As Netflix expands rapidly in Southeast Asia, its commitment to artistic expression is being tested by Vietnam, Indonesia, Singapore, the Philippines and others.
At the same time, Netflix is ramping up investment, planning to spend $1.9 billion in 2023 on local content production in the Asia-Pacific, said Media Partners Asia, a Singapore-based research agency.with Netflix to boost domestic film development, the country’s biggest telecommunications company, Telkom Group, which had earlier said the platform contained “inappropriate content,” lifted its four-year ban on Netflix and nowBut conservatives have continued to call for censorship.
Still, faced with declining subscriptions elsewhere, companies are pushing to make inroads into Vietnam. In March, weeks after the governmentin Vietnam, Netflix executives joined a major delegation of U.S. firms to visit the country.The trip was led by the US-ASEAN Business Council, which in 2022 signed an agreement with the Vietnamese government to improve business conditions for the tech industry.
Streaming companies recognize that governments have certain “anxieties” over content, said Louis Boswell, chief executive of the Asia Video Industry Association, a trade group that counts among its members Netflix, Disney Plus and Amazon. He cited the example of Thailand’s notoriously tough lèse-majesté laws, which make it a crime to insult members of the royal family.
Instead, Boswell said, streaming companies have tried to persuade officials in Southeast Asia that the firms shouldn’t be regulated like traditional broadcasters or social media platforms. Tools like parental controls and content advisories on streaming sites allow users to “self-regulate,” making government censorship “redundant,” he said.
Gerrit De Vynck in San Francisco, Winda Charmila in Jakarta and Nhung Nguyen in Ho Chi Minh City contributed to this report.
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