‘AUTHENTICALLY LOCAL’: WHAT NETFLIX IS LOOKING FOR IN PHILIPPINE STORIES

Romance and family drama may be the Philippines’ strongest storytelling suits, but Netflix is betting that Filipino audiences — and creators — are ready to push even further.

- By NATHALIE TOMADA

As the international streaming platform looks forward to 2026, the message from Netflix is clear: stories that travel best are those that are deeply, proudly local and not “engineered” for a global audience.

This was underscored by Malobika Banerji, senior director for Content, Southeast Asia at Netflix, during a conversation with The Philippine STAR on the sidelines of the Jogja-NETPAC Asian Film Festival (JAFF) in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, where she offered insights into Netflix’s Philippine content strategy.

“What makes this exciting is that there’s a surge of interest in stories coming from this region,” Banerji said, noting how global viewing hours of Southeast Asia content grew by almost 50 percent from 2023 to 2024 as locally made titles are finding fans worldwide.

When asked how the SEA region compares to more established content exporters like South Korea or Latin America, Banerji was quick to clarify that Netflix does not view storytelling as a competition between territories.

“We focus more on what is the language of the content and is there like a consistent demand?” she said. “Like, for instance in APAC, if you see that Korean content, like, it’s viewed across the region, it also has fans beyond the region. But then Korean content also has a very long history of exporting.”

Different content languages, she explained, are simply at different stages of their global journey.

“Where I would say that Southeast Asia is doing really, really well is that we have been able to kind of showcase a lot of stories,” Banerji said. “In the past three, four years, at least 100 titles have made it to the global Top 10 at some point or the other. And just this year we have had 40 which was kind of unheard of five years back.”

Rather than chasing other markets, Netflix measures success internally.