Iflix, the leading entertainment service for emerging markets has announced that 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 localised 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.
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.
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.
In January this year, iflix announced its groundbreaking joint venture with Football Malaysia LLP to democratise the game and bring football back to the Malaysian people.
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.
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 personalised 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 maximise engagement.
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 localised 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.
