Former Globe COO to Head Video Streaming Service Hooq

Former Globe COO to Head Video Streaming Service Hooq

Photo courtesy of PTB
Photo courtesy of PTB

And the battle for content just got interesting

Peter Bithos, the man brought in by Globe as their Chief Operating Officer has left his position at the local telco to head Hooq, a new video streaming service put up by Warner Bros., Sony Pictures Television and Singtel.

Hooq is looking to bring over-the-air video streaming to South East Asia, ahead of American company Netflix who has expressed their desire to expand into territories outside the Americas, specifically in Asia and in the Philippines by 2016.

Hooq’s aim is to provide users in SEA with easy to access entertainment directly to their phones and mobile devices. While Hooq is part of Singtel’s group of companies, the service will not be released in Singapore or Australia and instead will be launched in emerging markets including Indonesia, India and Thailand, as well as the Philippines.

“We are starting this venture to change the way people across Asia view entertainment,” Bithos said. “Today, across developing markets, there is limited access to quality entertainment, streamed directly to the screen of one’s choice. It’s either illegal, high cost or difficult to get. We aim to fix that.”

Bitho’s move to Hooq is just more proof that the next battleground for telcos will be content. Smart already has their own streaming service Blink, and is bolstering that with their strategic partnership with The Walt Disney Company to bring their content to their subscribers, which includes games, apps and potentially movies and TV shows as the months go by. Globe (which Singtel has a 47.3% stake in) will be combating this with Hooq, which has also netted several key executives from TV5.

If 2014 was the year where both Smart and Globe debuted strategic partnerships with high-profile music streaming services, this year will be the year where on-demand video streaming will take center stage.

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