Splice Beta and Media in Southeast Asia with Alan Soon

Alan Soon, co-founder and CEO of Splice Media joined us in a conversation about Splice Media and their latest conference, Splice Beta, and offered his perspectives on how the media businesses are now in the transformation mode across Southeast Asia. We discuss the interesting media companies and the non-traditional business models in the media business. Alan also shared his thoughts on how the duopoly of Google and Facebook affects the advertising supply chain of media properties and the challenges of journalism in the region.

Here are the interesting show notes and links to the discussion (with time-stamps included):

• Alan Soon (@alansoon, LinkedIn), Co-founder & CEO of The Splice Media [0:19]
  • Since our last conversation, what have you been up to? [0:27]
• Splice Media, Splice Beta and Trends on Media & Journalism in Southeast Asia [0:55]
  • To start again, can you introduce the Splice Media and her vision and mission to my audience and how it has evolved since our last conversation? [1:20]
  • Can you talk about Splice Beta and the intended audience? [3:06] (and you can use the promo code: analyseasia to get a 10%) 
  • Who are the interesting speakers for the Splice Beta conference? [5:11]
  • What are the interesting media companies that you have seen across Southeast Asia? [7:49] 
  • Is there an unbundling between discovery and curation for media startups across Southeast Asia? [10:36]
  • Have you seen any interesting business models in media startups across Southeast Asia? [11:49]
  • Suppose if you want to do advertising, are any media outlets in Asia Pacific at the mercy of aggregators, Google and Facebook, the duopoly in terms of distribution? [14:02]
  • Have the traditional media outlets started their own transformation and if so, what are the steps that they are taking to deal with their own disruption? [15:45]
  • How do the media outlets in Asia Pacific tackle against regulation and governments which do not support free press? [18:00]
  • What are your current perspectives on investigative journalism in Southeast Asia? [19:29]
  • Do you see investigative journalism operating in Southeast Asia differently? [22:04]
  • Given that you have worked with different traditional media newsroom and recent events happening with Facebook being an enabler for some governments to jail journalists in Philippines and Myanmar, how do we educate more people to be critical and media literate? [23:14]
• Closing [25:42]
  • Can you recommend a book or movie or podcast or anything which recently made an impact to your work and personal life? [26:01]
    • Alan’s recommendation: ABC’s “The Dropout” podcast
    • BL’s recommendation: Jill Abramson’s “Merchants of Truth”
  • How do my audience find you? [27:34]

Podcast Information:

• Feed
• iTunes
• Libsyn
• Google Play
• Facebook
• Castbox
• Spotify
• TuneIn
• Himalaya
• Overcast FM
• SoundCloud
• Twitter
• Facebook
• Google+
• Linkedin
• Stitcher
• Acast

The show is hosted by Bernard Leong (@bernardleong & weibo) and are sponsored by Ideal Workspace (Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn) with their new Altizen Desk (Twitter, Facebook, Medium). Sound credits for the intro music: Taro Iwashiro, “The Beginning” from Red Cliff Soundtrack and this episode is edited by Carol Yin, and co-produced by Carol Yin and Bernard Leong.