80 FTA channels by the end of 2018, of which more than 60 will be available to users for free.
The new iflix 3.0 user interface also adopts learning from social media platforms and Asian service models, currently setting the benchmark for customer innovation, scale and engineering, to maximize engagement.
Mobile-First Generations will lead the way.
Today’s growing
youth population shares a handful of widely acknowledged traits. As a
demographic, not only do they have notoriously shorter attention spans,
stringent benchmarks for “the best of everything” and binge-happy
habits, they are also a highly influential audience segment in defining
taste and trends in media and culture. These younger audiences also
share a voracious appetite for highly engaging short form content.
Studio2:15, iflix’s dedicated short form creative hub, was created to cater to the increasing demand for short-form, snackable content. The studio is currently on track to produce an estimated 2000 pieces of original short-form content by year-end, with a projected 250 new titles by the end of 2019, from collaborations with local influencers and YouTube stars to localized versions of world-leading formats and best practices, as recently announced with iflix’s collaborations with Complex Networks and QYOU.
iflix Co-Founder and Group CEO, Mark Britt said, “2018 is already a transformational year for iflix. We continue to be passionately obsessed with what emerging markets customers need and want. The huge growth we’ve seen across the business is a testament to that commitment. We have one goal and that is to make iflix ubiquitous across emerging markets. To achieve this, we will continue to learn and innovate to build global culture and find new audiences for extraordinary world class content.
“We owe a huge thank you to our customers and partners for sharing their time, feedback and patience, allowing us to continually learn and get better every day at delivering a service created just for them,” Britt added.
Now available to over one billion consumers throughout Asia, the Middle East and Africa, iflix has established itself as the clear market leader in video streaming. Offering consumers a vast library of top Hollywood, regional, and local TV shows and movies, including many first run exclusives and award-winning programs, each subscription allows users to access the service on up to five devices, including phones, laptops, tablets, and television sets, for viewing wherever, whenever.
ABOUT IFLIX
iflix is the world’s leading entertainment
service for emerging markets, offering users unlimited access to
thousands of TV shows, movies and more. With a vast selection of
everyone’s favorite comedies, drama, K-drama, Turkish drama, Bollywood,
Nollywood, cartoons, movies, live sports and more from Hollywood, the
UK, Asia, the Middle East and Africa, iflix places the entertainment
people want at their fingertips to either stream or download. For one
low monthly fee, iflix subscribers can watch on their mobile phone,
laptop, tablet, TV...wherever, whenever.
Let’s play.
iflix is currently available to consumers in Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, Brunei, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Myanmar, Vietnam, the Maldives, Kuwait, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon, Egypt, Sudan, Cambodia, Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, Nepal, Bangladesh, Zimbabwe, Morocco, Tanzania and Uganda.
