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inally seeing the potential in Southeast Asia’s largest market, media streaming services from abroad are flocking by the numbers to earn a piece of Indonesia’s passionate desire for entertainment, as well as to tap into a wired society of over 84 million internet users.

One of the latest contenders, Malaysian video streaming service iFlix, is optimistic about the market and aims to explore Indonesia’s potentials further. The Jakarta Post’s Dylan Amirio spoke with iFlix Indonesia CEO Cam Walker to get insight on his ambitions.

Question: Is the Indonesian market used to the concept of paid entertainment, resulting in demand for content streaming to be this high?

Answer: I think the origins of this kind of service started out with pay TV services, which compete to offer a range of content on televisions.

However, in Indonesia, paid TV services have one of the weakest market penetrations in the world. It took them 15 years to reach 1 million subscribers and even now it still hovers at around 2 to 3 million.

But even with pay TV, the demand for accessible and affordable content in Indonesia never ceased to rise and the delivery of video content to this eager public became the rational thing to do.

That is why iFlix entered the Indonesian market: To answer this huge demand. Our pricing is accessible as well, with an Rp 39,000 [US$2.96] per month price tag.   

So how do you see the whole streaming industry’s longevity in Indonesia?

It’s going to be incredibly positive and the numbers we discovered are varying. You have 30 percent smartphone penetration, that’s about 80 to 100 million people.

A week after we launched, iFlix already saw 40,000 subscribers, with 5,000 new activations per day. Combined with our three other markets in Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand, we have about 3.5 million subscribers in total.

Indonesia is our largest market and our expectations were greatly exceeded as we could not believe the demand at first. In Indonesia, we launched in partnership with Telkom’s IndiHome service, where IndiHome users would get free access to iFlix.

However, you would need to have a credit card to subscribe for now, as we are talking with a number of local payment gateway providers like ATM options, e-wallets, direct debit, coupons at minimarkets, etc. to help implement our payment service.

On the provider side, we are also going to announce a partnership with Indosat Ooredoo in August. I think that services like ours can do in one week than what pay TV can do in one year here.

 Regulations regarding the policing of over-the-top companies are still non-existent in Indonesia, but are being considered by the government. What does iFlix expect from this supposed regulation?

We will definitely be 100 percent compliant with any regulation that arises. I think with the surprise entrance of the US’ Netflix service in January here, the government scrambled to amend existing laws because it was much unexpected.

So the March 31 circular [by the Communications and Information Ministry] gave us time to prepare before entering the market.

We tend to comply with censorship, permanent establishment and tax rules, all of which are currently in the process of being completed. At this time, our request is for the government to outline its regulations as it sees fit because this is a great opportunity to build this business.

With the influx of foreign streaming services in Indonesia recently, how does iFlix plan to stand out among the others?

This influx means that it is a positive sign for the market itself. iFlix has a simple proposition to provide the best entertainment at an affordable price, as we see our biggest competition does not come from rival providers, but from piracy.

We simply provide an affordable, 12,000-hour option for those people are used to satisfying their hunger for entertainment from pirated material.

It’s the kind of habit forming that is needed to build your inroads within a market like this, and I guess iFlix’s goal is to also cater to viewers who tend to binge watch.  That’s interesting because our series viewership is currently higher than our film viewership on the service.

And in terms of building content, our way is to partner with local film studios, producers, distributors and aggregators. iFlix is working with television networks too, who have their own content and we plan to move into producing original content in the future.

It’s interesting to note that in the Indonesian market, local films tend to dominate view counts, with about 50 percent of our top 20 film titles being local films. It’s just sensible to move in that localized direction, because it’s what the people want in the end.