Vietnam has quietly become the centre of gravity for video in Southeast Asia, and the numbers behind that shift are now hard for any marketer to ignore. As Variety reported in November 2025, streaming has decisively passed pay television in the country: streaming subscribers climbed roughly a third in the first half of the year to around 70 million, while pay TV slid from about 22 million homes to 16.5 million over the same window. The publication also placed Vietnam as the region’s largest buyer of unscripted formats, taking close to a third of Southeast Asia’s acquisitions. Read commercially, those two facts describe the same movement. Audience attention, and the brand money that chases it, is leaving the broadcast frame and settling on screens people carry.
That migration is the backdrop against which the entire market for product video production Vietnam now operates. It is not a story about taste or about a generation that prefers phones. It is a story about where budgets can still find an audience, and the answer has changed.
When short video reaches parity with television
The companion data point comes from the We Are Social and Meltwater Digital 2025 April Statshot, the same body of research the trade press has used to map short form consumption across the region. Vietnamese users spend about six hours thirty minutes a week on short online video, almost exactly level with the six hours thirty four minutes they give to television in total. Parity is the word that matters. For decades the planning assumption was that television held the mass audience and digital picked up the margins. In Vietnam that hierarchy has flattened, and the flattening is structural rather than seasonal.
The regional context sharpens the point. The Philippines, Thailand and Indonesia all sit inside the global top five for short video consumption, with Filipinos watching roughly ten and a half hours a week. Long form has not collapsed to make room: Filipinos also lead the world at more than nine hours of weekly long video, the vlogs and explainer content that sit one click deeper. So the audience exists for both the fast product clip and the considered brand film, and it exists at volume. What has decayed, across the whole of Southeast Asia, is traditional broadcast as the default destination for that attention.
For a studio, the consequence is a portfolio question rather than a format preference. A commission that once meant a single hero spot now tends to mean a system: a short piece engineered for social discovery, a longer cut for the platforms where people sit and watch, and the variants that feed retail and commerce surfaces. Studios such as Hoang Films, a production house in Saigon which has directed and finished commercials and brand films for domestic and international clients across roughly three years, sit inside exactly this reframing, where the deliverable is plural by default.
The money is following the audience, and it is following it precisely
The macro picture confirms what the Vietnamese consumption data implies. Global advertising spend crosses one trillion dollars in 2026 on Dentsu’s reading, up 5.1 percent, with WARC putting the figure nearer 1.30 trillion and a steeper climb. Inside that total the composition is the real signal. Dentsu has digital at 68.7 percent of all ad investment in 2026, and online video growing about 11.5 percent, close to twice the pace of the market as a whole. WARC notes that almost eighty percent of ad dollars now flow into retail media, search and social. Money is not merely moving online. It is concentrating on the surfaces where video and commerce meet.
Vietnam offers an unusually clean version of that environment. DataReportal counted 79.8 million internet users in January 2025, a penetration of 78.8 percent, against smartphone penetration of 84.4 percent, well above the 63 percent global average. The distribution channel for video is therefore close to saturated, and it is mobile first by construction. Vietnamese online retail reached 16.35 billion dollars in 2025 on Metric’s measure, up almost 35 percent in a single year. A market growing retail at that rate, watching short video at parity with television, on phones nearly everyone owns, is a market where product video is not a marketing flourish. It is closer to inventory.
Discovery is social, which changes what a clip has to do
The Variety piece carried a small but telling observation: a Vietnamese actor’s award win spreading across Facebook with thousands of interactions from young audiences. The detail matters because it locates discovery. Video in Vietnam does not arrive through a schedule. It surfaces inside a feed, passed between people, and its first job is to survive that environment.
The Statshot data underlines the same logic from the commerce side. Creator and influencer video is mainstream rather than niche, with nearly half of Filipinos watching influencer content weekly, more than double the global average. Shoppable and creator led formats are validated demand signals, not experiments. For the production side this rewires the brief. A clip that must earn its place in a feed and survive being shared is built to a different specification than a spot designed to fill a thirty second broadcast slot, even before a single frame is shot.
A demand environment that is unusually durable
What makes Vietnam distinct is not only the audience behaviour but the strength of the floor beneath it. Variety set its observations against national GDP growth above seven percent and an official target near 8.3 to 8.5 percent. Ho Chi Minh City registered 8.37 billion dollars of foreign direct investment in 2025, up more than 24 percent. The country’s cinema footprint expanded from about 90 theatres in 2010 to more than 1,200 today, growing around ten percent a year, which signals a population willing to pay for screen content rather than only consume it free. Southeast Asia’s digital economy passed 300 billion dollars in gross merchandise value in 2025 on the Google Temasek Bain reckoning, and Vietnam has set itself a policy target of cultural industries near seven percent of GDP by 2030 under Decision 2486.
Layered together, those figures describe demand that is structural rather than cyclical. Asia Pacific ad spend grows 5.4 percent in 2026 on Dentsu’s numbers, and global entertainment and media revenue heads toward 3.5 trillion dollars by 2029 on PwC’s. Vietnam is positioned to capture a disproportionate share of the video portion of that growth, because the audience, the devices, the retail volume and the policy intent point the same way.
The quieter implication sits with the studios. When streaming has already overtaken pay television, when short video has already drawn level with the broadcast it was supposed to supplement, the competitive question stops being whether to make video for these channels. It becomes whether a studio can produce across the full range a single brief now demands, from the clip that lives in a feed to the film that holds attention for several minutes, at the cadence a 35 percent retail growth rate requires. The audience has finished moving. The market is still working out who can follow it at scale.
