MANILA – Video-on-demand is shaping up to become hot business in the Philippines after Kuala Lumpur-based startup iFlix raised US$30 million in an investment round participated by its parent company Catcha Group and the Philippine Long Distance Telephone Company (PLDT).
iFlix was first announced in March by Catcha and Evolution Media Capital and is seen as Asia’s own Netflix, with a catalog of 10,000 hours of US, Asian regional and local TV shows and movies. PLDT and Catcha invested US$15 million each in the funding round.
The money will go towards bringing the service in key Southeast Asian markets, including Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia and the Philippines throughout the year, in addition to securing rights to new content, production and marketing.
Details on specific launch dates have not been disclosed, but a spokesperson from iFlix shared with adobo that the Philippines and Malaysia will be launched as soon as the second quarter of 2015.
adobo can also reveal that the company already began conducting roundtables in the Philippines since last week and already has an official Facebook fanpage with 2,400 fans to build up interest around the brand.
iFlix will be competing with its regional rival Hooq in the Philippines, a joint venture between Singtel, Sony Pictures Television and Warner Bros Entertainment, which partnered with Globe Telecom for its debut.
With PLDT investing, iFlix could likely take a similar route to enter the country with PLDT’s mobile arm Smart Communications, giving it access to a potential user base of 70.7 million customers, based on May 2014 data.
However, Smart is currently in partnership with Blink, another video-in-demand service developed by Omni Digital Media Ventures, the digital media group of Solar Entertainment Corp.
It was launched in September 2014 and uses technology by pay over-the-top TV provider Tvinci which, with Deluxe Entertainment Services Group, has a cloud-based catalogue of over 40,000 multiscreen-ready titles.
