roots there, too. As an example, she highlighted Backrooms, the A24 horror hit drawn from a 4chan meme and directed by 20-year-old YouTuber Kane Parsons, which became the studio's biggest-ever opening before earning more than $260 million worldwide.

The same pattern, Dhivya said, has been shown in Southeast Asia, where Netflix s Thai film My Dearest Assassin rode the 13-million-follower Instagram reach of its star, Baifern; and where Indonesian viral X threads have spawned theatrical hits from Dusun Mayit to the horror phenomenon KKN di Desa Penari.

As she put it:  Built in the fast world,  but  banked on premium. 

That pattern, Dhivya argued, is why the microdrama has suddenly become such a surging new streaming format - and the subject of various deals at APOS this week. By integrating premium storytelling structure, serialized arcs and cliffhangers into a mobile-first delivery and pay-per-episode monetization, the format does something new: it builds an audience and charges it in the same fast-attention layer.  It collapses the funnel,  she said.

Microdrama is  the new top-of-funnel for premium  - a way to capture attention with polished stories, monetize it on the spot, while also steering the most engaged viewers toward the longer-form, more premium version.  The fast layer stops being only where you build awareness,  she said.  It becomes where you start to earn. 

She added:  Winning the conversation and culture is core to building deeper engagement, and monetization follows. 

For the studios and streamers in attendance, the presentation also mapped whose content is winning, market by market. Where a local industry has real scale, Dhivya said, homegrown stories outperform the oft-dominant Korean imports. Local titles lead in Indonesia and Thailand, while Korean and U.S. fare still tops Malaysia and the Philippines. Among titles that travel within the region, Thai content reaches furthest, drawing 6.4 million viewers elsewhere in Southeast Asia across every market and spanning genres from crime and thrillers to horror and boys'-love romance. Indonesian horror also travels, she added - strongest in the Philippines, via Netflix - while the Philippines itself looks like the region's next potential growth market, with local hits proven at home but not yet reaching abroad.