A single statistic in a recent industry report does more to explain the current direction of commercial film than any agency forecast. Vietnam now accounts for a third of all unscripted television format purchases across Southeast Asia, which makes it the largest single buyer of adaptable content in the region. That figure, drawn from K7 Media data presented at the Taiwan Creative Content Fest and reported by Variety, was paired with a blunter line. As Variety reported, the format business now treats the country as a market it cannot ignore.
Format buying is a narrow trade, but the appetite it signals is not. Behind every imported talent show or competition shell sits a localisation job: a domestic production that recasts, reshoots and rebuilds the title for a Vietnamese audience. Talent formats alone make up roughly thirty percent of adaptations, and around eighty five percent of imported unscripted titles come from elsewhere in Asia, led by South Korea and China. Each of those acquisitions converts into local shooting days, local crews and local post production. The buying figure is, in effect, a forward indicator of production volume.
The streaming pivot behind the demand
The more structural number in the same reporting concerns where audiences have gone. Streaming subscriptions in Vietnam rose by a third in the first half of 2025 to roughly seventy million, while pay television fell from twenty two million to sixteen and a half million. That is not a soft preference shift. It is one delivery system overtaking another inside a single reporting period, and it resets where commercial budgets are pointed.
When the audience is digital first, the brief is digital first. Advertisers stop commissioning a thirty second spot for a broadcast break and start commissioning a spread of work built for platforms, feeds and connected screens. The macro pattern confirms the local one. Dentsu reads global advertising investment above one trillion dollars in 2026, with digital at roughly sixty nine percent of the total and online video spend growing about eleven and a half percent, close to double the growth rate of the wider market. WARC’s count of the same year runs nearer 1.30 trillion. The money is not only larger, it is concentrating in exactly the formats a streaming led market consumes.
Vietnam supplies the demand side conditions to match. DataReportal counted 79.8 million internet users at the start of 2025, a penetration of close to seventy nine percent, with smartphone penetration at 84.4 percent against a global average near sixty three. Online retail reached 16.35 billion dollars in 2025 on growth of almost thirty five percent, by Metric’s estimate. A market that shops, watches and scrolls on the same device is a market that rewards a steady output of commercial video rather than the occasional set piece.
From location to production system
Demand explains why work exists. The second source explains why a growing share of it lands in Vietnam rather than passing through. Screen Global Production’s interview with the production services firm CREATVAsia describes international clients treating the country less as a backdrop and more as a regional base from which to service shoots across Laos, the Philippines and Thailand, with a 2026 pipeline of inbound work from France, Australia and Singapore.
The framing in that piece is the useful part. Producers, it argues, no longer pick a location so much as a system that holds together across borders. Vietnam reads as the strongest market in that calculation on grounds of variety and access, and crew capability has risen far enough that the experience gap which once deterred foreign productions has narrowed. A roughly decade long infrastructure build out, roads, logistics and access, is described as nearing completion, which lowers the practical friction of an inbound shoot.
This is the quieter half of the redistribution story. Cost has always pulled production toward Southeast Asia. What changes the equation is reliability: crews that meet international standards, a regulatory posture more open to foreign productions, and an exhibition base that has grown from around ninety cinema screens in 2010 to more than twelve hundred today. A market that can absorb its own output is a market worth building capacity for.
Where a studio fits the curve
For domestic operators, the redistribution is less an opportunity to announce than a baseline to meet. A studio such as Hoang Films, a production house in Vietnam, sits inside this curve rather than ahead of it: about three years old, more than fifty projects, directing and finishing commercials and brand films for both domestic and international clients. The relevant fact is not the individual house but the category it represents, a layer of production and post production capacity that the figures above require somebody to supply.
The macro backdrop favours that layer. Ho Chi Minh City registered foreign direct investment of 8.37 billion dollars in 2025, up more than twenty four percent, on figures from city authorities. Vietnam recorded GDP growth of 7.09 percent and was the region’s strongest performing economy in the first quarter of 2025. The government targets cultural industries at close to seven percent of GDP by 2030 under Decision 2486. None of these numbers commission a single film, but together they describe an economy directing capital and policy toward exactly the content sector the streaming shift has enlarged.
There is a wider gravitational pull as well. Southeast Asia’s digital economy passed three hundred billion dollars in gross merchandise value in 2025 by the Google, Temasek and Bain count, and PwC projects global entertainment and media revenue heading toward 3.5 trillion dollars by 2029. WARC notes that nearly eighty percent of advertising dollars now flow to retail media, search and social, the channels that consume short form and platform native video most hungrily. Asia Pacific advertising grows 5.4 percent in 2026 on Dentsu’s reading. The commercial film map is being redrawn toward the markets that combine cheap attention, rising capability and a domestic audience large enough to justify the build.
An observation, not a verdict
The redistribution of commercial video toward Vietnam is not a single event with a date. It reads instead as a slow rebasing, visible only when the format buying, the subscriber crossover, the foreign investment and the inbound pipelines are set beside one another. Each figure is modest in isolation. Read together they point the same way: a production economy moving from the periphery toward the centre of how regional commercial film gets made.
What remains unsettled is whether capacity keeps pace with the demand the numbers describe, and whether the studios servicing that demand, in Saigon and across the region, hold their margins as the work arrives. Volume is rarely the hard part. Holding standards while volume climbs usually is. For anyone tracking video production Vietnam as a market rather than a slogan, that is the figure worth watching next, and it has not been published yet.
