A bundled streaming app is a discount, not a strategy
Southeast Asian operators present bundled video and music subscriptions as their answer to the global platforms. Measured honestly, most bundles are an expensive price cut, and the money is better spent on the services platforms cannot build for themselves.
Walk into any mobile operator's shop in Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta or Manila and you will see the same posters: a postpaid plan with a global video service, a music app or a sports package included. Operators across the region have spent a decade presenting these bundles as their way of competing with the platforms that took their messaging and voice revenue. I took part in that effort at Altirra, and I now think the industry has misdescribed what it was doing. A bundled streaming subscription is a discount on a connectivity plan. It can be a good discount. It is not a content strategy, and treating it as one has cost operators money they did not have.
What the bundle actually buys
When an operator includes a streaming service in a plan, it pays the service provider for each subscriber, sometimes with a minimum commitment however many customers take it up. The customer receives something with a visible retail price, and the operator hopes the bundle will attract new subscribers, persuade existing ones to move to a dearer plan or keep them from leaving.
Those are pricing effects, and they can be measured like any other price change. At Altirra we measured them properly for the first time in 2021. We compared customers who had activated a bundled service with similar customers on the same plans who had not. The bundles reduced churn by a little under one percentage point a year among customers who used them, and made almost no difference to those who never activated them, who were the majority. We were paying minimum commitments for about 410,000 bundled subscriptions, of which fewer than 150,000 had been used in the previous ninety days.
In other words, most of what we were spending bought nothing. The rest bought a modest reduction in churn at a cost per retained customer higher than we would have accepted for any other retention offer. We had not noticed because the bundles were managed by a partnerships team whose success was measured by the number of partners signed, not by the commercial team that priced our plans.
The platforms already own the relationship
The deeper problem with bundling as a strategy is that it gives away the relationship it claims to protect. A customer who watches a global video service on our network knows that service's brand, its recommendations and its catalogue. When the bundle ends, or the customer changes operator, the service keeps them and we do not. The platforms understand this well, which is why many of them are happy to be bundled. An operator's shops and billing system bring them customers they would otherwise have to acquire themselves.
Some operators in the region have tried to escape that trap by buying or commissioning exclusive content, particularly sport. I understand the temptation, and in a market with patchy fixed broadband an exclusive football league can move subscribers. But the arithmetic is unforgiving. Rights holders sell to the bidder who values the rights most, and that bidder is often a platform with a global audience across which to spread the cost. An operator with fourteen million subscriptions in one country is bidding against companies with hundreds of millions. When it wins, it has usually paid a price that makes sense only if the content does more than retain customers, and it rarely does.
Where an operator can still earn its place
None of this means operators should leave the platforms alone. It means we should be paid for what we provide rather than paying for what we do not control. At Seralis we no longer agree to minimum commitments for bundled services. Bundles are sold on revenue-sharing terms without exclusivity, and our commercial team prices them as discounts, each with a measured effect on churn that must cover its cost. They account for about 6 per cent of postpaid revenue, down from a peak of 9 per cent at Altirra, and the margin on that revenue is positive for the first time.
What we can offer the platforms is what they find hard to build in this region. The first is billing. Many of our prepaid customers have no credit card, and carrier billing, in which a subscription is charged to the mobile account, opens markets the platforms cannot easily reach alone. We are paid a share of each transaction for it. The second is identity. Mobile numbers in Malaysia are registered to verified users, and services that must confirm who a customer is, from digital banking to event ticketing, will pay for a reliable check carried out with the customer's consent and within the law. The third is capacity when it matters. A video service whose heaviest traffic arrives at nine in the evening has good reasons to agree content-delivery arrangements with the networks that carry it, and we price those arrangements on cost, not on hope.
The fourth is physical presence. Seralis has about 38,000 dealers and reload points, many of them small shops in towns no platform will ever visit. When a platform wants to sell prepaid vouchers, or a bank wants to register customers for an account, those shops are worth paying for.
None of these businesses is glamorous. Together they earned us about RM180 million in 2025, more than bundles earned at their peak, and at better margins. They depend on things operators already have, which is why they can be defended.
The habit I would encourage in other operators is a simple one. Move bundles out of the partnerships function and into pricing. Measure each one against the cost of an equivalent price cut. Where the bundle does better than the price cut, keep it; where it does not, let it lapse at the end of the contract. Then put the people and capital saved into the services the platforms need and cannot easily build.
Operators lost the argument about content years ago. We do not need to keep losing it at our own expense. We need to be good at the parts of the digital economy that still run through a network, a bill and a shop.