Online entertainment flourishes in times of quarantine

When staying at home has become a must, video streaming services have proven to be the go-to choice for citizens for their availability and viewer-based algorithms.
Grade school students are now preoccupied with cartoons
Grade school students are now preoccupied with cartoons

POPS Worldwide, a Vietnam-based entertainment provider has seen skyrocketing numbers since schools were closed on a national scale, said its media director Truong Tu Ngan.

The views on their multiple YouTube channels increased by 22 percent altogether, with POPS Kids and POPS Anime which target young viewers growing by 200 percent.

Most notably, there was significant surge in livestream engagement rate with a 300 percent increase in watch time, mostly in children’s content, world news and entertainers’ channels.

Meanwhile, the number of streaming viewers on FTP Play, another online entertainment service with their own apps and exclusive series, upped by 40 percent in February 2020, said its spokesperson.

A recent survey on video streaming subscription services in Vietnam shows that Netflix is the second most popular one and the only foreign platform that makes top 5, even though its monthly packages costs from 3 to 5 times higher than most Vietnam-based counterparts.

The survey was conducted in February 2020 by Q&Me, a market research company, on 676 Vietnamese citizens, 202 of whom are familiar with online content.

It also points out that most people use smartphones (76 percent) and smart TV (73 percent) for streaming services, and 97 percent users are online at home.

Speaking with reporters, many entertaining executives expressed concern over the complicating epidemic which would affect TV series productions, and consequentially the viewers’ experience. They plan to put out smaller scale projects to maintain frequent releases and also focus on more educational and family-friendly content.

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