Hong Kong broadcast giant TVB celebrates its 50th anniversary in November this year. And while the territory’s media environment is the toughest anyone can remember, TVB’s new streaming platform – myTV SUPER – is shining a light on the way forward.

On 23 April last year, Television Broadcasts Ltd (TVB) bosses in Hong Kong switched on streaming platform myTV SUPER and went live with hopes, dreams and targets of reaching 1.4 million users by the broadcast giant’s 50th anniversary in November 2017. Today, the platform has more than four million users. That’s 214% more than they expected and months ahead of schedule.

S.K. Cheong, TVB’s executive director and GM, admits to being “very pleased with the results”. In a territory with 2.2 million households, 3.3 million of myTV SUPER’s 4.4 million subscribers (June 2017) access via mobile/web platforms, which have a strong free component. myTV SUPER has between 300,000 and 400,000 paying mobile subscribers. About one million paying subs have both mobile and TV-box access. Just on the household side, Cheong expects to get to one million paying subscribers before the middle of 2018, up from the current 700,000.

Consumer time spent on myTV SUPER is substantial. The average time spent on the platform via connected TVs or set-top boxes is three hours a day. “At 60-90 hours of viewership a month... that’s a sign of stickiness, of success, and real consumption. We are there already with our service,” Cheong says. Average mobile usage is about 30 minutes a day.

It’s not only the viewing stats that are good. By December this year, less than two years in, myTV SUPER will have reached operational breakeven, with a clear vision of the way forward that includes being able to start monetising 50 years – something like 100,000 hours – of video archives.

“We’re able to see good usage of our archive, which we have never seen before, on this platform,” he adds. And the end is nowhere in sight. “We are a third of the way where we could be... within five years. So there is still a lot more work to do.”

There’s no deep secret to success he’s not willing to share, admitting to the advantages of TVB’s vast library, its 85% command of total free-TV broadcast viewership in Hong Kong, and a hard-bundle deal with a leading Hong Kong broadband service provider that fast-tracked myTV SUPER’s rollout.

Success is even sweeter, given TVB’s not-so-successful stabs at pay-TV in the past. These included a satellite-delivered DTH platform. TVB announced in January this year that it had submitted an application to surrender its domestic pay-TV service licence. The platform, TVB Network Vision, had about 200,000 subscribers at the time. These are being migrated to myTV SUPER.

What’s different this time? “The model,” Cheong says. And the approach. “Embracing OTT distribution through the internet and everything that entails required quite a lot of brave decisions,” he told delegates at this year’s ContentAsia Summit in Singapore in September.

“What we learned is that if you are going to be in OTT as a platform especially, or even as a content provider, you have to think carefully. Do you really believe in it? There is a lot of potential self-disruption that you have to do,” Cheong says.

Among TVB’s boldest decisions was putting all its free services on the OTT platform – and allowing ad skipping.

“We allowed all the instant rewind and even the ad skipping. We said we will deal with it if it happens. We didn’t hold back in terms of what the consumer expected and the user experience they wanted. And we found that that was the right decision,” he says.

One of myTV SUPER’s most popular features today is the instant three-hour rewind, even though this means viewers tend to fast-forward through ad breaks.

TVB’s path of self-disruption is ongoing, and the consequences are not entirely pain-free.

“We decided that if ad skipping is what the consumer wants, we will give it to them and skip the ad breaks for them. So that when they rewind the real-time free-TV channel, we skip all the traditional free TV ads and insert online ads,” he says.

The trouble with this approach is that online ad loads are far lighter at the moment than on traditional TV channels, where every 42-minute show typically has 20 x 30-second commercials. “You can’t do that online,” Cheong says. “But we will get there maybe one day if we are good at what we do.”

An evangelist for broadband/OTT services, Cheong says he firmly believes OTT is the future. “I see a future, in five to 10 years, where we can shut off our transmitters and stop our free TV broadcasting, give the licence back to the government and transmit all of television in Hong Kong [on OTT].”

“It’s not impossible that something like this will happen, such is the power and the capability of the technology and the benefit that it brings users... But you have to have faith in it. You have to execute extremely well and you have to learn to deal with the disruptions as they come,” he says, adding that trying to predict the disruptions could “block the pathof your OTT success”.

A much bigger risk than not disrupting – and likely cannibalising – existing models is not doing it, he says. “You have to innovate on pricing and bundling to the extent that it is necessary for that particular market and the segments you are addressing. You do that because OTT works and you believe it’s the future.”

Acknowledging that this is easier for him to say because TVB is not in 100% pay-TV mode – “If I was an 100% pay-TV operator and 100% of my revenues were coming from traditional services, it would be a lot harder for me to say this” – but he doesn’t see a choice. ”You either disrupt yourself or someone else will. You might have limited success not doing it initially and that may give you some comfort, but how long that might last is a big risk for you,” he says.

Cheong stresses the ability to deliver real benefits for consumers, including – as simple as it sounds – picture quality. Four of TVB’s five free channels are offered in better quality on myTV SUPER than broadcast because of broadcast spectrum limitations.

“If we are going to do internet TV, we don’t want it to be an inferior form of television... Online, we give it the right amount of bandwidth to make the picture look good. On traditional TV, we have to compromise on four of our five channels because we don’t have enough free-TV spectrum.”

A combination of factors underpins myTV SUPER’s success so far. Cheong attributes about 40% of the streaming platform’s success in Hong Kong to functionality, including “time freedom” – the ability to view pure free-TV services on OTT, featuring seamless availability of content, including the three-hour rewind. After three hours, the same content is available on-demand. “There is no moment in time that you would miss a TV show, and that includes sports,” Cheong says. For the most recent Olympics, TVB streamed 2,000 hours of content on six live channels, all available with the three-hour rewind option and then in a VOD archive, with no gaps.

About 30% of myTV SUPER’s success is attributed to content. About 20,000 hours of the100,000-hour archive have been uploaded so far, giving consumers unprecedented access to back titles; “We could not have done this without the library,” Cheong says. The remaining 30% he attributes to all the other factors, including hard-bundling with service providers and promotions.

Going forward, TVB may, in a couple of years, become the kind of super-aggregator international rights holders would die for. For now though, Cheong says the priority is to provide the best OTT platform for Hong Kong, with stable quality and top features.

“Things come one step at a time. I believe that we will still be the best platform for international content in Hong Kong but we are not there yet,” he says. At the same time, even if appetite for international content today appears to be low, “you would be making the wrong conclusion if you based [forecasts] on today’s data”.

On the to-do list is learning how international content could/should be marketed. “We are living in a fragmented world of varied interests and we have to figure out a way to surface that special interest for each of the bits of international content available in Hong Kong,” he says.

While there’s still a lot to do at home, TVB is considering taking myTV SUPER beyond Hong Kong’s borders. Details are being worked out, but “we are hoping to,” he says, “at least in markets we are familiar with”. TVB has extensive content relationships across the region, including StarHub in Singapore and Astro in Malaysia. “We have learned that OTT works... So the number one learning is, ‘is that exportable?’ We think it is.

“At different levels of broadband stability and penetration in different markets it will work in a different kind of evolution, but you have to believe that this works and you have to go for broke”.

This article was originally published in the October 2017 print issue for MIPCOM 2017 in Cannes