Pocket Aces forays into China through an exclusive partnership with WebTV Asia

Pocket Aces, India’s leading digital entertainment company, has become one of the first Indian digital players to foray into the Chinese market. They are doing this through a unique partnership with WebTV Asia, a leading multi-platform digital media entertainment company in the Asian territory. With this deal, Pocket Aces becomes the first Indian digital content creator to be available on one of China’s biggest websites, Youku Tudou, which is owned by e-commerce giant Alibaba.

Pocket Aces creates content across 3 channels – Dice Media (premium web series), FilterCopy (snackable and sharable content) and Gobble (all things food), and reaches over 40 million people weekly on its own properties. This partnership will be kicked off with FilterCopy and Gobble, each of which will now have dedicated sections on the Youku Tudou platform. The content will be sub-titled in both English and Mandarin, making it accessible for a wide set of audience.

‘’China has always been an elusive market but is full of exciting opportunities with over 730 million internet users. We’re very excited to partner with WebTV Asia to distribute our content on one of China’s biggest platforms, Youku Tudou, which has over 500 million monthly active users. Our content has resonated with audiences across geographies as it touches upon core human attributes, so we’re confident that it will hit the right chords in China as well. We are starting with syndicating short form content as currently that works much better with audiences in China. Subsequently we will look at long form as well. With our rich IP library and large distribution, our goal is to reach and entertain audiences worldwide and make Pocket Aces a global brand.” said Aditi Shrivastava, co-founder, Pocket Aces.

“WebTVAsia’s Celebrate Asia vision of unifying the most popular and influential Asian creators by showcasing their content to the world, is becoming closer in reality. Having already establishing ourselves in 10 Asian countries, we are now very pleased to have Pocket Aces as our partner in India, representing such a massive and important market. Equally vital is our long-term collaboration with Youku Tudou, where new market entry opportunities into China are now much more accessible to our regional content partners. With Pocket Aces, we’re excited to begin the journey of Indian digital content on Youku Tudou and soon expand into other international territories.” Fred Chong, Group CEO, WebTVAsia.

The Chinese online entertainment market is growing rapidly and with few players such as iQiyi, Youku Tudou, Tencent dominating the market, the need for quality content is unparalleled. According to a report by the EntGroup (report in Chinese), the number of paying consumers for online video services in China has increased from 8 million in 2013 to 20 million in 2015. Youku, which merged with Tudou in 2012 to create video streaming colossus Youku Tudou, was acquired by Alibaba in a $4 billion deal in November last year. Netflix, which had not managed a headway into the Chinese market on its own, has now partnered with iQiyi.

Over the past few years, Indian content consumption has increased multi-fold in international territories. Major TV networks are syndicating their content across territories such as Pakistan, Europe, South East Asia & Middle East. But China remains hugely untapped for Indian content – only large budget Indian films such as Dangal, Baahubali, PK, and Dhoom 3 have released in China, and no digital player has footprint there yet due to China’s internet being closed to content distributors such as Facebook and YouTube. In this scenario, Pocket Aces’ entry into the digital world of China is a key and significant step for the Indian content industry and proves that content is still the king, regardless of the language barrier.