iflix

» see iflix.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

iflix never reached Turkey at meaningful scale. It was a southeast-asian product, designed for the markets where Netflix was either too expensive or not yet localized: Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Pakistan, the Maldives. The pricing was the wedge. Three to five US dollars a month with telco-bundle options that put iflix on a postpaid mobile bill instead of a credit card. The first time I heard the name was in a 2017 telecom-industry deck about Asian video subscription growth, and even then the framing was "the company you have not heard of that has more users than HBO Asia."

iflix launched in May 2014 from Kuala Lumpur. Patrick Grove of Catcha Group put up the founding capital alongside Mark Britt and a Liberty Global investment. The thesis was straightforward. Most of southeast Asia was about to come online via cheap android phones, and the standard Netflix subscription was either unaffordable or unbankable for the new audience. iflix would be the localized alternative, with cheaper pricing and licensed content from the major Hollywood studios plus regional originals shot in Bahasa and Tagalog and the other local languages. By 2017 it had passed 5 million users and Sky and Hearst were adding to the cap table.

The peak number iflix claimed was 25 million monthly active users in April 2020, spread across thirteen countries. The number was always a little soft because most of those users were on free trials or telco-bundle promotions that auto-renewed without payment, but the audience was real. iflix was the dominant subscription streamer in Malaysia and the Philippines for a stretch of 2018 to early 2020, ahead of Netflix in raw user count if not in revenue.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the decline ~

The business never got to a place where the subscription revenue covered the content licensing. Each market launch required a new round of telco partnerships and a new round of localized originals, and the unit economics never quite closed. By 2019 iflix had pulled out of the Middle East and was reorganizing the management team. The pre-IPO plan was the bet that the company would solve unit economics at scale, with public-market money to bridge the gap. They filed the prospectus in early 2020 with a target listing on the ASX.

~ the day it died ~

The Australian market dropped roughly 30 percent across March 2020 as covid lockdowns hit, and the IPO window closed within a week. The financing arrangement iflix had with its investors contained a material-adverse-change clause that triggered when public-market conditions deteriorated past a threshold. It triggered. The bridge funding evaporated. In April two of the founders resigned from the board and the company laid off more than 50 staff. The remaining team shopped the assets to a buyer of last resort. Tencent agreed in late May and the deal closed on June 24, 2020 for what reporting described as "tens of millions" of dollars. The pre-IPO valuation iflix had been carrying was around 1 billion.

~ the long tail ~

Tencent rebranded the surviving service as "WeTV iflix" and folded it into the WeTV product. The standalone iflix.com brand stopped existing as a separate company that summer. Some of the regional offices stayed open under the new owner for another two years, with the final South Asian and Thai offices closing in May 2022. The southeast-asian streaming market that iflix had tried to define is now a four-way fight between Netflix, Disney+ Hotstar, Viu, and WeTV. iflix is the brand that proved the market existed and could not stay alive long enough to win it.

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