Governments across Asia are funding content to build soft power. Japan has enormous soft power and less to show for it commercially than South Korea. That should worry Southeast Asian nations as they are now writing the same kind of check. The region is having a streaming moment. Subscribers are rising, local content matters more to platforms than ever, and Thai, Indonesian and Filipino titles are starting to find audiences abroad. What Southeast Asia needs to decide is whether it becomes a true export industry or a well-funded domestic one.
Brand Finance's 2026 Global Soft Power Index ranks Japan third globally, while South Korea climbed to 11th, with its position strengthened by K-pop, K-dramas and K-beauty. Southeast Asia has watched two neighbors convert content into national standing and it wants its own place at the table.
Governments across the region are borrowing heavily from the South Korean blueprint. The Thailand Creative Culture Agency, known as THACCA, is designed to coordinate the country's creative and cultural sectors, and the government committed $125 million in the 2026 fiscal year through September, and double that with $250 million for the 2027 fiscal year. Indonesia has elevated its Ministry of Creative Economy and rewritten the financing rules beneath it, including a system of intellectual property valuators designed to give banks a monetary basis for valuing creative assets, potentially giving producers something more useful in a negotiation than a view count. Vietnam has a
national cultural industries strategy targeting 7% of gross domestic product by 2030 and a mandate that 30% of domestically produced films be exported annually.
South Korea is the right model to copy. South Korea built its content agencies around a clear objective: to develop audiences and business overseas. Southeast Asian governments are now building similar institutions, but many are still deciding how to turn public investment into international audiences, stronger negotiating positions and more value retained by local rights holders.
Look at what their financing structures do. For example, the Taiwan Creative Content Agency (TAICCA) has programs designed to help local producers use international cofinancing and distribution deals to secure production financing. That solves a genuine cash flow problem. But it raises a harder question: Is Taiwan using public money to build Taiwan-owned intellectual property, or to help local producers deliver content that a global platform has already negotiated to acquire?
Jakarta is trying to become a production hub, offering international and domestic productions a 50% discount on location fees at government-owned sites and a one-stop service for permits and locations. That can bring foreign money, jobs and expertise into Indonesia. It does not necessarily build Indonesian-owned intellectual property. That is one of Japan's lessons. Japan built enormous global audiences over decades, but its negotiating position did not always keep pace with the value of that audience. The country created valuable intellectual property, but its commercial success overseas did not always translate into the strongest possible position for Japanese rights holders.
Indonesia is also an interesting exception. Its system of intellectual property valuators lets financial institutions put a monetary value on creative assets, backed by a dedicated credit pool for intellectual property-driven creative firms. Taiwan's fund, by contrast, prioritizes projects capable of reaching 1 billion international views a year. Views measure reach, whereas a metric that shows the monetary value of content provides a more sophisticated assessment. Producers are better able to negotiate favorable financial terms by giving them a metric that allows them to understand the value of the content to the platform.
There is a second gap the agencies are not built to close: most of the investment goes into producing content, rather than building audiences for it. Southeast Asian shows and films generated $1.7 billion in global streaming subscriber revenue between 2020 and 2025, according to Parrot Analytics. Of this total, 47% of Southeast Asian content revenue came from within the region, compared with just 18% for South Korean content. South Korea, therefore, derives 82% of its content revenue overseas, versus 53% for Southeast Asia, a measure of how much further South Korea has built its export business.
Availability compounds the problem. Netflix's latest viewing disclosure shows only around 24% of Indonesian titles and 30% of Thai titles in the dataset were available globally. Content that never reaches an overseas market cannot demonstrate whether anyone there wants it.
Two suggestions.
One, build the audience next door first. Southeast Asia has 700 million people with overlapping tastes and shared viewing habits, and the region treats that as a home market rather than a first export market. Fund festivals, screenings, conventions and fan events across borders, the unglamorous work of turning viewers into fandoms. It is cheap next to production subsidy, and a fanbase does not expire when the release window closes. Vietnam's experiment with rewarding creators for content promoting local heritage is interesting precisely because it is aimed at demand rather than supply.
Two, negotiate together. Australia is instructive as Netflix reaches roughly 60% of Australian homes, yet Australia represents a tiny share of its global subscriber base. Australia has nevertheless used the leverage of its domestic market to require major streaming services to invest in Australian content. Under rules introduced in 2025, services with at least 1 million Australian subscribers must spend at least 10% of their Australian program expenditure to new eligible Australian programs, or 7.5% of Australian revenue.
Southeast Asia has far greater combined scale but approaches global platforms largely country by country. No single Southeast Asian market has the leverage Australia has created through regulation. A regional producers' association could at least give producers a collective voice on rights, data and international distribution. The agencies are the easy part. South Korea decided what it wanted before the money arrived. Southeast Asia is building the institutions first and will find out afterward what it decided.
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