Asia is now the world's biggest buyer of television
Asia-Pacific overtook every other region for streaming scripted series orders in the first half of this year, according to research by Ampere Analysis first reported on 3 September.
India led the region with 25 orders, the largest increase of any market in it, driven by Prime Video commissioning across several Indian languages, Ampere said in findings reported by TV Technology. South Korea was second by volume, where Netflix continues to lead commissioning.
Streaming commissions in the region passed every other market in the first half of the year. The revealing numbers are Taiwan's nine and the Philippines' seven.
Taiwan took nine new scripted commissions in the six months and the Philippines seven. Ampere described both as unusually high volumes for those markets.
Those two numbers are the finding. India, Korea and Japan have carried Asian commissioning for a decade, and a region-level record built on them would say little. Orders arriving in Taipei and Manila at this rate say the map has widened.
The genre mix moved as sharply. Crime and thriller took a third of the region's commissions and drama reached a record quarter, while science fiction and fantasy, which led by volume share in the first half of 2025, fell away, Ampere said.
Licensing is moving alongside commissioning. Prime Video expanded an existing multi-year worldwide distribution agreement with CJ ENM during 2026, according to the same research.
The caution is that order counts are not spend. A Philippine commission and an Indian one enter the tally identically and cost very different sums, and Ampere's figures count announced orders rather than budgets — so the record is a record of volume, not of investment.
Volume is still the thing that changes what reaches a viewer in London. Nine Taiwanese series ordered in six months is nine that did not exist to be subtitled a year ago, whatever each one cost to make.
This is one research house's count, and the numbers reached us through a trade report rather than from Ampere directly. Its methodology counts orders announced in the period, which will include titles that are cancelled and exclude those commissioned quietly.
Ampere pointed to two titles as evidence that the region's output travels: Netflix's Thai original My Dearest Assassin and its Korean original The Great Flood, both of which found audiences well outside the countries that made them.
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Asia-Pacific overtook every region for streaming series orders in the first half of 2026, with unusually high commission counts in Taiwan and the Philippines.