Pay TV needs a fresh & sexy story – starting with not calling it pay TV. As part of a series tracking entertainment brands as they chase their tales, ContentAsia talked to Turner APAC head Ricky Ow about mobile video, the IP grail, feature films, killing old thinking and ditching outdated descriptions.

Turner has commissioned its first mobile-first video series in Asia, taking the regional organisation another step into a future built on reworked relevance and engagement across all platforms. Now into his fourth year at the regional media business, Turner’s Asia Pacific president, Ricky Ow, says investment in originals has increased significantly compared to three years ago. He won’t give numbers, but he will say that there is an outsize determination to own quality IP. “We want new IP and we want our IP to become stronger,” Ow insists.

The mobile-first shorts (production details under wraps) are part of an original production initiative that has two key drivers. The first is Turner’s kids services and the second is a commitment to IP ownership. In the next 18 months, “there will be a significant increase in content that we are delivering to our channels and platforms,” Ow says.

This includes entertainment content for WarnerTV supported by, among others, a five-feature production deal with Singapore-based mm2 Asia. The first project is theatrical biopoc Wonder Boy. Ow says the entertainment originals will “help Warner TV to become more relevant... and will help us to grow in terms of reaching out to new and bigger audiences”.

Originals allow Turner to own all rights and “allow us to look beyond” to, for instance, distribution across every platform and, beyond that, to manage each piece of content as a franchise. “Besides the revenue from syndication, it’s important to look beyond. We need to look at each piece of content as IP. And then decide how we manage that franchise in an overall environment where people can watch so many things in so many places. We have to be relevant across all platforms,” Ow says.

And stay true to an expanded slate that runs from kids, which involves multi-element franchise management, to Korean, where the cycle is much faster and everyone wants it right now. “We need to have different approaches,” he adds.

Originals for each of the regions – including India, where Turner operates Pogo, and Japan – are customised, continuing the shift from regional to sub-regional. “We’ve always customised for different regions, but this is the first time we have been so co-ordinated,” Ow says.

This golden age of original production is not without challenges. The biggest are sustaining growth and attracting new audiences. “We need to come up with good ideas and investment, to be innovative. And secondly we need to keep working to get new audiences so that we can expand and keep the momentum,” he continues.

Channels remain a core part of the business, driving the bulk of revenue and profit. “We believe linear channels will continue. Turner channels are strong and well-curated and have a role, but we also believe they need updating to be more relevant to the consumer.” Today’s killer difference is the shift to skinny bundles. “We are positioning to be in the skinny bundle,” Ow says.

There’s also the investment in Vietnamese online platform POPS Worldwide, which gives Turner direct-to-consumer access and insights.

“The old thinking is that you want to keep everything in one place. The new thinking is ‘how do you make your content exciting and relevant by building a 360 proposition around it’.” In 2016, Turner recorded 1.7 billion touch points in Asia Pacific across TV, online, apps, Facebook and YouTube. “We no longer measure ourselves by ratings,” he says, adding: ”Today we measure ourselves by touchpoints”.

Ow no longer describes Turner as a pay-TV business. “We are about consumers and content and getting those joined together.”

Published on Issue Four of ContentAsia's inprint+online (7 September 2017)