Dhivya T. says premium VOD users spend just 8% watching premium content

Southeast Asia’s premium VOD audience is spending almost all its digital life somewhere else. Media Partners Asia’s Head of Insights Dhivya T. said, in a presentation at APOS today, that premium VOD users spend only 8% of their digital life actually watching premium content. The rest of their time goes to social, messaging, gaming, and short video.

The key detail is not that entertainment is competitive. It is that the “default” behavior is fragmented attention across multiple apps and devices. Dhivya T. made that point at APOS, and the implication is immediate: if only 8% of digital life is watching premium VOD, then the industry is not just competing with other shows. It is competing with the entire attention ecosystem, including the phone screen users are already trained to reach for.

This matters because VOD businesses usually talk about premium content as if it is the center of gravity. But the pattern described at APOS suggests premium viewing is a slice, not the pie. When users spend most of their time on short-form formats, chat, and games, premium platforms face a hard question: how do you win moments, not just subscriptions? Streaming is often optimized for catalog and quality. Attention, however, is optimized for habit, speed, and interactivity. If the audience habits are social and scroll-first, premium products need distribution strategies that fit the way people already spend time.

Then there is the second screen problem, which is not just a consumer preference. The presentation references adding the TV screen to users’ mobile behavior, underscoring that the viewing experience does not live in one place. For an operator, that changes measurement. “Minutes watched” on one screen can hide the reality that users consume related content, commentary, clips, and reminders somewhere else. It also changes product design incentives. If the TV is only part of the funnel, then features like discovery, recommendation, and cross-platform reminders become as important as what is on the premium library.

From a board and investment perspective, the 8% figure should shift how people stress-test the business. Premium VOD companies typically assume that content quality and brand will pull users in and keep them there. But if users are allocating their time in a very different way, growth may hinge less on producing more premium hours and more on converting off-platform attention into on-platform viewing. That conversion can fail even when content is strong, because users are building their day around messaging and short video rather than sitting down to watch.

Regulators and policymakers also sit in the background of this kind of attention shift, even when they are not directly discussing VOD engagement metrics. Southeast Asian media and telecom ecosystems have historically been shaped by how platforms operate at the intersection of consumer behavior and data flows. When time concentrates in social, messaging, and short video, the market power of those ecosystems can rise relative to traditional premium distributors. That can pull regulatory focus toward competition, consumer protection, and platform governance, because the places users spend time are also the places where content moderation, data handling, and advertising targeting decisions get made.

For creators and rights holders, the takeaway is equally sharp. If 92% of digital life is not premium viewing, premium content needs packaging that travels. That often means formats and distribution that play well with short video discovery, social sharing, and interactive environments. The “premium” label still matters, but it may not be the first thing that earns the click. The attention path may begin with something snackable and end with something deeper, only if the platform ecosystem makes that jump easy.

For executives, the strategic stakes are straightforward. If your product measures success by premium minutes on a single interface while users live across social, messaging, gaming, and short video, you risk building a strategy that is true on paper and wrong in the audience’s daily routine. The 8% figure shared at APOS is a reminder that attention is the scarce asset. Teams that win will be the ones who design for the split, measure across screens, and treat streaming as part of a multi-app behavior loop, not as a standalone destination.